Books

no more poetry presents drone, the debut collection from poet felix garner-davis. the book is simple, in that it directs us where to look. high up in the apartment of words the poet offers the audience a window, from which the abundance, beauty, pain and peculiarity of the world can be observed. the poet boldly enacts the role of surveyor, of witness and of voyeur, and asks that we follow suit.  

the poems offer new perspectives for which to frame the mechanical and the natural, the quiet and the dizzying. with precision and generosity garner-davis offers an inquisitive consideration of people and their many strange performances within time. the poet asks the audience to join him as the grounded witness; to pause and breath, and in turn celebrate one’s hereness. the poem sings of our aliveness! garner-davis places the reader firmly by his feet, neck tilted against the glass pane of the building or the taxi-cab or the train or the motorcar. thrust into the streets that carry the great disconnect of living; of lives separated and alien, and yet so proximal to our own. this is a book of city poems, guided by the poet, whom we may also call the drone. this is a book that collects many small songs of the everyday and asks us to sing them. drone is a celebration of moments and their endurance

felix is a writer, spoken-word artist & architecture student. he lives in naarm & co-edits the literary journal malevolent soap.

nmp.07: 
2021, english — metallic paperback
164 pages — 108 x 178 mm
first edition, edition of 200 (numbered)

First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Anna Kavan and Cortázar; she watches Fellini; she dreams about the Mediterranean Sea. Much like Green’s multimedia installations encompassing the sonic, spatial, and visual, Camino Road is richly layered—part intellectual genealogy, part fictional personal memory, and part cultural criticism.

Green has described the book as a “self-conscious homage to or parody of the ‘road novel,’ ‘bohemia,’ and artist-rebels.” “I’d been thinking about the beat generation, figures like Jack Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.—the mythic construction of the artist personality as rebel and how females, and myself in particular, entered into that,” she said. “These ‘beat’ sources seemed to form a typical American introduction to the idea of bohemia and of being an artist.”

Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the group exhibition Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the text is written in both English and Spanish, and accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s. The book was published through Green’s production company, Free Agent Media (FAM), which since 1994 has been circulating and exhibiting media, printed matter, and time-based projects.

A unique treatise on the circuits of exchange in gender, politics, and art, Camino Road can also be read as a variation on the classic Bildungsroman genre. “I don’t feel developed in any area,” thinks Lyn at one point. “It’s very difficult being young and incomplete.” Importantly, she also muses, “I want to be swallowed by another language.”

A selection of poems by the Moroccan Marxist, feminist and poet Saida Menebhi, who died in prison on hunger strike in 1977, aged 25, after being imprisoned for her political organising against the Moroccan state. Translated from French to English for the first time, the zine contains a selection of the poems Saida wrote during her time in prison, shortly before her death. It also includes an essay on the Years of Lead in Morocco - specifically the 70s - as well as the conditions of prison, hunger strikes, poetry, and martyrdom (from an internationalist position: including Bobby Sands and the republican hunger strikes).

Ephemeral and anarchic, Runes and Chords is the first collection of artwork by famed poet, critic and artist Alice Notley. These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley’s Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page.

They defy containment and category, much like their creator—each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media. With this collection, one of America’s most influential living poets and artists continues to prove her worthiness of that title.

A visionary analysis of what Terry Smith identifies as the "visual arts exhibitionary complex."

In this book, the renowned art historian and writer maps the institutional and quasi-institutional framework for contemporary art that sprawls across the globe. He then delves into a powerful form of curatorial activism rising up in the exhibitionary complex: Open Strike. This is the inaugural volume of the series Thoughts on Curating, edited by Steven Henry Madoff.

'Mortimer is one of the most talented writers of our generation and their debut collection proves this. Part essay, part poem, part memoir and part SOS, Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life navigates its thematic scope—ranging from transness, queerness and naming to loving and losing—with sensitivity, insight, humour and bravado. Best thing I read this year.' - Isabel Waidner

'Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life is a wonderful and thoughtful reflection on love and beauty and bodies and music and memories, and on the constellations of small things that make up modern queer life.' - Huw Lemmey

D Mortimer is a writer from London focussed on trans crip narratives. Their work (essays, poetry, prose, creative-criticism) has appeared in Granta and been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (Queers Read This, The Kathy Acker Reading Group). Their short story ‘Supermarket Revelations’ was published in Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction (ed. Waidner, Dostoyevsky Wannabe: 2018) and a poem-essay, 'How To Draw Hands', was published by Warm Yourself by My Trash Fire in 2020.

Employing the concept of an anarchic organization of cinematic spaces, the author embarks in this volume on a journey toward an imaginary political trope for the cinema of the present – a working principle that aims to form a new way of thinking by destabilizing outdated structures of cinema.

ROSA BARBA (*1972, Agrigento, Italy) is an acclaimed artist who works with film. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the renowned Calder Prize. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, among others.

‘Corrections and Clarifications’ is an ongoing newsprint project by Anita Di Bianco, an edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions, and apologies to print news from September 2001 to the present. In essence, a reverse chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, tangled catchphrases, and patterns of misspeak and inflection.

Previous editions have examined the printed news media in the United States and United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and other international press from Asia, Turkey, and the Balkans printed in English. The publication includes text contributions by Di Bianco and Francesco Gagliardi.

108 p, ills bw, 24 x 32 cm, hb, German/English

Bricks from the Kiln is a semi-yearly journal and multifarious publishing platform established in mid-2015 to support critically minded and explorative writing on and around art, design and literature. Edited by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister, the forthcoming issue, number five, begins with a single sentence:

blankets topologies in glistening snow and blood — produces instructional spattering, again and again — coughs up clotted network diagram hairballs of illegibility — parasitically draws on / from Thomas Browne’s quincunx — meets for The Big ROAR tomorrow, yesterday — lifts loud cows off the page, aloud — flips the coin of language, heads or tails? — politely speaks on writing heard yet seen — twists tongues, transliterates and teases — makes contact with ancestral spirits — traverses the foothills of La Marquesa, past and present — is the Spectre at the feast — (re)traces polymorphous concrete poems — dashes, gestures, speaks, breathes, moves, joyness — is, as ever, tentative, incomplete and inconsistent.

Contributions by Helen Marten, Rebecca May Johnson, Johanna Drucker, Louis Lüthi, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Ursula K. Le Guin, Quinn Latimer, Stefan Themerson, Slavs and Tatars, Ashanti Harris, Catalina Barroso-Luque, Kevin Lotery, Bronac Ferran with Greg Thomas and Astrid Seme with Alex Balgiu.

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Si pour beaucoup d’hommes, le féminisme est une affaire de femmes, bell hooks s’attelle ici à démontrer le contraire. La culture patriarcale, pour fabriquer de « vrais hommes », exige d’eux un sacrifice. Malgré les avantages et le rôle de premier choix dont ils bénéficient, ces derniers doivent se faire violence et violenter leurs proches pour devenir des dominants, mutilant par là-même leur vie affective. La volonté de changer est un des premiers ouvrages féministes à poser clairement la question de la masculinité. En abordant les préoccupations les plus courantes des hommes, de la peur de l’intimité au malheur amoureux, en passant par l’injonction au travail, à la virilité et à la performance sexuelle, bell hooks donne un aperçu saisissant de ce que pourrait être une masculinité libérée, donc féministe.

William Kherbek’s Twenty Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow are of course twenty tales from our technofeudal today. From the software company to the art gallery to the prison to the nature park, here is our scary, scary world as seen through the Kherbekian filter: colors pushed to full saturation, soundtrack ramped up to eleven, video played at 1.1x speed. Luckily, the terror of true realism is laced with wild insights, and the acerbic critique is mercifully cut with Kherbek’s signature raucous hilarity.

"Read this book for its political sagacity and wit, but also for its linguistic extravagance, its jubilant play on every word you thought you knew — down to the last punctuation mark. It’s the kind of funny that makes you smack yourself on the forehead. (But as always, as one character reminds, “keep one hand free for rose.”) We can only hope that some CEO does not pick this book up and take it as an instruction manual." – Elvia Wilk, author of Oval

"Kherbek’s ruthless, dystopian future bears an uncanny resemblance to present-day office politics. Twenty Terrifying Tales from Our Technofeudal Tomorrow is a book that, in true Swiftian style, is written “to vex the world rather than divert it.” – Susan Finlay, author of My Other Spruce and Maple Self

The concept of a Geofinancial Lexicon emerged in 2016 as a curated subset of the then-canonical financial lexicon compiled and maintained by the Financial Times. The experiment set out to demarcate the possible relationships between the Earth, finance and the anthropocene through the complicitous vocabulary of financial advisors and traders – the Bulls, Bears, Doves and Hawks of ‘high-finance’ and economic policymaking.

This edition, rewritten and recompiled for general release, aims to open this experiment out to the wider-world and provide a generative platform for future investigations, conceptualisations, experiments, languages, actions and collaboration.

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.

Inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world

Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.

After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalised world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical, he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

“This exhilarating novel-poem situated in a dystopian future, is a quest to find out what is distinctive about humankind, a poetic and vigorous praise of reading, knowledge and art as the only way to survive. The Night of the World makes indeed a beautiful, powerful and meaningful reading that stays with you for a long time.” — Cristina Fuentes De La Roche OBE, Hay Literary Festival International Director

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of two critically acclaimed books, What If Latin America Ruled the World?(Bloomsbury, 2010) winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award. More recently, In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), and the poem Night of the World (The 87 Press, forthcoming 2021). Professor at the University of London.

