Books

Lost & Found Series X focuses on the literary, visual, and cultural work of Lois Elaine Griffith, one of the last surviving founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Since its inception in 1973, this Puerto Rican cultural center has been a site where artists from the Nuyorican and Black arts movements have come to share their work, voices, histories, talents, and language on its stage. While the scant existing scholarship on the Cafe has been told from the perspectives of its predominately male and/or Latinx founders, this series seeks to reinstate Griffith’s essential role as a founder, and honor Griffith’s stewardship of the Cafe’s archive.

The four publications presented in Series X highlight how Griffith brings Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions to her archival work, disrupting the legacies of colonization and transatlantic slavery through cultural creation and preservation. Series X, edited by Lost & Found scholar and archival collaborator Joseph Cáceres, includes the following archival publications of Lois Elaine Griffith:

Dedications includes selections from unpublished poetry manuscripts of Griffith’s poetics of memorialization devoted to loved ones and others who died due to sudden illness, during the HIV/AIDS crisis, or the result of American racism.

“All My Scattered Pieces” Surrealist Gatherings (1972 – 1979) includes a collection of Griffith’s surrealist visual artwork which led to collaborative projects with artists of the feminist, Black and Nuyorican arts movements.

Keeper of the Archive further documents people important to the Cafe’s legacy not found in academic narratives, whose legacies are kept alive through Griffith’s meticulous archival work. Through Griffith, we are invited to witness relationships between poet and costume designer Marcel Christian, photographers Arlene Gottfried and Tony Gleaton, and the Cafe.

Finally, You See What You See (a collaboration and co-publication with Granary Books) is a collection of Griffith’s picture-poems discovered in a notebook stored among her papers, and represents an aesthetic offering meant to inspire curiosity and collaboration, mirroring the kaleidoscopic vision of both Griffith’s and the Cafe’s aesthetic.

Sonnets, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as "Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks" which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground-breaking works of writing consciousness.

Edited by Lee Ann Brown. Cover art by Sophie. Book design by Wayne Smith.

"Between the 8th and the 10th of January in the year of 2019, we became Na Castelloza, she who in Auvergne at the beginning of the 13th century composed a cycle of cansos about—finding—unrequited love. If there exists a lyric subject, we are of her heritage."

A canary flies in Golestan Palace of the Qajars in Tehran, IF, unfolding through fragmented, interwoven narratives that consider the possibility of a bird narrating what it sees: three famines forced upon Iran; the forced unveiling of women; the partitioning of the country between dominant powers; and the nationalization of oil leading to the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh all appear as fragments left unresolved rather than explained, as if the bird were saying: you will not understand me, let’s keep it that way.

This pamphlet is a section of a longer book that moves across a specific historical juncture in Iran, from the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911) to 1953, when a joint CIA–MI6 coup d’état disrupted and set back years of gradual effort toward democracy and independence in Iran. Much like the rest of Mosadeq’s work, this piece is shaped by misunderstanding, distance, and misreading. IF, mirroring the territory it explores, resists a coherent narrative.

STARTING POINT: ALL GROUPS HAVE AN UNCONSCIOUS

This project developed from a shared experience: groups we believe should exist and succeed, from mutual aid collectives to communist cadres, struggle with difficult and often unexamined inter-psychic group dynamics. We take it as a starting point that groups, by their very nature, elicit and enact painful and confusing states, like over-dependence on a leader or fear of contamination. We believe that these dynamics play out beneath the surface and alongside whatever the group is trying to do together. In other words, any group, like any individual, has an unconscious.

OUR BIG QUESTION: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR GROUPS DOING POLITICAL WORK?

Groups break down for all kinds of reasons; political organizing is often brutal, exhausting, disappointing work. Feelings of heartbreak and betrayal, resentment and shame, are common. These can be painful, difficult aspects of group life to discuss. They are also often dismissed as ancillary to the real work of political struggle, especially in times of unabating crisis, genocide, and war.

Although interpersonal drama can be taken up in excess–and distract from our work–group dynamics are not mere distraction, and our hesitations about discussing them do not make them disappear. Ironically, in fact, when groups treat relational dynamics as merely superficial or deleterious, they often wind up mired in confusion about what any given internal conflict is “really” about. Often the confusion is posed as not being able to discern what is interpersonal strife and what is political disagreement—an aggravating situation that, we’ve observed, comes up constantly in groups’ narration of their own breakdown. There are no easy formulas for working through these dimensions of group life, but we believe that being undisciplined about them makes it harder for groups to work together productively—or, for that matter, to separate “well.” This pamphlet offers concepts and questions that you can bring to your own group to perform a group inquiry, to think about what might be happening below the surface.

Groups Group is a collective of clinicians, organizers, writers, artists, and scholars interested in group dynamics in the everyday life of all forms of left social movements. We also do internal process work, popular education, and consult with groups.

To be in a group is to submit to a form of disorganizing organization that hangs on careful balance: to be devoted to a collective without being engulfed, to be disciplined by it without sleepwalking to the tune of a leader’s will, to integrate without dissolving into it. As infants born into a sexual union from which we are then necessarily excluded, the yields and limits of assembly are evident from the outset. Before we arrived in the bloc, we lived our lives in other groups: the family, the religious order, the cafeteria table clique. You can sit with us. You can’t. Some groups we remember entering. Others we didn’t elect, but deselected.

As a form of critique whose object of analysis is suffering, psychoanalysis understands the pains of the group. Its full task is to make sense of them as a condition of the many as much as of the one. As the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu glosses the problem of thinking about groups, the “commonplace” assumption is that the group “is a pooling, a sharing” through which “the energies, enthusiasm and capacities of individuals who freely assent to the discipline of the group” coalesce into a unified forcefield. Yet, as Anzieu stresses, this idealized description eats itself. It collapses union with sharing, with collectivity. We know that groups rely on sharing. He asks, “a sharing of what?”

Psychoanalytic cults. Cowboy churches. The Epstein Class. Iranian monarchists. Fascist liberals. Clinics and their radicals. Discipline and holding. Getting together, falling apart.

Essays by Séamus Malekafzali, Tracy McNulty, Richard Seymour, Zahid Chaudhary, Danny Hayward, Eri Linsker, hannah baer, and more.

I Remember Nightfall, the first comprehensive collection of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio’s work to be published in English translation, is made up of her first four book-length poems: The History of Violets (1965); Magnolia (1968); The War of the Orchards (1971); and The Native Garden is in Flames (1975). Di Giorgio’s writing transforms everything it touches—a lily, a head, a hare, a ghost, a porcelain cup. All becomes beautifully and violently intertwined, dead and alive. Boundaries are blurred: an eagle drinks tea with a mother, a flower puts on the longest pearl necklace or kills you. Di Giorgio’s obsessive, magical gardens serve as a stage for the ongoing encounter of nature and the supernatural. These serial prose poems explore memory, family relationships, erotic desire, and war, animating a world that is always on the verge of explosion.

Marosa di Giorgio was born in Salto, Uruguay, and raised on her family’s farm. Di Giorgio (1932-2004) is one of the most prominent Uruguayan poets of the twentieth century. She began writing in her childhood and published her first book of poems at the age of twenty-two. She then went on to publish a total of fourteen books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and one novel. While some critics have categorized her as a surrealist, she herself denied membership in any literary movement or school. Although she was relatively unknown outside the Southern Cone during her lifetime, she is now becoming more and more widely read throughout Latin America and Europe.

This is a bilingual edition, with cover art by Basil King.

Appearing for the first time in English translation, LEX ICON presents everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. As abstraction distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, so too do Tavares’s poems distill the essence of everyday items in language. LEX ICON connects Tavares’s early poetry to her later graphic sculptural poems. Foregrounding insights into human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in simple household objects, the poems collected here also present these as almost mystical artifacts that partake in some unnamed ritual.

Salette Tavares (1922-1994) was a Portuguese writer, theorist, and visual artist. She was a member of the experimental poetry group PO.EX and was involved in the publication of the first issues of Poesia Experimental. Her books include Quadrada (Moraes Editores), Lex Icon (Moraes Editores), Obra Poética 1957-1971 (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), and Poesia Gráfica (Casa Fernando Pessoa). Her spatial poems were exhibited at the 2014 retrospective, Salette Tavares: Spatial Poetry, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Translated by Isabel Sobral Campos, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

The fourth volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination, on the topics of accessibility in the arts and ableism.

Wages For Wages Against has been doing pioneering work for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland since 2017. It is committed to social and economic justice for all artists. This volume brings together texts by artists who create spaces—fields of possibility. Texts that seek to amplify moments of struggle and negotiation. Texts that speak of interdependence, trauma and adaptations. Texts driven by a desire and a sense of urgency to address the accessibility of spaces where art is created and experienced.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Edited by Wages For Wages Against.
Contributions by Michaëla Danjé, Quiplash, Park MacArthur, Lari Medawar & Ostensible, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem.

