Books

In the second volume of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside.

With a foreword by Rebecca Romney

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

The final book in the Native Tongue Trilogy.

The interstellar Consortium of Planets has forsaken the irredeemably violent Earth, condemning the planet to economic and ecological chaos. As the Consortium prepares to euthanize the planet, women freedom fighters are offered one last chance to correct men’s brutal nature and stop the planet’s annihilation. In the stunning conclusion to the Native Tongue trilogy, female linguists must once again come forward to ensure the survival of humanity.

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

First edition of the Engagement Arts Zine.

Published May 2019

Published in 1666, The Blazing World stands as one of the first Western works of Science Fiction. In its assertion that all animal flesh is made of rational matter (including that of the female body) Margaret Cavendish wrote the only 17th century text of its kind - a book of gendered natural philosophy.

Caught in frost at the North Pole, Cavendish tells the story of a woman who is saved by crossing over from our world, to a whole new Utopia. Amongst gems and stars she finds a city of half-human half-beast scientists. Worm- Men, Bear-Men, Bird-Men and Fish-Men welcome her to their land. Together they toil in their investigations, describing Nature afresh.

Cavendish predicted motors, submarines and nautical machinery long before these technologies came to exist in the present. As more than just a work of fantastical invention, The Blazing World is important for its portrayal of invention itself. Enlightenment technology is described here as a recourse to protect the world. All of it. The feeling and reasoning matter of all animals, minerals, trees and plants is significant for its proto-environmentalism and for its path-setting form: philosophy as poetry; science as poetry.

With a foreword by Emile Frankel.

The poems in Ran Walker's collection use an African-American poetic form called the Kwansaba, which was created in 1995 by Dr. Eugene Redmond. The poems follow a seven-line, seven-words per line pattern with no word more than seven letters (save proper nouns and foreign terms). All language within the form speaks to aspects of African-American history and culture. With these forty-nine poems, each chapter of forty-nine lines, Walker offers profound commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from interrogations of celebrity culture to issues that speak directly to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant's first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a "foreigner" in a country to which he is bound by "the first page of his passport" is the author's principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.

Matters of Feminist Practice, edited by Poupeh Missaghi and Karla Kelsey, brings together scholars, writers, poets, and artists of different identities and backgrounds to confer on the urgent topic of “feminist practice” through seven topics: the body, the quotidian, hybridity, language, documentation, environment, and conflict.

In the twenty-five scholarly and creative-critical pieces included in our introductory volume, each contributor brings unique visions, insights, approaches, voices, and forms to launch the conversation, which will continue to unfold online at mfpjournal.com. 

Contributors to the inaugural issue include: Alexis Almeida, Mary-Kim Arnold, Mildred Barya, Teresa Carmody, Julie Carr, Serena Chopra, Caroline Crumpacker, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Marcella Durand, Jennifer Firestone, Yanara Friedland, Carla Harryman, Madhu Kaza, Petra Kuppers, Jean Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Megan Madden, Saretta Morgan, Lida Nosrati, Adrienne Perry, Frances Richard, Kat Savino, Celina Su, and Rachael Guynn Wilson.

In the tradition of Baldwin’s Price of the Ticket, Pamela Sneed takes on the call to action to generously offer her own life experience of finding self and purpose with art, agency and celebration amidst and despite family dysfunction, abandonment, racism, sexism and belonging with joy, humanity, creative daring and a twinkle in the Big Apple to become an acclaimed writer in Downtown New York. This profound poetic journey of her keen and witty observations, revelatory experiences reveals a deeper truth of society and its discontents, that all combined weaves a tapestry with humor, grace and wisdom. Sweet Dreams is a profound memoir of courage, transformation and empowerment. This intimate embodied bold and tender tale calls to action for humanity to insist and create gestures of self-determination while taking a moment to pet the butterfly. —Karen Finley

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer and performer. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, Gift by Belladonna*. Her work appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poets.”

day pulls down the sky is the title of Okpokwasili’s first (and simultaneously released) LP initiated by Danspace Project’s executive director and chief curator Judy Hussie-Taylor who brought the idea of a recording to Okwui during one of their meetings about Danspace’s Platform 2020 and research institute. These songs were written by Okwui between 2012 and 2018, some specifically for her interdisciplinary performances. Four of the songs were first performed by Okwui at Danspace Project, including “sam’s song” on the occasion of Sam Miller’s memorial on September 15, 2018.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.

Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

Written in the style of a sarcastic and irreverent guidebook, How to Suppress Women's Writing explains how women are prevented from producing written works, not given credit when such works are produced, or dismissed or belittled for those contributions they are acknowledged to have made. Although primarily focusing on texts written in English, the author also includes examples from non-English works and other media, like paintings. Citing authors and critics like Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Cavendish, and Vonda McIntyre, Russ aims to describe the systematic social forces that impede widespread recognition of the work of female authors.

Life not as singular and individual, but entangled and connected. 

