Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This third issue presents texts by : Lila Maria de Coninck, Gabriel Gauthier, Marjolein Guldentops & Ahmed Saleh.

Ahmed Saleh (born 1998) is a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza. He studied business administration and political science and is currently living  in Brussels. Ahmed writes articles in Arabic and English, several of which have been published on various platforms. 

Marjolein Guldentops (Belgium, 1994) is a visual artist, author, and performer. Her artistic practice spans various mediums, including text, video and performance. Rooted in the concept of worlding, her work explores the urban rhythms, flows, and semantics that shape perceptions of space and language in both physical and metaphysical senses.

Gabriel Gauthier is a graduate of the Beaux-arts in Paris. He writes books, performs and makes music. He has published Simurgh & Simorgh and Contra at Théâtre Typographique (2016, 2024) and Speed at Vies Parallèles (2020). He has designed pieces at the border of dance and visual arts (Cover, Rien que pour vos yeux). Space, his first novel, was published by Corti.

Lila Maria de Coninck (2004) is a Belgian creator living in The Hague. She makes music, theatre and writes poetry. The guiding principle in her works is the use of multilingualism and miscommunication to promote creativity in her mother tongue, Dutch.

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Swaying between command and curiosity, acquiescence and destruction, distance and proximity, Jennifer Soong’s Suede Mantis / Soft Rage proffers tenderness that teeters on the precipice of loss. Premised on this peril is not a paralyzing grief but a generative poiesis of “cruel desperation,” in which poetry pronounces itself in contrasts and conditionals, had beens and renunciations. Like a tongue that tans flesh, like passion that’s made pliable by the pulsing and glistening of language, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is the negotiated labor of a process rather than a product, raising interior operations to the surface while presenting an antithesis to mimetic construction. Neo-romantic and post-pastoral, the poems in Soong’s second collection reinvigorate lyric possibility.

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems(winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts of Letters, and is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. For fifty-six years, she and her husband Keith Waldrop ran one of the country's most vibrant experimental poetry presses, Burning Deck, in Providence, Rhode Island.