On Feminist Films

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

One day in April the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. As the investigation begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lang, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy; his wife, Kitty Lang, a psychotherapist; and Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer and Owen’s close friend. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, Owen intervenes from the after-life, desperate to find out his fate. Interiors is a about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life.Jessie Widner’s debut novel Interiors is poised and poetic, a moving account of what happens to the lost inner lives of the people who leave us, ‘the invisible things that expand within the self … that leave no record’. The mood of the novel, an air of trepidation, stayed with me long after I put it down like a ghostly presence, echoing the novel's own fictional haunting.

Jessica Widner is a writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review. Interiors is her first novel.

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.

A facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s sole, early, extremely rare poetry book A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, originally published in 1972.

Heavily illustrated from Jarman’s collection of postcards, the book combines text and visual imagery in a way which foreshadows his subsequent style as an artist and filmmaker. With the majority of the first edition having been destroyed by Jarman, this makes available a missing, significant piece of his oeuvre.

The facsimile retains the book’s original format, with a silver mirror cover, and an image accompanying each poem, printed in a striking green ink. Additional material comes in the form of a Foreword and Afterwords by So Mayer, Tony Peake and Keith Collins.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media.

From her documentaries 'bordering on fiction' to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman's work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.

‘Inland Empire’ is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch. The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.