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Cover of Things To Do With Your Mouth

Les Figues Press

Things To Do With Your Mouth

Divya Victor

€20.00

Attempts to control the mouths of "speaking women"—17th century witches, 19th century hysterics—have taken many forms, both physical and metaphorical.

In Things To Do With Your Mouth, Divya Victor repeats, recants, and relentlessly echoes a textual meeting place for the psychic and corporeal implications of this "fear of women with excessive powers of speech and discourse," creating a cacophonous movement towards the feminist purpose of poetics. Culling language from texts as diverse as nursery rhymes and contemporary pediatric health websites, the biblical Song of Solomon and Freud's "Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," Victor confronts this long history of the "silenced mouth." Section by section, appropriated word by appropriated word, Victor relishes in the buccal opening, its capacity for words and discourse, addressing Nietzsche's claim that the world "lives on itself: its excrements are its nourishment." These words will "eat you alive, digest you, leave you scattered." Or, as CA Conrad states in his afterword, these reutterances will ultimately "liberate" us "one cough at a time. The mouth in, the mouth out, mouths training mouths around the always-imperfect O."

Language: English

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Cover of Grammar of the Cage

Les Figues Press

Grammar of the Cage

Pam Ore

Poetry €20.00

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

Cover of Cunt Norton

Les Figues Press

Cunt Norton

Dodie Bellamy

Fiction €20.00

In Cunt Norton, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy "cunts" The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature.

The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems ("the greatest fuck poem in the English language," according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. "These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well," Bellamy writes. Even as Cunt Norton dismembers the history of English poetry, "cunting" Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy's cunted texts breathe life into literary "masters" with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion. 

Cover of +|'me'S-pace

Les Figues Press

+|'me'S-pace

Christine Wertheim

Poetry €20.00

+|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is book 1, volume 2 of a wider, ongoing project known as "For Love Alone" Christina'S-tead, a poetic enquiry into the current state of the English tongue.

"In a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Wertheim's +|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written in part as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments. But even more, it is fun to read for its word play"—Juliana Spahr.

Introduction by Dodie Bellamy and art by Lisa Darms.

Cover of Inch Aeons

Les Figues Press

Inch Aeons

Nuala Archer

Poetry €20.00

Inch Aeons is a meditation on the form of meaning, the nature of nature, and the locality of tradition in an over-wired-world.

Here, award-winning poet Nuala Archer adopts, breaks and recreates the limits of haiku, evoking moments of collision and convergence, from "Beyond Conception- / Without Regeneration- / Big Bang's Leave let Be" to "Am-Is-Are-Was-Were- / Has-Have-Had-Do-Does-Did-Shall- / Should-Can-Could-Will-Would-."

Poet Juliet Patterson calls Inch Aeons "a complex and wondrous book," while poet Pam Ore says the poems are "like starlight, resonat[ing] with the brightness of an original violence, cooling-healing and coalescing into the word."

Published as part of the TrenchArt Casements series, Inch Aeons includes inside illustrations by Japanese artist Tamzo and visual art (back cover) by American artist Molly Corey.

Nuala Archer is the author of Whale on the Line, Two Women, Two Shores (with Medbh McGuckian), PAN/AMA, and From a Mobile Home. She served as the primary English-language editor for University Over the Abyss: The Story Behind 520 Lecturers & 2,430 Lectures in Kz Theresienstadt 1942-1944. In 1995 she survived a catastrophic car accident; recovering in Jerusalem, she enrolled in a theatre degree program at the School of Visual Theatre. Archer continues to perform with the Jerusalem Theatre Company at festivals around the world, including in Auschwitz, London, Dublin, New Delhi, Bangalore, Seoul and Kagoshima. She is an Associate Professor at Cleveland State University.

Cover of Metal Works

Lenz Press

Metal Works

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

Poetry €20.00

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

Cover of Know Thy Audience

Moist Books

Know Thy Audience

Nadia de Vries

Poetry €14.00

Know Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries’ third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor – but not poetry altogether.

Speaking—or rather, singing—as a ‘battered woman’ from a working-class neighborhood, De Vries’ aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the author—and not her perpetrator—pulls the strings. Who is the victim in these poems? Can violence be redeemed through esthetic metamorphosis? Or can powerlessness only be transferred as fetish? Know Thy Audience investigates the extent to which a victim can share their wounds, and to what degree an audience can—sensibly, ethically—be burdened with painful knowledge.

Cover of Slangen

het balanseer

Slangen

Dominique De Groen

Poetry €19.50

Slangen krioelen in de sarcofaag van het heden, in de krochten van de popcultuur, in de mummie van de natuur, in wondes en rot vlees, in artificiële woestijnen en op geoliede dad bods. Ze wentelen zich rond beursgrafieken, raken verstrengeld met wurgende algoritmes, orkestreren een trage ondergrondse revolutie. Een meisje snijdt zich aan een nepdiamanten piramide en werpt haar slangenvel van zich af.

Dominique De Groen is schrijver en beeldend kunstenaar. Ze publiceerde de dichtbundels Shop Girl (2017), Sticky Drama (2019) en offerlam (2020). Ze werd genomineerd voor de Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee 2018, de Herman de Coninckprijs 2020 en de Fintroliteratuurprijs 2021 en won de Frans Vogel Poëzieprijs 2019 en de Fintropublieksprijs 2021.

Cover of Songhai!

Materials

Songhai!

Askia Touré

Poetry €14.00

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future.

Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.

Askia Touré is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.