Eternal Current Events: Early Writings

The involuntary whispering of the dew-harvest.

A grimoire carved in scarlet, SALAMANDER'S WOOL is the inaugural full-length collection of writing by V Manuscript, amalgamating a vast array of arcane rituals into an ensorcelling poetic corpus. To read SALAMANDER'S WOOL is to consort with spirits and scry with dæmons, a linguistic alchemy which transmutes both language and reader.

V Manuscript is a poet and scriptomancer living in New York City.

The Queen’s Ball ingests taboo as fuel for a baroque and spiraling story of love in its most prismatic and absurd iterations. Through frightening distortions and hallucinogenic twists of fate, a demented circus of artists, writers, gender-hustling aesthetes, and religious fanatics collude in a glorious discombobulation of propriety and convention. I have never laughed this much at a novel that could somehow shock even the most irreverent of libertines, demanding, at times, absolute disgust. Truly nasty work. Iconic. —Juliana Huxtable

Translated by Kit Schluter
Afterword and notes by Thibaud Croisy, translated by Olivia Baes

Set among the flamboyant demi-monde of the 1970s Paris underground, The Queens’ Ball follows the narrator Copi in his attempt to write a novel as life comes undone around him. His Roman lover Pietro is stolen by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator whose coterie take up residence in Copi’s flat and pump out low-budget pornographic rags and films. His friends leave him, burnt out from the theatrical excess of the decade. And worst of all his editor keeps calling him, demanding to know where the book is. Propelled by Copi’s careening prose and incisive humor, The Queens’ Ball swerves from Paris to Ibiza to New York and back again in a whirlwind frenzy of love, loss, and madness. Featuring an illuminating critical appendix by Copi’s current French editor, Thibaud Croisy, Kit Schluter’s rhapsodic translation marks the début of Copi’s world-renowned fiction in English.

The Queen’s Ball is a heedless novel of transformation of bodies and tenses, a novel of enormity and loss which is, in the end, about writing a novel. Copi is a feckless romantic-his theme is the persistence of love in the phantasmagoria. His tender psychos hurtle through increasingly outré adventures that seem to expand and contract like accordions. Here is crime à la française. Here is a great queen’s verbal aggression, radiant detail, and joyous destructive energy. —Robert Glück

The Queens’ Ball is probably Copi’s masterpiece... By 1978, Copi was already an aesthetic: The Queens’ Ball was the magnet, the inverted whirlpool that brought that aesthetic to the surface. —César Aira

TIME by Spencer Longo is a collection of printed work depicting government raids, religious visions, environmental catastrophe, and extremist fundamentalism tangled together in a narrative web of salvation, annihilation, and transcendence. Using pen plotter graphics directly on uncollated pages of Time magazine, Longo explores the conspiratorial trope that messages are secretly embedded in mass media, coaxing our millenarian anxieties out through an additive printing process using graphics from survivalist publications, end-times evangelical cartoons, and marginalia from the borders of underground occult material, all sprinkled with ecstatic bursts of star-spangled clipart. A must-have for your fallout shelter's library.

Rip It Up is the first ever English translation of Kou Machida's award-winning novel, an undertaking over five years in the making and the inaugural title of Inpatient Press's new translation imprint Mercurial Editions.

Set in a kaleidoscopic hyperreal Japan circa Y2K, Rip It Up catalogues the misdeeds and misgivings of a down-and-out wannabe debonair who ekes out a meager living at the fringes of the art world, wracked by jealousy at his friend's success and despondency of his own creative (and moral) bankruptcy. In turn hilarious and also horrifying, Machida's pyrotechnic prose plumbs the discursive depths of the creative spirit, a head-spinning survey of degeneration and self-sabotage.

Kou Machida is a punk singer, actor, and author, who turned to poetry and fiction after releasing one of the seminal Japanese punk albums with his band INU, 1981’s Meshi kuuna! (Fuck Eating!). He has won the Akutagawa and Tanizaki prizes among many others, and his 2005 novel Kokuhaku (Confession) was named one of the three best books of the last thirty years by the Asahi Newspaper.

Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor, and musician who spent his salad days shouting in dank basements before getting a master’s degree in medieval Japanese literature. Recent translation projects include contributions to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki; and the memoir Try Saying You’re Alive! (Blank Forms, 2021) by outsider folk maniac Kazuki Tomokawa.

Winner of the 2000 Akutagawa Prize for Fiction

Cactus erotica. Dykes taking T erotica. Handmade rope erotica. 
Tangentially alien erotica. Clit long like laffy taffy erotica. Death erotica.

In L.A. Warman's anti-sequel to her award-winning debut Whore Foods, two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.

LA Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which recieved a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 500 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece ADMSDP one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others. She is a founding organizer of the Free Ashley Now survivor defense campaign.

"This book is an instant waypoint on my return to the revelation: if nothing else, my tears have a place where they belong—mixed into the dust of others." — Wilmer Wilson IV

Filmmaker, photographer, writer and traveler  Chris Marker (1921-2012) never respected boundaries between genres. His landmark 1962 film La Jetée is almost entirely stills, its one moving image as thrilling as the Lumières’ films must have been for their original audiences. Each of Marker’s films (including the widely celebrated Sans Soleil) stretched the definition of the art, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, even computer game. 

In Immemory, Chris Marker originally used the format of a CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, multimedia memoir. The reader investigates “zones” of travel, war, cinema, and poetry, navigating through image and text as if physically exploring Marker’s memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our era. With it, Marker both invented a literary form and perfected it. And yet the digital format he chose for his experiment was quickly rendered obsolete.

Immemory: Gutenberg Version reinvents this unique work for the printed page, a project the author dreamed up, titled, and developed with Exact Change before his death. Now finally realized, Immemory: Gutenberg Version brings this seminal work by Chris Marker into the present and future via a time-tested, durable format of the past — the book.

Edited & with an Introduction by Isabel Ochoa Gold

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat Raha • Nisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh

In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery.

Finlayson suggests that these two artists' work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York City. His essays have appeared in periodicals including Artforum, Bookforum, Papers on Language and Literature, Studio magazine, Kunst und Politik, PARSE, Archives of American Art Journal, and 032C. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms. His primary research is on contemporary art with emphases on Marxism, Black studies, philosophy of history, and conceptual art. He writes with the London-based Black Study Group and is a founding member of the political education collective Hic Rosa.

"[…] this new poetry will not serve the taste of the prosperous class. which only represents a minority. The people who populate this earth find the right to live at the end of a constant struggle. Like everything else, they also have a right to poetry, and it will appeal to their taste."

Three friends —Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat— followed this principle as they were composing their "odd" poems. Their aim was to write poetry for everyone, about everyone.

This books gathers the poems Orhan Veli published with his friends in Odd (1941), the manifesto he wrote for this new poetry, and the foreword he wrote for the 1945 re-edition.

Prompt Thinking explores how artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the nature of thought. In the age of generative AI, prompting becomes more than a technical instruction: it emerges as a philosophical practice.

This book arises from an experiment with AI in which the fictional philosopher Jianwei Xun sparked global debate by publishing a book about power and perception in the digital age. That book, Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality, was written with the assistance of AI. Rather than casting AI as either savior or threat, Prompt Thinking proposes a third way: conscious dialogue with artificial intelligence as a means to expand critical awareness. The book shows how critical philosophical engagement with AI can produce unexpected insights while preserving intellectual autonomy.

Part theoretical framework, part methodological provocation, Prompt Thinking offers tools for navigating cognitive transformation. It proposes an ethics of the threshold, neither rejecting technological change nor surrendering to it.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.