A collection of 12 essays written by academics, writers and thinkers, Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience celebrates the artistic and cultural works which have inspired, and continue to inspire, this volume’s contributors as scholars, teachers, and writers. The chapters celebrate the ‘moving’ power - personal and political - of works which engage with questions of identity, race, self-and-other relations, and sexuality.

These highly personal chapters span a multitude of artists, particularly writers of colour, through exploration of their applications to neurodiversity, POC and LBGTQ+ communities, and feminism. Works explored are diverse in origin and heritage, spanning personal and political culture from South Africa to Trinidad, India to France, Nepal to The United Kingdom. These include autobiography, novels, short stories, plays, painting, sculpture, and film.

Essays by Rowland Abiodun, Stuart Bell, Amrita Dhar, Natalya Din-Kariuki, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Madhu Krishnan, Isabelle McNeill, Maryam Mirza, Adam Roberts, Laura Seymour, Kirsten Tambling, Emma Wilson.

The Bow is a collection steeped in the pains and pleasures of impermanence. Mattar’s densely populated poems lyrically dart between entangled histories and contested presents, immersing the reader in the fleshy undercurrent of contemporary life. Writhing with sensitivity and tumult, this is a work of slippery power. – Momtaza Mehri

Taking on false conceptions of mistaking “a walled garden for the world,” Mira Mattar proves the always new and always ancient tools of poetry help us love the world as it is, not as it was, and not as we wished or hoped. These poems destroy lies to buzz around us no more. – CAConrad

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. She is a Palestinian and Jordanian from London, where she lives and works. Her novel, Yes, I Am A Destroyer was published in 2020 by Ma Bibliothèque and her chapbook, Affiliation, was published in 2021 by Sad Press. The Bow is her first collection of poems.

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

In Sarona Abuaker’s extraordinary debut collection, “images, graphs, charts, statistics, maps, bank statements from the home of origin &/or showing the said home of origins” perform a version of skin that shakes until it is no longer something another person could touch. Is this erasure, a metamorphic performance, or the moment, in fact, in which the body is disappeared? In one searing instance, Abuaker attends to somatic memory as something made available only by severance, a physiological and political act: “release memory/ muscle/heart/if you cut open the chest/you will see the blockages/cross lines/coronary/green azygous/armistice/ partition/seizing seizing seizing.” Here, syntax performs the cut and becomes the texture, the wound, the very thing that must be sutured now. As the poet writes: “resistance sometimes looks like constraint.” Perhaps the same could be said of recovery (aftermath) as well. Why so few women on the street at night is another brilliant offering from the87press. – Bhanu Kapil

Sarona Abuaker is a poet, artist, and educational outreach worker. Her poems have been published in Berfrois, MAP Magazine, and the87press’ Digital Poetics series. Her mixed-media essay Suture Fragmentations – A Note on Return was published in December 2020 with KOHL: A Journal for Body and Gender Research. She is based in London. Why so few women on the street at night is her debut collection (the87press, 2021).

In a time of ongoing political, economic, and climate crisis, can we afford our collective unhappiness any longer? There is No Unhappy Revolution gives expression to the age of revolution unfolding before us. With equal parts sophistication and raw urgency, Marcello Tarì identifies the original moments as well as the powerful disruptive and creative content haunting our times like a specter.

One hundred years after the October Revolution, amidst our current civilizational crisis, is it still possible to think and build communism? Yes, Tarì responds, provided we radically rethink the tradition of revolutionary movements that have followed one century to another. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, he deftly confronts the different contemporary movements from the Argentinean insurrection of 2001 to Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the French movement against the labor law, and the Arab spring, resurrecting and renewing a lineage of revolutionary thought, from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, that promises to make life livable.

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

For #2 in the ¶ (Pilcrow)-series Romy Day Winkel has approached collecting, or hoarding, as an aesthetic of patience. Through her selection of Wikipedia-articles she looks at what happens when objects, magical or otherwise, are all put together. If it is impossible, and perhaps even uninteresting, to know when a collection or archive is finished, how does one start to hoard impatiently

¶#2 consists solely of texts and images found on the online collaborative platform Wikipedia. ¶#2 is assembled by Romy Day Winkel, designed by Tjobo Kho and Wouter Stroet, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published by OUTLINE.

Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies is an ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research, which encompasses the spectrum of experiences and practices that Anne Juren has developed as a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. Her interest in anatomy and somatic practices grew out of multiple shoulder dislocations. The last dislocation happened in 2014 and, in retrospect, it functioned as a catalyst for this PhD and as one of its main methodologies. With the notion of “anatomies”, the interest sits more in operations on the body, than defining the body itself.