First Meeting is the first monograph on Argentinian artist Santiago de Paoli. Covering de Paoli’s oeuvre from his early, experimental projects to his most recent explorations, the book delves into his innovative approach of painting on unconventional materials, from plaster to bread, felt to canvas, aluminum to wool, and socks to fur. It features newly commissioned essays by Fernanda Brenner, and Mariano Mayer, as well as a conversation between Christian Rattemeyer and the artist.

OEI #112–113: A Cosmology of Bliss concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) began the project in 1942 while a stateless refugee in the Shanghai International Settlement, and who, after emigrating to the Australian beach town of Coogee, worked on it for the rest of his life. After 30 years of obscurity, the language was picked up as a communication system for nonverbal children in a small hospital school in Canada, with great promise. This, however, led to acrimony between its creator and its first genuine users, who sought to amend it for their needs—an event which Charles likened to ‘a new Babel of symbols’.

A Cosmology of Bliss reconsiders the histories, forms, and dreams of Bliss and its many contributors. It includes a new picaresque biography of Charles, the chemical engineer, wounded refugee, and amateur semanticist; essays that draw out affinities and resistances, such as with the history of 20c Australian poetry and experimental pedagogy; unpublished material from Bliss’s manuscripts and correspondences, including an extensive selection of the barely-published Blissymbols Picture Book—Charles’s final work; and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. Together they seek to lodge Bliss into the history of Australian visual art and poetry as a remarkable exception. Against received accounts of a failed auxiliary language or an outmoded therapeutic aid, A Cosmology of Bliss is the first study to insist that Bliss is a poetic project. Taken as such, the symbols begin to speak—silently—of a world of lucky faults, chemical grammars, speechless inscriptions, and untenable, incandescent loves.

with Dr. Charles K. Bliss & his devoted coworkers: Javant Biarujia, Claire Bliss, Christopher Brennan, Melinda Bufton, Alexis Carrel, Brendan Casey, Justin Clark, Mitchel Cumming, Gabriel Curtin, Jesse Darling, Douglas Everingham, Michael Farrell, Elisa Gabbert, Samantha Gorman, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sam de Groot, Gail Hastings, Julian Huxley, Martin Johnston, Alfred Korzybski, Ruark Lewis, Aodhan Madden, Ern Malley, Rowan McNaught, Shirley McNaughton, Tom Melick, Quenton Miller, Robert Milne, Anthony O’Donnell, Ouyang Yu, Victoria Perin, Oscar Perry, π.O., Lisa Radford, Oliver Reiser, Bertrand Russell, Mark von Schlegell, Imogen Stidworthy, Brian Stride, Ella Sutherland, Sam Szoke-Burke, Elisa Taber, Peter Tyndall, Lucy Van, Ania Walwicz, Margaret Woodward, Tim Woodward, Tom Wright, Xu Bing, Jarrod Zlatic, etc.

Fiction Non Fiction is a series of readers that pairs voices in literary criticism with the material histories of labor, gender, and race. Each volume proposes a close-reading of fictitious and theoretical works to explore how identity politics have been narrativized by liberal institutions across space and time.

Volume II, published on the occasion of Belas Artes, Bruno Zhu’s exhibition at CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon, is anchored by the centrality of how one looks. Ranging from domestic scenes in the female-owned prazos of Zambezi Valley, the trade of Indian calico, the 19th century British Nonconformist campaign in Southern Tswana, and accounts of Chinese workers by writer Eça de Queiroz, this reader surveys the role of dress in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Featuring contributions by Jean Comaroff, Simon Gikandi, Stuart Hall, Kate Haulman, Eugénia Rodrigues, Regina A. Root, Victoria L. Rovine, and José Carvalho Vanzelli, Volume II addresses how fashion facilitated idealized images of the Other to serve the unity of the colonial topos.