Featuring a poem by Hanne Lippard, an interview with Dope St Jude, 6 Q&A's with IG Meme LGBTQ+ accounts, Selected Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory’s ‘Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects’ by Chris E. Vargas, an interview with Marilyn Waring, BUTCHCAMP, an essay Nina Lykke, (radical) self-care: biography of a network, a fashion shoot 'Gluck, Hig, Tim, Grub, Peter' photographed by Ilenia Arosio, an essay by Nadia Hebson, WICKED TECHNOLOGY/WILD FERMENTATION by Sara Manente, a Second Skin Harness by Sara Manente, Inju Kaboom and Gunbike Erdemir, Feminism, He-Yin Zhen and Reconceptualizing China’s History: A Brief Comment by Rebecca E. Karl, Thunderclap by Amy Suo Wu, an interview with Amy Sillman by Melissa Gordon, Some Women Want to Have Their Cock and Eat It To by Jill Johnston, (Post)Menopausal Graphic Design Strategies by Rietlanden Women’s Office and the essay Sex in Texas, anticipated by Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

By means of a dialogue between the text and the visual material from the videos, Steyn Bergs and Emma van der Put want to take a critical look at how images are mobilised, not only to illustrate certain visions of the future, but also how they contribute to the creation of such visions—which are never ‘neutral’—in the present. On the basis of the videos made by Van der Put, this publication focuses on the specific working and politics of images in the Noordwijk and the Expo area in Brussels. Within these locations, developments that are currently taking place throughout Europe (from property speculation to migration flows) manifest themselves in a concrete and local manner.

With contributions by: Rebecca Jagoe, Erin Eck, Skye Arundhati Thomas, Samuel Kenswil, Daniella Valz-Gen, Alex Margo Arden, Artun Alaska Arasli, Stacy Skolnik, Laura Morrison, Benjamin Edwin Slinger, Harman Bains and Audry B.

With contributions by: Georgia Patience Anderson, Hans-Christian Dany, Ruth Angel Edwards, Liv Fontaine, Sarah Gail, Adam Gallagher, Penny Goring, Harmony Grunge, Tiziana La Melia, Aaron Lehman and Thomas Laprade, James Loop, Rosanna McNamara.

The Interjection Calendar is an on and offline project, devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. The PDF can be downloaded for free and there are 12 releases per year. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. 

Contributors: Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. She currently works as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery (Sheffield) and is the founder and curator of TMT Projects - a contemporary arts platform based in Luton Town. 

vei darling is a first generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist and activist, who grew up in the D(M)V. vei moved to New York City when she was 17, and began an intense path of spiritual reconfiguration. vei positions herself within social justice and humanitarianism, whilst being infused with magick and spirituality. Her ultimate desire is to subvert the current paradigm in lieu of one that respects and reflects life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Caspar Heinemann is a writer, artist and poet. Their interests include critical occultism, gay biosemiotics and countercultural mythologies. Some of the time they teach and read things at institutions, a lot of the time they cook potatoes in different shapes and listen to Alan Watts lectures. They were born in London, UK, roughly 2.5 months after the release of Green Day’s seminal album Dookie. 

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). He studied at Howard University, Cave Canem, and California Institute of the Arts. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family just west of Minneapolis and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Douglaskearney.com 

Cara Levine - with: Khadija Tarver, Christine Wong Yap, Eliza Myrie, Greg Boyle, Rodney Lu- cas, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ashley Stull Meyers, Sidony O’neal, Kambui Olujimi Jadelynn Stahl, Amanda Eicher, Jessica Angima, Faye Gleisser, Quenton Baker, Sam Aranke, Jade Thacker, Ekaette Ekong, Christopher Johnson, Marvin K White, Kemi Adeyemi, Constance Hockaday, Kate Johnson, Bayete Ross-Smith, Leila Weefur, Kirat Randhawa, Angela Hennessy, Elizabeth Dorbad, Prophet Walker, Shamell Bell, Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Ann Lewis. Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA and is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. 

Daisy Parris was born in Kent, 1993, and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014. She currently lives and works in South London. Daisy Parris’ work raises questions about identity politics as well as the limits of what it means to be human. By using various formats such as portraiture, roomscapes and text, Parris focuses on identity struggles as well as the worry, guilt, numbness and the violent encounters of everyday existence. 

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xeno-femme sci /fantasy, cursed video games, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. 

James Lawrence Slattery is an artist, critic and academic living and working in London. They hold an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a masters in Film Aesthetics from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 

Gjergji Shkurti is a New York based author. His writing explores architecture as fiction and incorporates a filmic imagination. The writing stems from a yearning to push history forward. 

Chanel Vegas is an artist who works in London. She writes poetry, makes paintings, and regularly performs as part of her work. Chanel graduated from Goldsmiths in 2017 and was the first student to be the recipient of the university’s Artist Award. 

Punch Viratmalee currently lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Viratmalee graduated Chulalongkorn University in 2015 with a BA in Communication Design. She previously worked at a commercial gallery in Bangkok and is now working as a curatorial assistant for the first Thailand Biennale. She also writes. 

The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente under which they write criticism an occasionally curate. The White Pube is based at thewhitepube. com and on Twitter and Instagram as @thewhitepube.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

"Gender as a concept is not only applicable to humans. When the idea of gender is applied to the cables, its meaning is reduced into a relationship of insertion. As a non-binary individual and designer, I find this problematic that such way of classifying gender violently erases the existence of everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories. However, instead of insisting on abolishing those terms, I discovered that the idea of gender that we applied to the electric cables functioning in very queer ways that we couldn’t expect." More on www.d-act.org.

The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass during the Block I /2014 curated by Lilia Mestre. Questions on art, dreams, politics, violence, research, life, practice, bureaucracy, resistance, etcetera, … are addressed and later on re-addressed, revisited and assembled into a book with (at least) three faces… 

BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book. 

The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris ... This is the legend of a she-dandy's life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.

'As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.' - Anne Boyer

Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological movements: all look at the body as a ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a signifier for the reproduction crisis generated by the neoliberal turn in capitalist development and for the international surge in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and bestselling author Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body into a work-machine, expanding on one of the main subjects of her first book, Caliban and the Witch. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects.