Books

Canonically Speaking is the second title to appear on the First Drafts imprint, a zigzag in Kunstverein Publishing’s output that’s dedicated to publishing completed manuscripts that would otherwise, for an array of reasons, not see the light of day in this rough early form.

Central to Canonically Speaking is the idea that (female) life is an inherently surrealist experience. In this spirit, the ‘absurd’ is embraced as a means to speak out on themes such as self-image, spirituality, mental health and work. While slipping between poetry, comprehensive list-making, knock knock jokes and intertextual references, forms of recital and misinterpretation often take place, whereby characters quote and repeat sentences and words from a large variety of sources, jumping from the health benefits of whale blubber to court transcripts of Bill Clinton's impeachment to the plasma that is released when microwaving two grapes side by side.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Drink Deeply and Dream by Elspeth Walker is an ethereal, offbeat short story about wannabe vampires with a Marxist bent and their search for salvation from capitalism via eternal bloodlust.

Paperback, Staple Bound and Offset Printed

Enfin la traduction en français du best-seller de Jen Calleja, qui sera présente pour une lecture croisée. Repassez vos capes et astiquez vos chaînettes. 

La figure du gobelin est espiègle, marginale, répugnante et fascinante et le mode gobelin peut être envisagé comme un mode de vie à part entière.

Jen Calleja, depuis son obsession pour les objets verts et les marionettes, ses souvenirs familiaux, son rapport au corps et au dégoût de soi, au chagrin, au sexe et au deuil, propose avec malice une pensée hybride entre essai, auto-fiction, poésie et théorie de la gobelinité.

En chacunx de nous, suggère-t-elle, sommeille un gobelin qu’il est temps de libérer. 

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

An immersion in the flow of language, words, and images within David Douard's work.

A jumble of workshop views, recent productions, and reassembled fanzines, inner GLOw' replica delves into the roots of David Douard's practice. The "zines," which he has been compulsively producing for years, interact with his works, contaminating them. Pages of collages, drawings, photocopies, scraps of tape, torn magazines, slogans picked up on social media, and photos taken with smartphones reveal the density and formation process of the artist's language. This flow insinuates itself and transmutes within his sculptures and installations, whose teeming and polymorphous materiality is revealed in an exhaustive set of objective photographs.

Three texts are added to this iconographic corpus: a phantasmagorical fiction by Charlie Fox, an essay by Ingrid Luquet-Gad, and a poetic enumeration by Nina Kennel.

inner GLOw' replica—the first book published by Zzz—is the result of a long collaboration between David Douard and designers Thomas Bizzarri and Alain Rodriguez.

Born 1983 in Perpignan, David Douard lives and works in Aubervilliers (France). Language is the very basis of his work. The texts and poems he collects on the Internet are manipulated, transformed in order to become a vital flow, feeding into his sculptures. Through language as an ingredient, David Douard redefines space as hybrid and collective by injecting anonymous, chaotic, deviant, ill and frustrating poems in it. As he recreates an infected environment where the real world used to be, the fantasy brought by new digital technologies expands.

Texts by Charlie Fox, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Nina Kennel.

Chilli is one of the most popular food ingredients in contemporary China, and symbolic of modernisation. More Than Chilli goes beyond its trendy façade to explore Chongqing, known for its tradition of spicy food. From the perspective as a local, Rossy Liu reflects on her own personal memories associated with chilli. A combination of fragmented scenes, objects, dialogues, movements and sounds are drawn on to unravel the locality of culinary identity. While chilli has become a ubiquitous flavour in today's global society, the book emphasises the hidden intimacy that still exists between Chongqing locals and their unfiltered connection to chilli.

“Sketchbook 1-10” with Antoinette d’Ansembourg bundles a complete collection of pocket sketches created between 2020 and 2023, stretched across ten different notebooks. These sketches, despite their two-dimensionality, form the mainstay of her sculptural output, offering a glimpse into the intimate process behind her stately installations.

A contemplative photographic series by Jochen Lempert, created during a residency at the Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, a former mill nestled in the Provençal landscape.

Known for his background in biology and his distinctive analogue black-and-white photography, Lempert brings a scientific sensitivity and poetic restraint to his exploration of the site's immediate environment.

Shot entirely on location, the images focus on subtle interactions between natural forms and their surroundings. Rather than constructing grand ecological narratives, Lempert observes everyday life in and around the mill, drawing attention to the interdependencies and ephemeral presences that define a place.

With the intimacy of field notes and the tactility of silver gelatin prints, Local Ecology. Moulin des Ribes is both a document and a meditation. It reveals the overlooked ecologies that persist on the periphery of human attention, transforming the act of looking into a form of ecological engagement. In the silence of these photographs, Lempert proposes a different kind of knowledge—rooted in slowness, attunement, and care.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2021 during a residency at La Società delle Api, Moulin des Ribes, Grasse, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

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.

Why be the object when you can dive into yourself and archive your own adolescence? And what about this adolescence when it lasts until the late thirties, and expands beyond the traditional understanding of age group? 

This volume redefines the coming-of-age genre by addressing the contours of the obsession with the prolonged teenager years. Contemporary art views adolescence as a mental state, a condition that has eroded the traditional markers of the passage into adulthood; not a transitory phase but a prolonged mode of being or even a critique of a world that itself refuses to stabilize.

Extramentale, a curatorial platform on teenage aesthetics, was founded by Julia Marchand, the editor of this book, which spans the period from the platform's creation in 2016 through to its eventual closure in 2026. It gave voice to artist-adolescents and author-adolescents, mainly millennials and Gen Zers.

Adolescent artists of the Extramentale program and beyond contributed to this publication by sharing their words on the many dimensions of the adolescence: Robin Plus, Gaia Vincensini, Raphaëlle Serre, Linda Voorwinde, Tohé Commaret, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie, Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel, Kevin Blinderman, Mohamed Bourouissa, Michal Novotný, Laura Owens, Magda Szpecht, Thomas Liu Le Lann, Velvet Aubry, Arnaud Dezoteux, Prune Phi, Alban Diaz, Ant Łakomsk, Liselor Perez, Francesca Grilli, Camille Aleña, Joanna Kordjak, and Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło; interviewed by Venice-based researchers Cecilia Larese, Vittoria Morpurgo, and Julia Marchand.

"Having a party (hope you will be there)", is a catalogue of an exhibition organized by Mickael Marman and D&TLG at CFAlive in Milan with artists from the black European diaspora, including original contributions, photos of the show, as well as a brand new intro text by Olamiju Fajemisin.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

LOST & FOUND SERIES VI presents work by Gregory Corso, Judy Grahn, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Ted Joans. While the styles and experiences of these writers are radically different, each project presented here enacts a commitment to the exploration of knowledge unbound by disciplinary constraints.

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981, introduced by Anne Waldman, includes two transcribed and annotated lectures that illustrate Corso's vast storehouse of cultural knowledge, animating his poetics both on the page and in the classroom.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word presents two very different lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a new interview with the author. Whether looking at iconic French novelist Colette or examining the poetics of prose, The Sounding Word describes an unflinching empirical approach to knowledge and its transmission through direct experience.

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses explores mythic, societal, and personal relationships to menstruation throughout time, and is accompanied by a recent interview with the legendary poet, teacher, scholar, and activist.

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, introduced by Diane di Prima, presents an array of previously unpublished texts on jazz, surrealism, travel guides to Africa and Paris, his inimitable Negative Cowboy, and photographs from his life and times. As writers, each considers and refigures the malleable conditions of historical truth and the pursuit of knowledge as part of their creative process. And as readers, we are encouraged to do the same.

SERIES VI includes:

Gregory Corso: Naropa Lectures 1981 (Part I & II) (ed. William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, Öykü Tekten)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: The Sounding Word (ed. Iris Cushing)

Judy Grahn: Selections from Blood, Bread, and Roses (ed. Iemanjá Brown & Iris Cushing)

Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller (Part I & II) (ed. Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay)

Garréta’s first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete.

Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.

Anne F. Garréta is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, received her License de Lettres at the Université Paris 4 (Sorbonne), her Maitrise and her D.E.A at the Université Paris 7 (Diderot), and a PhD at New York University. The author of six novels, Garréta was coopted to the Oulipo in 2000. Her first novel, Sphinx (1986), which caused a sensation when Deep Vellum published its first English translation in 2015, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or their lover. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 and the Albertine Prize in 2018 for her book, Not One Day, which was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Garréta teaches regularly in France at the Université Rennes 2, and more recently at Paris 7 (Diderot), and is a professor at Duke University.

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

www.timehasfallenasleepintheafternoonsunshine.be

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

the netherlands has been the home of irishman charlie jermyn for the last 5 years; it’s a nation that has been dredged up from the water and which attempts, to this day, to hold back the persistent tide. in this brilliant and very-hard-to-describe debut novel, jermyn brings the common and absurd to crisp, shimmering life through his essays and short non-fiction pieces, reminding us to take note of the mad and brilliant world around us before the tide comes in again.

illustrated by samuel van heijningen