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Cover of The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition

Wesleyan

The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition

Aimé Césaire

€18.00

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.

Published in 2023 ┊ 96 pages ┊ Language: English, French

recommendations

Cover of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Wesleyan

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Samuel R. Delany

Sci-Fi €27.00

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds. 

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues—technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—have only become more pressing with the passage of time. 

The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is—you!

Cover of Lola the Interpreter

Wesleyan

Lola the Interpreter

Lyn Hejinian

Poetry €19.00

The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn Hejinian. 

Lyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an 'I' and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian's lifelong exploration of thought's infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to My Life and A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian's life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence. 

Cover of Coeur de Lion

Fence Books

Coeur de Lion

Ariana Reines

Poetry €16.00

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.

Cover of EN

het balanseer

EN

Guy Rombouts

Poetry €25.00

In het begin van de jaren 1970, hield Guy Rombouts een notaboekje bij waarin hij alle woorden, bijvoeglijk naamwoorden en werkwoorden bijhield die hij tegenkwam tijdens het lezen en die met elkaar verbonden waren door het voegwoord ‘en‘.

Ongeveer 50 jaar later en met de hulp van de grafische vormgever Jeroen Wille, is de transcriptie van zijn aantekeningen gepubliceerd als een boek dat gelezen kan worden in twee richtingen (en als enige boek coronaproof met twee tegelijkertijd).

Het boek bevat 2158 verzen met in totaal 4316 EN-combinaties.

De kortste verzen met evenveel letters:

A EN Z

4 EN 6

De langste verzen met evenveel letters:

ONUITSPREKELIJKHEDEN EN IMPONDERABILIA

ONEVENWICHTIGHEID EN ZELFOVERSCHATTING

Cover of True Poem Dead PDF

TEXTS press

True Poem Dead PDF

Sam Riviere

Poetry €5.00

2 poems written with AI assisted neural network.

Cover of The Descent of Alette

Penguin Books

The Descent of Alette

Alice Notley

Poetry €20.00

The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a spoken text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

Alice Notley is a poet whose twenty previous titles include The Descent of Alette, Beginning with a Stain, Homer's Art, and Selected Poems. She wrote the introduction for her late first husband Ted Berrigan's Selected Poems. She lives in Paris.

Published 1996.

Cover of Dregs, Beacons

Self-Published

Dregs, Beacons

Anna-Rose Stefatou

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.