Books

In Shorter Views, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Samuel R. Delany explores the closely felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality; the untangling of the intricacies of literary theory, and the writing process itself. The essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more.

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.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the same radical potential as the printing press or the Internet, in particular presenting extraordinary challenges to traditional banking. Yet the paper contains no reference to existing political ideas, monetary or economic knowledge. So here it is.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics? 

In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of "inconvenient knowledge."

Fourth Person Singular sets open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language.

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.

Collection of early prose writings by Adrienne Rich. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, 'playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language.' Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich’s volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

A collection of poems by the amazing Adrienne Rich.

'In this collection, Ms. Rich has shown both a deep knowledge of her subject, women, and a fine mastery of her craft, timeless contemporary poetry. Above all, she has not abandoned the struggle of 'trying to live/ in a clear-headed tenderness' and translating her efforts into critical signposts for those who follow.' - Kansas City Star

Pisti, 80 rue de Belleville is Estelle Hoy’s latest novel.

Elke is a young academic with a troubled past that keeps spilling onto her present. Just as she is about to leave town for a writing retreat, she meets Pisti, a charismatic, hard-boiled but luscious Hungarian left activist, who runs an anarchist collective in Paris. Over one night in a Belleville apartment, old friends and new lovers discuss–and act–polyamory, politics, and the art of conversation.

A wry exploration of the seductive allure of tropes and cliché in the art world and politics, Pisti is also an experiment in writing, shamelessly flirting with namedropping and appropriation. The character of Pisti was appropriated from Chris Kraus’ novel Torpor.

Pisti and it's blasphemy against the left and art world is not apostasy, but rather a stepping away from a teleological view of politics and instead, a radical reimagining of the role of incompatibilities, partial identities, cliché and perhaps ultimately, the unresolvedness of hypocrisy.   Which is to say, not taking things too seriously, in order to take them seriously. - Estelle Hoy

As she tries to collect them for an essay that she is wanting to write, voices begin interfering in Clara’s Schulmann life. Voices of women, heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; voices of novelists or feminist theorists; voices of friends or of strangers overheard in the street. Like weeds, like bad seeds (what « zizanies » stands for in French), these wayward words invade her thoughts and her life, and the essay that she once had in mind unfolds in a picaresque tale full of twists and turns. Zizanies is a timely and elegant narrative that reveals Clara Schulmann as a new author whose own voice is going to matter in the years to come. (The texts in this book are French only.)

Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. 

Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women-menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. 

"This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." -Judith Butler

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.”

Samuel Ace’s / Linda Smukler’s Meet Me There is the third volume in Belladonna*’s Germinal Texts series—works that trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Meet Me There is a paired republication of Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Hard Press, 1996).

In the present edition, the texts are accompanied by a new introduction and poem by Samuel Ace, and by a collection of short essays and reflections on Ace and Smukler’s poetics by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Ari Banias, Kay Gabriel, Andrea Lawlor, Eileen Myles, Joan Nestle, Pamela Sneed, TC Tolbert, and Yanyi.

Meet Me There brings together Ace / Smukler’s remarkable explorations of the interplay of language, desire, sex, and identity, and repositions this work, 25 years later, in the midst of burgeoning contemporary conversations about gender, sexuality, sociality, language, politics, and poetics.

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.

FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installation. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

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.

A character called X journeys through a present that is neither here nor there, but feels oddly proximate. She moves through landscapes of words, ever-shifting to host the groundless present, a place and time driven by her motivated, yet contextless pursuit. Narrative is always under construction. The preferred medium for X's peregrinations: a sentence, as capacious as a three-second video, a ten-year nap, or an unexplored hard drive. In this suspended world, X's sensorium is curious and alert, but also anguished, hesitant, and precarious: she feels around for sympathetic energies and familiar faces along the way. Along what way? A book like a body might be a room for waiting, a machine for memory, a sensuous thing, an image quickly glimpsed...

Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York-based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage.

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.