Sun of Consciousness

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

A cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.

Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut. 

The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”

Edited by Evan Kennedy & Jason Morris

The selected journals of trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau.

Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau was also a prolific painter who maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his experiences at the “abject bottom” of life in the US. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea and paintings by Arobateau, Time Also Will Make It Interesting captures Arobateau’s life as a young dyke in the criminalized cultures of 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York; his transition from dyke to trans man in late 1990s San Francisco; and his return to painting and an unfolding spirituality within that rapidly gentrifying city. 

Queerly messy, ornery, and stuffed with Arobateau’s wisdom, this volume is what he might have called, “a novel combined with a journal—da novel/journal! Taking all the liberty in the world! A domain where verse can be inserted, dreams recorded, my everyday political rants printed out, combined with my forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”

Foreword by Michelle Tea.

A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispecter.

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity…

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain. 

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

Translated by Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araujo

The first publication dedicated to Glissant's art collection and project for a museum of memory-in-transit. 

Titled after Édouard Glissant's (1928–2011) anthology, La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents (2010), this publication offers a polyphonic extension of the writer's foundational thinking on art to museology, philosophy and poetry. The Museum of Errantry reflects Glissant's conception of the museum itself as an archipelago—a space open to ruptures, disappearances, and reinventions without forced synthesis. The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds features detailed artist entries, archival fragments and visual documents to illuminate the many relational, diasporic, migratory trajectories that inform Glissant's personal art collection and meditations. The volume also features never-before-published excerpts from L'Abécédaire d'Édouard Glissant (2008), a long-form recorded dialogue between the author and acclaimed Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as well as a facsimile of Notebook of a Journey on the Nile (1988), a poetic-philosophical travelog composed during a felucca trip through Egypt.

Edited with text by Ana Roman, Paulo Miyada. Foreword by Sylvie Séma Glissant, Mathieu Glissant, Isabelle Vestris, Manuela Moscoso, Anne Louyot. Text by Catalina Bergues, Patrick Chamoiseau, Sabrina Fontenele, Édouard Glissant, Cecília Vilela.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is a volte-face of the neoliberal market economy’s construction of isolated, individual safety. In her debut book of poems, Mascarenhas lingers in the question of risk as it arises in daily life and intimacy. Through a close study and partial translation of philosopher-psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s Éloge du risque (2011), her poems posit risk as a fissure, through which we might imagine yet-unknown futures.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Bush Award.

Alisha Mascarenhas (b. 1989) is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021). She has contributed writing to Pamenar Press, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse, Peripheral Review, and The Felt, among others. Alisha was a 2023 resident at La Baldi Artist’s Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she now lives.

There is a body lying across Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk. Here is a book of generosity and perdition, that could not anticipate the death of its author, the one these works are addressed to, written for, dreamt by, in a stream of proximities. A strange dismantling of time occurs as a result of quiet reversals in which light is diffracted across belated syntaxes, reaching past life to the living. Though A Catalogue of Risk is “running past the flowers,” it is a slow text that grieves the day’s illuminations. It is a lesson in transmission in which we, readers, are the apprentices of grace, at the edge also of drowning. Here is a book that has been “hungering to be emptied.” So, too, is it a book of promise.
— Nathanaël

A Catalogue of Risk is a book of luminous attention. Alisha Mascarenhas gives us the language of a mind tracking both internal and external weathers, tuning and returning herself to beauty, fear, grief and desire. Attending a cascade of emotions, the poet dwells in questions, knowing that to keep open to difficult questions is to keep open to desire. That she risks such openness, thinking always with others, through pain and love, is an astonishment. 
— Madhu Kaza

A Catalogue of Risk poses an evocative challenge, one of prismatic nuance: to pursue multiple angles of intimacy along the life-death continuum of how risk holds, unfolds, and makes one whole. “The definition” of what risk is “is shaded in questions” and runs a gamut of desires and sensations at once libidinal and cerebral. Alisha Mascarenhas risks risk itself with this generous offering of exquisite phenomenology and experiential trace in the form of a full-saturation poetics glowing in amplitude and intensity.
— Brenda Iijima

Édouard Glissant’s novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people’s loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters’ lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree.

Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place—a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.

Murder is Danielle Collobert’s first novel. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard while Collobert was living as a political exile in Italy, this prose work was written against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Uncompromising in its exposure of the calculated cruelty of the quotidian, Murder’s accusations have photographic precision, inculpating instants of habitual violence.

Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert’s parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert’s extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert’s works available in English include In the Environs of a Film (Litmus Press, 2019), Notebooks, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and It Then (O Books, 1989).

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

In this edited collection of work spanning more than 20 years, Silvia Federici provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the "new enclosures" at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation.

Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection argues that women and reproductive work are crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the capitalist hierarchies. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations—but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing organization of life and labor.