What is highly unlikely but not impossible?  is informed by themes found in the work of Hiwa K, such as statehood, war, migration, belonging, the effects of neoliberalism and colonialism, home as a concept, language, and the myth of the individual artist. The compendium ranges freely across mediums, drawing together experimental poetry, science fiction, photography, memoir, academic essays, art historical texts, and more. Contributions include a short story by Benjamin Labatut, an excerpt from a lecture by Achille Mbembe, and drawings by Hajra Waheed. Like previous editions in the series, this book brings together a range of voices and mediums to consider some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Contributions by Omar El Akkad, Havin Al-Sîndy, Yto Barrada, Dionne Brand, Deena Chalabi, Nidhal Chamekh, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins, Brian Karl, Hiwa K, Benjamin Labatut, Quinn Latimer, Henri Lefebvre, Mazyar Lotfalian, Peter L. Manuel, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Gabriel Orozco, Jacques Rancière, Man Ray, Rijin Sahakian, Solmaz Sharif, Tiffany Sia, Julietta Singh, Rayyane Tabet, Anton Vidokle, Hajra Waheed

Transmissions: Radio Essays on Edges, Crossings and Narrowcasting Borderlands gathers radio essays—created as part of Robida Collective’s project Radio drugega/The Other Radio—which reveal that to speak of “the border” is never to speak of a single line. There are political borders, conceptual borders, bodily borders; carnivalesque borders, where order collapses into play; linguistic and cultural borders, where words slip between languages and where accents become geographies; archival borders, separating memory from forgetting; borders of abandonment, where life and death enter into a dialectical ballet; economic borders, drawn by property, ownership, enclosure; borders of matter, space and time; acoustic borders, where the voice meets noise and incomprehensibility; cosmic borders, where meteors cross the thin edge of air; ecological borders, porous and breathing, where one species touches another. These are some of the borders this book speaks of – lines that do not divide but resonate, that hold together separation and proximity, distance and relation. Together, these essays form a cartography of friction but also affinity, reminding us that to erase all borders is to erase the very conditions of encounter – and that meaning often emerges not at the centre, but at the edges where worlds meet.

With texts by:

Agnes Cameron, Ajda Bračič, Aljaž Škrlep, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Giorgia Maurovich, Jack Bardwell, Kate Donovan, Kat Macdonald, Lijuan Klassen, Luca Vettori, Michael Marder, Moritz Gansen, Olya Korsun, Petra Filagrana, Urška Savič.

How to See Rivers in Cracks, an invitation to read through softness rather than certainty. It begins where attention loosens, where listening lingers, and where small cracks let the world in.

Written as a shifting sequence of notes, exercises, and reflections, the publication moves through Moerwijk, The Hague, Antwerp, and in-between spaces, tracing how soil, sound, and urban surfaces remain porous and in constant transformation. Cracks are not treated as damage but as openings where relation becomes visible~ where matter, bodies, and environments co-compose one another.

The text resists a fixed interpretation. Instead, it unfolds as an instruction that can be followed, misread, or left open. In this sense, it does not hold itself steady. Without the reader, it does not fully take place, remaining dependent on attention, proximity, and the act of reading itself.

toi, moi, la pluie is a sequence of cards that can be assembled into three-dimensional configurations. The cards present two sides of the same moment: rain falling outdoors, and an art exhibition taking place indoors.

With humour and a sense of casual abandon, Sara Graça reduces the exhibition space to a dry place offering shelter from the rain. Despite a moment of intense intimacy—a passionate kiss—the space is largely inhabited by figures who do not seem to know one another, or to get along. The same kiss takes place outdoors; lovers, after all, do not care about the weather. Drawn in a caricatural style, recalling Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look series, these characters speak English, French, and Portuguese. We cannot tell whether they are visiting or staying; we do not know where they are.

The cards are accompanied by a small cut-out horse that can also be assembled and added. A memory of a past life, a lingering presence, a sense of “other”, the horse becomes the final piece of the puzzle. It acts as an exclamation point to these otherwise trivial human exchanges—cutting across inside and outside, shelter and rain, intimacy, cohabitation, and distance.

The publication is disguised as a book, revealing its playful nature only once opened, and inviting the reader to assemble, rearrange, and make choices of their own.

Sara Graça (Lisbon, 1993) lives in London and works in interdisciplinary ways, mainly using sculpture, drawing, photography and video. Her practice often questions ideas of value, authenticity and impermanence.

All copies are numbered & signed.

Ötza is a 5300-year-old cryodesiccated fan fiction writer from the Neolithic, an advocate for prehistoric literacy and a self-proclaimed connoisseur of post-historical theory-fiction. Locked in a cooling cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, her writings are hopeful yearnings for counterfactual salvation from her fate of archaeological conservation, and an attempt to rewrite the narrative (unfairly) extrapolated from scientific reconstructions.

Ötza is written and performed by artist Levi van Gelder, and created in collaboration with costume designer and stylist Leila El Alaoui.

Edited by Maia Kenney, Aidan Hoyle, Anthony Stephinson

In Arabic, the word for love حب is one letter shorter than the word for war حرب

Here, translators gather to perform an intimate labour, moving words from Arabic into English, or reversing such direction as language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that open to rubble, or only air.

These poems reverberate in the space between there and here, silence and voice, original and translation, and the polarities of war and love.

George Abraham, Eman Abukhadra, Omar Aljaffal, Norah Alkharashi, Lamia Abbas Amara, Nour Balousha, Samar Diab, Najlaa Osman Eltom, Miled Faiza (& Karen McNeil), Zeena Faulk, Ibrahim Fawzy, Daad Haddad, Yasmine Haj, Mayada Ibrahim, Rana Issa, Ali Mahmoud Khudayyir, Hiba Moustafa, Suneela Mubayi, Mariam Naji, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nashwa Nasreldin, Kamal Nasser, Nofel, Qasim Saudi, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, & Fadwa Tuqan.

May the poems gathered here––in translation, and in their original voice––spark introspection, remedy, and acts of imagination in between. ––Yasmine Haj, “To Speak to Each Other” (introduction)

trace: translating [x] invites readers to think about writing, place, and community; and to consider what is gained, lost, or missing, in processes of translation.

It is 1974. American and English expatriates, artists, writers, and eccentrics find their home in a quiet town on the island of Crete. Among them is Horace Vaughn, a sixty-five-year-old gay American writer who has long been at work on Household Gods, his attempt at the Great American Novel, and who in the meantime supports himself by dashing off detective stories.

Horace’s young Greek lover often annoys him, provides little satisfaction, and Horace idles his time away with alcohol, friends, and machinations. That is, until a young, enigmatic nineteen-year-old American woman named Helen arrives, another outsider. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious. He is fascinated by her punk style and elusive pose. In this small town, gossip spreads fast, and Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete: a suicidal ex-lover appears without warning, and there are whispers of her long-dead sister. The Henry Moore crowd dislike her, and a Greek waiter’s wife threatens to murder her.

When Helen vanishes, Horace is determined to follow her, to find her, especially her diary. His journey around Crete in his beat-up VW bug is funny and poignant, and for Horace, the mystery continues.

Sea-oath is a catalog of internal and generational mythologies, a procedural formalist poetic experiment, and a transcript of an internal trial between the speaker and God. 

Alter approaches the central theological reckoning of the collection through constructed metrical forms, neologistic indexing, and paratactic syntax in an attempt to articulate and organize memories and histories that had originally been buried by dissociation, self-punishment, and mental and physical escape. 

What kind of God permits and witnesses the cyclical transmission of suffering, and how can I understand my life and my path within my inheritance?

And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal, surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of contemporary Peruvian poetry.

Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters, one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. Suzanne, the older one, controls the finances. Louise, a former Carmelite, serves as her humble, tyrannical maid.

The author, who is also their great nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Mixing his writing with his photos, Hervé Guibert crafted a unique “photo novel,” reissued here for the first time with a full English translation by Christine Pichini, a new introduction by artist and writer Moyra Davey, and an account of the book’s origins by Thomas Simmonet.

I am still transitioning, but I am unsure into what.

Who are all these Evas? They puncture and disrupt the domestic space and equilibrium of the narrator, who alternately relies upon them or administers their care. Foam is the latest boundary-blurring, genre-resistant, strange and speculative new fiction from Kate Zambreno, the inimitable and relentless literary stylist and conceptualist. Inspired by the absurdities of Eva Hesse and other soft sculpture, these are speculative art essays and textures, a document of precarity and slippery time—mischievous, moody, estranged—a masterwork of tone and atmosphere.

Told through contradicting, unreliable narrators and almost entirely in dialogue, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR fuses the experimentation of George Saunders with the absurdist satire of Joseph Heller to deliver a seldom explored portrait of friendship and boyhood under the anarchy of occupation.

In a Kurdish village under military occupation, a group of boys scrape together their savings and buy a hand-stitched football to prove they aren't losers to the other kids. When it lands inside the opposing military base, Karim sneaks in and takes it back—only for the soldiers to burn the neighborhood to the ground looking for it. Streets are bombed, homes are raided, snipers take aim at pedestrians, residents are dragged off and imprisoned. As the casualty rate skyrockets, Karim and his friends retaliate by firing junkyard scraps from their slingshots while raging bulls escape slaughterhouses to stampede into warfare.