Books

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

It is a royal-format (16x24) print review of 250 pages, offering a manifesto where Global South narratives and ideas come to life. Through photography, articles, poems, and essays, each issue deconstructs dominant narratives, highlighting diverse voices. Presented in their original languages with English translations, the review fosters a global dialogue. Issue 0, titled "Ummah – Divine Oneness, Worship Plurality", explores the rich diversity of Islam, challenging colonial stereotypes and offering a new vision from Muslim and culturally Muslim perspectives.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

This publication shows the waiting archive of the Museum of Resistance. The Brussels Museum of Resistance is undergoing renovation. Hidden in the basements of the civil affairs department, the stacked archive awaits a new home. Boxes filled with recognition files, photo albums, exhibition panels, books, flags, furniture, and other scenographic materials are scattered throughout the entire floor plan. The recently appointed archivist Samuel and historian Agnes are sorting through the archive pieces and are striving to ensure a future. 

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This third issue presents texts by : Lila Maria de Coninck, Gabriel Gauthier, Marjolein Guldentops & Ahmed Saleh.

Ahmed Saleh (born 1998) is a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza. He studied business administration and political science and is currently living  in Brussels. Ahmed writes articles in Arabic and English, several of which have been published on various platforms. 

Marjolein Guldentops (Belgium, 1994) is a visual artist, author, and performer. Her artistic practice spans various mediums, including text, video and performance. Rooted in the concept of worlding, her work explores the urban rhythms, flows, and semantics that shape perceptions of space and language in both physical and metaphysical senses.

Gabriel Gauthier is a graduate of the Beaux-arts in Paris. He writes books, performs and makes music. He has published Simurgh & Simorgh and Contra at Théâtre Typographique (2016, 2024) and Speed at Vies Parallèles (2020). He has designed pieces at the border of dance and visual arts (Cover, Rien que pour vos yeux). Space, his first novel, was published by Corti.

Lila Maria de Coninck (2004) is a Belgian creator living in The Hague. She makes music, theatre and writes poetry. The guiding principle in her works is the use of multilingualism and miscommunication to promote creativity in her mother tongue, Dutch.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

2 poems written with AI assisted neural network.

Artists Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie dissect power and desire in a provocative conversation that probes the material erotic, appropriation, and sex. 

In Pervert or Detective?, artists Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie dissect power, desire, and subversion in a provocative conversation. Maybury, who integrates her work as a political dominatrix into her artistic practice, manipulates dynamics of control, compelling her male submissives to create art under her direction, only to claim it as her own. Through confession and humiliation, she dismantles notions of authorship, masculinity, and labor. McKenzie, known for her intricate trompe l’oeil paintings and conceptual installations, similarly blurs boundaries—between art and commerce, and authenticity and illusion. Her work challenges power structures and exposes the unstable nature of representation.

Maybury and McKenzie, through an expansive discussion with French art critic Marie Canet, interrogate the logic of seduction and domination, pushing against rigid binaries to probe the material erotic, appropriation, and transformation. With an introduction by curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, an afterword by writer Susan Finlay, and extensive reading and viewing lists, Pervert or Detective? offers a compelling exchange between artists committed to unsettling the familiar and redefining artistic agency.

Introduction by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen
Afterword by Susan Finlay

Soundcloud rapper boyfriends. AA rendezvous.

Singer-songwriter sweethearts. Toxic e-boys.

Suicide pacts. NYU poets.

Flirty coworkers. ASMR girls.

Porn-addicted paramours.

Catholic cliques. Imaginary simps.

Welcome to the world of

FEMALE LONELINESS EPIDEMIC.

Nazareth Hassan’s devastatingly brilliant Slow mania is a powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty. The artist begins with a photographic sequence: two white-blue sky panels; a shattered glass storefront window; a street gutter clutching leaves, smashed straw sleeves and plastic lids; then snow holding a disassembled red stained chest of drawers. These are the writer’s plinths where form as waste is configured: “smoggy breath thru burnt-edged holes tracking acid mucous inside your home.” Slow mania provokes through enumerative structures, for instance, “screening bodies” who keep a sex club’s gates open only to some: “…197 mmm maybe lemme think / 151 yes / 162 yes / 197 ok yes, but keep your shirt on.” The poet deftly folds human intimacy into interspecies metaphor: “The rat torso twitches in agreement. Across / the street, the flies continue to starve,” where “…you’re lost in your own hole: what did you find?” Hassan attends to this painful search, bearing witness to the disturbingly exultant, offering a radical state of being, in and out of which the stunning and timely Slow mania lives and thrives. — Ronaldo V. Wilson

