The Speak Angel Series

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening.

What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US’s brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O’Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the “war on terror,” feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

If Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal’s MLA citations to Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. Hole Studies is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around. — Jeannie Vanasco

The playful, inventive, and lyrically quick poems comprising The Grimace of Eden, Now orbit the strange space halfway between Tennyson and the Metaverse, veering between the natural world and a sci-fi universe, between inner feelings and outward observations, with questions of divinity alongside domestic life, spiders, dishes, and spaceships. The roving eye of these poems wanders through spacetime carrying irreverent theologies and exploring what it could mean to be living, sensate, and awake in this weird moment in time, exposing a mixture half of awe and half of madness. 

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich (Nightboat Books, 2021), Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (The Song Cave, 2021), Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2018), and BEAST FEAST (Ahsahta Press, 2014), as well as several chapbooks (Fonograf Editions, flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). Occasionally a visiting poetry professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, they live in the Arkansas Ozarks alongside three loyal, sentient pets, and the continuous void.

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

Ephemeral and anarchic, Runes and Chords is the first collection of artwork by famed poet, critic and artist Alice Notley. These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley’s Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page.

They defy containment and category, much like their creator—each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media. With this collection, one of America’s most influential living poets and artists continues to prove her worthiness of that title.

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

Dreaming Alcestis is an artist's book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley's 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?

Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides's ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon's relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson's words, "2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV." In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.

Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist's first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London).

Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Beatrice Gibson.
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley.