Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class, and Giving What You Don't Have

Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

"The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism." - Julia Bosson

Long out of print, The Close Chaplet is Laura Riding's first book, originally published in 1926. Riding deliberately ceased writing poems after 1940, when she came to see poetry as irrevocably flawed as a means of expression. These poems demonstrate Riding's early desire to depart from the close and well-tilled ground of traditional lyric poetry. According to her biographer, Elizabeth Friedman, many of the poems for THE CLOSE CHAPLET were brought in typescript from New York, a few were added in Egypt, and the entire text was carefully edited by Robert Graves.

In his introduction, Mark Jacobs writes that Riding was identifying herself with the pre-moment, the 'what-was-there' before Creation. How did the world, the universe, come to exist, why does it exist, why does it die, why do we? From these questions, Riding begins to develop a theory about the role of women as the origin of all human beings, the only animals with written language. This edition also includes Riding's essay A Prophecy or a Plea, a statement of her poetics initially published in 1926.

Laura Riding was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and publisher. While primarily known for the critical works that she co-authored with Robert Graves — A Pamphlet Against Anthologies and A Survey of Modernist Poetry — Riding also left behind an incredibly powerful body of poetry and prose works that, regrettably, remain little read today. These include THE CLOSE CHAPLET (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), EXPERTS ARE PUZZLED (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), CONVALESCENT CONVERSATIONS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), The Lives of Wives, and The Progress of Stories. Famously rejecting poetry early in her career, she spent the last decades of her life co-writing a theoretical work on linguistics, Rational Meaning, with her husband Schuyler Jackson. She was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1991, the very same year she died.

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

Three long poems by American writer, artist and actor Rene Ricard (1946-2014), an icon of the New York underground in the 1970s, accompanied by a series of drawings by American painter Robert Hawkins.

After Rene Ricard 1979–1980 and God with Revolver, Editions Lutanie publishes a third collection of poetry by the American writer, artist, and actor Rene Ricard (1946–2014), Love Poems.

Reprising the rare, eponymous book published by Richard Hell through CUZ Editions in 1999, Love Poems features three poems by Ricard and a series of black-and-white drawings by Robert Hawkins). Haunted by death, betrayal, and guilt, Ricard's poems speak from a wounded heart. Hawkins's accompanying drawings have the simplicity of children's book illustrations, but feature menacing shadows, broken cigarettes, used condoms, and petal-less flowers.

Translated into French by Manon Lutanie and Rachel Valinsky, and presented in a bilingual edition, the poems are followed by a newly commissioned afterword by Hawkins retracing his encounter, friendship, and collaboration with Ricard.

With Love Poems, Editions Lutanie reaffirms its decade-long commitment—initiated the year of Ricard's passing—to reissue his out-of-print works for English-speaking readers, while also presenting them for the first time to a French-speaking audience.

"With three simple poems, Rene Ricard exposes us to the often strained love within class stratification, between those coming together from different worlds, whether Bowery panhandlers or street hustlers, Hollywood movie stars or the highest echelon of European aristocratic wealth. Rene Ricard writes poems that are always honest. Sometimes painfully so."
—Patrick Fox

Robert Hawkins (born 1951 in Sunnyvale, California) is an American artist who lives and works in London. A fabled figure of the 1980s and early 1990s East Village art and punk scene, his work is and has been collected by artists and writers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn O'Brien, and Jim Jarmusch. Among Hawkins' first exhibitions was Lower Manhattan Drawing Show, a group exhibition curated by Keith Haring at 77 White Street Gallery above the Mudd Club, in 1981.

Rene Ricard was an American writer, artist, and actor. He was born in 1946 and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After a troubled childhood, he fled to Boston as a teenager, where he came into contact with literary and artistic circles. At the age of eighteen, he moved to New York City and became a central figure in the city's artistic and literary scene. Ricard appeared in several films by Andy Warhol and continued to act in many independent films throughout his life. In the 1980s, he wrote two major collections of poetry, as well as important essays and articles, some of which were instrumental in launching the careers of artists such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat (about whom he wrote the famous article "The Radiant Child" in Artforum in 1981). Beginning in the 1990s, he developed a pictorial body of work and exhibited his paintings in various galleries in the UK and the US. He died in New York in 2014.

Edited by Manon Lutanie .
Translated from the English (American) by Manon Lutanie and Rachel Valinsky.
Drawings and afterword by Robert Hawkins.

Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time. 

Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”

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