If Not, Winter

This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein’s career. It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent.

By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

In Anne Carson's Short Talks the reader is bombarded with short prose poems that resound with the fullness of meditations on lyric sermons, riddle-poems that consist only of answers, Lou Reed meets Claude Monet and converts to Zen, the pure hilarious ache of ontology. SHORT TALKS, the first book-length collection by this accomplished, original voice, is elegiac, perceptive, and droll. 

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us. — Megan Milks

Stacy Szymaszek has long been a poet attentive to work, and this attention is of course animated by place – whether the urban quotidian and attendant human dramas of previous books, or her present workplace on a dairy farm in upstate New York. In Essay’s conversational, immediate, vulnerable, affecting and affected poems, Szymaszek turns to cows and to the cow-like exhaustion of humans who labor in service of capital’s voracity. Essay is bent to the workday but not beaten down by it. We are offered a visionary form, boldly attendant to the present, to prolong survival without denying death.“The heart of the matter is to be able to keep / loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity / unpredictability and contradictions.” In Essay, Szymaszek has built a bed of hay where we can break from our labors and daydream about the “livelihood where we can all work / a single day and have enough for the year and the work / of the cows can be ended.” — Alli Warren

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’