Slow mania is resistance to resolution, it’s pointillistic magic, it’s Seurat in Bed-Stuy: the tighter you zoom, the more undifferentiated beauty you encounter. It’s kinky (the kinked-up curls of somebody’s greased-up chops). It’s tender (bruised and brown, like the overripe fruit that haunts your summer kitchen waiting to be crumbled into a crumble). The colors are blurry, the edges are soft, the stakes are high, and everything—everything!—shimmers in the space between life and afterlife. Hassan’s gaze is a hot summer steam that sneaks into the skinniest, stinkiest crevices; the grimiest seams, the most miraculous cracks. Breathe into the abyss, that’s the invitation. Take it in, let it in. Be a wit(h)ness to every single being. — Steffani Jemison

This amazing book reads like a synesthetic performance, the only thing missing is the smell of sweat, of streets, of loss. A book of choreographed pages, scores, movements, image blur, hand-scribbles. The bleak, unsparing texts hidden among the materials turn out to be the record of sudden eruptions, violent street scenes, pick-up scenes, unclear dialogues, insults, self-debasing verbal injuries on repeat. The performers are racialized, sexualized, anonymized “persons,” “meats,” numbers, lovers, passers-by, all caught up in these dangerous yet desperately emotional and triggering dances at the limit. It will leave you raw, spaced-out, both roused and alarmed as though coming out of an intoxicating show, and wanting more. — Caroline Bergvall

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
—Eileen Myles

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians; Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience, which won the 2017 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction; and a monograph of ink drawings, Prose Architectures. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

A sequence of ten poems; in separated continuance, an outcry that ventriloquises and manifests languages of exclusion and yet with dogged persistence protests them. 

“Oh strike the light, float the boat, for sake of common peril they are fallen away as gathered up in sight of lamentable in- difference and will go down against us”. 

Tout geste est renversement – Every gesture is reversal is a publication by artist Laurianne Bixhain comprising an imahe captured and silkscreen printed by Bixhain and a text written by Chloe Chignell. The work addresses the potential for mutual transformation between language and materials, whether human or non human. How does language traverse the body? What are its resonances? How does it shape physical presence, gestures or thoughts? 

A2 silkscreen printed poster
Designed by Morgane Le Ferec.
Printed in 300 Copies. 

4 poèmes-affiches, format A3, impriméx en risographie au studio Colorama (Berlin), sur papiers variés, tirage à 150 exemplaires

«GASOLINE, Apocalypse 1998», «the category is: phone sex», «zona nudista», «(fête) sentimental-e-s» : étés d'apocalypse, émojis banane, cruising transocéanique, SMS en short, sales coeurs, baraques à frissons et grand-huit sentimental... ces poèmes courent toustes ~ à genoux, à nu ou en solex ~ après la question du désir, après l'amour aussi, avec une tendre obsession

Design graphique signé Auriane Preud’homme, Enz@ Le Garrec, Roxanne Maillet & Martha Salimbeni, avec des dessins de Gaëlle Loth

Jangal est un ouvrage collectif avec la participation d’Ana Pi, Julien Creuzet, Léna Araguas et Éva Barois De Caevel. Il a été conçu lors de l’exposition « Cet ailleurs, qui rejaillit en moi, lorsque je suis là (…) » de Julien Creuzet à la galerie NaMiMa de l’École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy.

Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Studyapproaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. It reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history through the voices of working choreographers. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the dance history back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space and moves into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future.

Text by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne

Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

The appearance of Firespitter (Nightboat, 2025), a 600-page-plus collected poems, is immensely valuable and long overdue . . . Hers [Jayne Cortez’s] is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives. - David Grundy, Poetry Foundation

"Ces deux collines jumelles sont pour moi des contre-monuments : un héritage industriel délaissé, en friche, conservant une puissance symbolique et politique. Les messages et les crassiers sont indissociables." 

La première partie de cette édition est une collecte d'images intégrant des messages sur les crassiers (1948-2024). Ces images ont été récupérées principalement sur internet, complétées par un appel à collecte public sur les réseaux sociaux, ainsi que par la distribution de flyers et le collage d'affiches. Les images sont rassemblées chronologiquement et chaque message est recontextualisé dans son événement politique. La seconde partie présente les crassiers jumeaux en croisant plusieurs perspectives ; historique, géologique, urbaine, écologique et politique. Enfin je définis les crassiers en tant qu'outils et supports tactiques d'affichage public. Ce travail a abouti à cette première impression en janvier 2025. 

Cette édition continuera à se développer au fil du temps grâce à des rééditions régulières, intégrant des messages découverts ou récemment apparus.

God Is a Bitch Too is the accelerated and acidic English-language debut of Colombian poet María Paz Guerrero­. In this chapbook, god is needy, Latin American, and an overweight woman. No one asks god to dance. Someone speaks, someone tries: “One is the measure of their body.”

God Is a Bitch Too is #13 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.

The fruitfull sence is an excerpt from Lucretius’s masterwork De rerum natura, in which the poet marvels at the sensory world. Optical illusions, the drift of smell, the juicy mechanics of taste. All animated by Lucy Hutchinson’s gorgeous 1640 translation, which renders the original Latin into bouncy English pentameter. The first publication in our new series, Sensory Dispatches.