Don't Leave Me This Way

Permanent Volta is a book of poems about constraint and debt, as much as it is about excess, credit, loving luxury, and hating work. These are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.

Taking cues from Rosa Luxemburg's birdsongs and the syntax of invasive flowers, these poems strive to love lack. If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems are motivated by refusal, inversion, and evading representation. In Permanent Volta, the muses demand wages, and then they demand the world. Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are melancholy and militant, lazy and anti-state, greedy and collective.

Permanent Volta is for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.

A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.

A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, "The Beautiful One," comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson's poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices. 

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring "possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity."

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

The first book devoted to the late African American writer and actress, Dorothy Dean, one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday, close to Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This second release from Éditions 1989 features Dorothy Dean's unpublished writing and selected correspondence with Edie Sedgwick, Rene Ricard, and Taylor Mead, among other friends and artists. This volume also includes Dean's transcendent script of an unrealized film starring Factory actor, Ondine.

Lyrical, humorous, political, and brutally honest, Who Are You Dorothy Dean? is a tribute to one of the few prominent African American women of New York City's bohemian heyday.

Dorothy Dean (1932-1987) was an African American writer and actress. She entered the 1960s New York underground scene and quickly became one of its key, if overlooked, figures, starring in six of Andy Warhol's films and inspiring the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Robert Creeley. Presumably the first woman ever hired as fact-checker at The New Yorker, Dean held brief editorial and proofreading positions at publications such as Vogue before launching her very own bulletin of film reviews, the All-Lavender Cinema Courier, in 1976.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo.
Texts by Dorothy Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, Rene Ricard, Taylor Mead, et al.
Translated from the English (American) by Rachel Valinsky.

From 1972 to 1974, the anonymous writers of Social Disease offered groundbreaking, incisive, and sweeping critiques of social relationships through the lens of Situationism. Arguing that true revolution — the kind of complete and irreversible revolution longed for in the wake of such revolutionary moments as the May 1968 student uprisings and the 1969 Stonewall riots— would change every aspect of society, it was clear that affective relationships — how we love, how we feel pleasure— would necessarily be changed as well, and thus deserved examination as much as the traditional questions of labor or politics. The voices in the essays speak with urgency, and do not compromise in their expression. Beyond the theoretical insights of the text, the emotional truth of history comes through in the spaces of contradiction, and allusions to intercommunity conflicts. These essays were written without constraints for an immediate audience of comrades and peers; with this translation of the collection, that audience now includes us.

"Translating from the French, Mar Stratford's MISERE DU L'AMOUR captures the urgency, passion, and drama of 1970s gay leftism. MISERE DU L'AMOUR asks questions that persist: what does a better world look like? What is the true nature of love? Can we fuck and suck our way to liberation?The questions asked by F.H.A.R in the 1970s have a relevance to today's discourse that Stratford's translation animates. Tell your friends, your lovers, and your haters." —Brendan Williams-Childs

"The Misery of Love" & Other Essays From Social Disease / “Misère de l'amour” & autres textes de le flèau social. Bound with staples. Covers printed on Mohawk off-white cardstock, with front cover image hand colored with pencil and marker. Interiors printed on bright white French text weight paper. Printed and assembled in "Kingston, New York,” the unceded and occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes.

Designed by The Aliens.

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP