Nawar's Sketchbook

When living things bloom & molder all in a heartskip, when they expand toward death, this is what worms hear.

Artist’s book of paintings by Mikołaj Moskal: gouache, archival paper elements, simple & meaningful captions. REMMUS is a graft of Podlasie earth-water-sky and Mikołaj’s pigments, heart, and intuition. Designed in close collaboration with graphic artist and designer Kaja Gliwa.

The paintings are bracketed by a poem each by Kuba Niklasiński (“Flows | Flaws”) and Stefan Lorenzutti (“What Worm Heard”), handwritten by Mikołaj in English and Polish.

“Invest in a floating city or gentrify a submerged one.”

Nourhan Maayouf’s I Was Going to Work is a hybrid sci-fi picture book by the Cairo-based artist, in which the proto-cyborg citizens of Happy Land Nation establish new-fashioned diurnal rhythms against the ever-present backdrop of a monorail to nowhere and its pillars, idle and idolatrous.

Across forty-four spreads of what might be thought of as a picture book for adults, Maayouf delves into every aspect of a deeply familiar society in which retrograde devolution is billboarded as reinvention by Orwellian technocrats and speculators.

And yet pockets of the cyborg population continue striving, dreaming, craving, protesting, gleaning, and inventing. For a situation to be bleak, some notion of beauty must remain tenaciously rooted where it matters most.

Hands & Feet of Friends & Family is a weave of Helen Korpak’s photocollages and locket-sized literary captions recording closely observed familiar and familial gestures. Granular renderings tenderly taped, Korpak’s collages meld the touching and the wryly humorous, balancing throughout the vulnerability of artist and subjects bonded by essential fondness.

Beginning to look 
I started to notice 
the older I get 
the more I notice 
studying the reproductions 
separating this from that 
noticing the gestures 
feeling the movements 
of the joints—

Designed and typeset with haptic craft by Samuli Saarinen.

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

Touch Response is about lacking language and how to (not) interpret images. This is a book on vulnerability, as a description, prescription or side effect. It is made in a difficult period of fatigue and pain, mainly in the sofa in my living room, as a dialogue with myself and other invisible forces.

Drawings by Lore Smolders - visual artist
Interview with Birds WG - healer, writer, performance artist
Text editing by Isolde Vanhee and Joan Somers Donnelly

Abattre les arbres, boucher les fontaines, renverser les pierres réunit les 4 tomes d’un conte épisodique initialement paru en auto-édition tout au long de l’année 2021.
”Abattre les arbres, boucher les fontaines, renverser les pierres” sont les mots d’une archéologue s’exprimant à la radio au sujet des intentions des premiers chrétiens arrivant en Grande Bretagne. Cette formule a attendu de longues années dans mes notes avant de devenir un récit d’images.

"From this moment / and hence backwards / a visitation / echoes thru the apparent opening / to the tomb / the narrow passage is the mind's reasoning / in clarity / as she moves like a shadow / having lived her life before " — Joanne Kyger, from Places to Go (Black Sparrow, 1970)

"All processes measured as form are traceable in curved decay. Seemingly unmeasurable, unquenchable, the heart stone harbors its own native entropy. The evolution of organs is not ours to decipher. We’re drawn slanting toward the stone in helices of approaching circles. Our movements throw shadows, our bodies ring haloes." — Michael Cavuto, "Isis Theses"

"In the dual work of Isis Theses & Pyre I-V, living, death, language’s work of remembrance, place & poetic lineage all take part in shifting throughlines of recombinant forms, as a spiral spirals back on itself, changed over time. Early on, here, Cavuto writes “There is not enough wood for coffins. There is wood enough for a boat.” a Pyre then is a boat, a burning that is going somewhere, not death-as-end but as an upward & outward movement into collectively shared air, an archeology of connection. “Kyger wrote that memory is a weird dimension carried around invisibly in the ‘mind’’ Cavuto writes, in one of those moments that feels like a key, “Writing, she said, gives history back to you.” But it is not only history that Cavuto is carrying forward in these poems, it is something more spatially complex, enlivened & embodied in the dance of the words, & in the vital breakdown of the words themselves. The poems in Pyre I-V enact their answer to the question ‘what essence is left us when no words are left,’ & leave us, after the ritual process, dazzled with the true sense that something is left, something important of resonance & remembrance, in the atomized language-space; the air around the dis-integrating morphemes shimmering on the page as dissipative, potentiate sparks. —Cody-Rose Clevidence

Michael Cavuto is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. His books include Country Poems (Knife Fork Book, 2020) and Pyre (Spiral Editions, 2025). With the poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen, he publishes the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter. Along with Tessa Bolsover, he publishes hand-bound poetry books through auric press.

Pyre, Michael Cavuto. Illustrations by Astrid Terrazas. 52p, 8.5" x 6.75", hand sewn with red linen thread. Covers letterpressed on a 1963 Vandercook proof press with Strathmore Premium Grandee paper. Copy text and illustrations printed both offset and digitally on Mohawk felt paper in a first edition of 275. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke. With thanks to Vladimir Nahitchevansky and the various friends who helped assemble.