Books

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

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

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings delves into the imaginative realm of books and libraries and the interpretive structures of subject bibliographies.

It is the first monograph of its kind to historicize, theorize, and survey two decades of what the author refers to as contemporary visual bibliography or experimental subject bibliography—artistic and poetic projects that explore artifactual, intellectual, spatial, and design possibilities.

Ranging from artists’ books and web data-bases to stack interventions and reading room installations, Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings reviews over fifty compelling visio-bibliographic examples created by diverse, international cultural workers.

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

Do you remember the last time you were looking forward to the future? We're not talking about flying cars or floating screens. We're talking about a credible vision of a better time to come. So when was the last time? How did it look? How did it feel?

Have a glance at page 223, about two-thirds in. This is a portrait of Frantz Fanon by Milton Glaser. One of the biggest names in commercial graphic design of the 20th century, painting the likeness of the giant of anti-colonial thought. Let’s leave aside the question of "who's the Milton Glaser of today?" for now, but if there was one, whose portrait would they be painting?

What we’re attempting, in these few hundred pages, is to track our favorite examples of the visual language of revolt and solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s, put them in dialogue with our most beloved works of graphic design of those decades, and celebrate the heroes who made them. 
Creative currents flowing from Paris to Tokyo, Cuba to Milano, Beirut to New York, Berkeley to London, with innovations and revolutions (both political and artistic) happening every year. Causes supported by incredible talent and inspiring design that activated people, uplifted liberation movements, advanced the struggles for social justice, and created bonds of global solidarity.

Sadly this cross-pollination between commercial art and the political ended around the late 1980s and those two worlds are now completely isolated from one another.
Why do movements not produce beautiful and memorable visuals anymore? Why do the biggest image makers of today not lend their talents to the good fights that need their help? We hope that these will intersect again, and the first step is to study their history.Friends, we are here to tell you that fighting for a better world is, in fact, not only extremely cool, but the coolest thing you can do — and we have the images to prove it!

Ramdane Touhami and Émile Shahidi have spent years researching and traveling to assemble a huge collection of books, rare periodicals and radical art that will soon be available for consultation in person and online, and of which this little book is just a taste.

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism.  

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.  

Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis. 

Translated by Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck

Afterword by Edwy Plenel

Featuring poems and short stories by Coco Gordon Moore, Nate Lippens, Jimmy Cooper, Danielle Chelosky, Matthew Kinlin, and Thomas Moore, as well as an interview of Jack Skelley by Lydia Sviatoslavsky and photographs by David Catalano. Edited

Goswell Road publishes ‘Numbered Map’ by Archie Chekatouski, to accompany his exhibition 'You can do so much more with a chair than you can with a painting?'. The publication is edited in 30 copies and focuses on Chekatouski’s Paint-by-numbers Series.

Bio: Archie Chekatouski (born 1996 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Paris. His works are touchingly silly and beautifully simple.
 

The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman's flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman's photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member.

Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience's consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago's South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts.

With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.

Juice is Renee Gladman's first full-length book. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that draw praise and attention from her contemporaries. Juice describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."

Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Dana Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Bear,” in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: “Arthur’s Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be.” It is “a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.”

“This short novel, offered here along with an essay by Guibert, reads like a madcap picaresque—one in which bodies can transform, the pace is constantly accelerating, and geography proves to be malleable. A gloriously surreal account of an unexpected voyage.” — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

Hervé Guibert was a French photographer, critic, and author. Born in 1955, he published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography. His writing was often deeply personal, ironic, and centered on illness and the body. Guibert died from complications of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six.

Dana Lupo is a writer and translator based in New York. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Bone & Ink Press, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Apricity Press, and elsewhere. Arthur’s Whims is their first published translation.

Recognized as a poet, less so as a visual artist […] Mina Loy also wrote in the style of Crystal Pantomime, a text from one hundred years ago [c. 1915] describing a ballet in prose. The writing evokes images with which actual theater effects can only interfere. It projects in the mind as onto a screen. But this restless writing does more than that, shifting registers and unfolded in equal parts fairy tale description, precise impossible stage directions, notes for impossible costumes and sets, guidelines for impossible choreography, and a glancing archeology of personal association, opinion, art historical commentary, and psychoanalysis, all floating in suspension, all shading into poetry, and with this manner of overflowing every frame defining its poetics. — Matthew Goulish

This first standalone edition of Crystal Pantomime opens with a biographical introduction by Mina Loy’s literary executor—poet Roger Conover—originally published in Eliot Weinberger’s journal Montemora in 1981, as well as a dramaturgical introduction by Matthew Goulish of Chicago performance group Every house has a door, originally prepared as opening remarks to Every house’s reading of Loy’s Pantomime at the Arts Club of Chicago in spring of 2024. In tandem these supplementary texts begin to frame what is a rather strange and singular sketch for a work never realized.

Pati Hill's cult novel, available for the first time since 1976.

Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill's last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title "An Angry French Housewife." Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbor, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine's daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which "the two elements fuse to become something other than either."

This novel is also one of the most incisive examples of Hill's writing—dry and impartial, yet managing to capture the contradictory feelings of her characters. In a letter addressed to the photographer Eva Rubinstein asking for reproduction rights, she writes: "My book is about a woman with a little girl and a husband who falls in love with a woman and a little girl and a husband and loses them all, just like in your mirror. It doesn't sound very cheerful but it is mainly funny."

Daisy, an independent publishing house, releases a facsimile of the out-of-print work that, after almost 50 years since its initial publication, has become a coveted collector's item.

"Impossible Dreams charmed me with its droll and irreverent tone when it was first published. Hill's use of embedded photographs was unexpected and transgressive for its me. Brilliant!"
Anne Turyn, photographer, educator and founding editor, Top Stories

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind a litterary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years . After a short but dazzling career as a model, between 1951 and 1962 she wrote a dozen short stories—several of which were published in George Plimpton's prestigious literary journal, The Paris Review—and five books which earned her real critical recognition. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 after giving birth to her first and only daughter. She was then forty-one years old, and would later claim to have decided at that time to "stop writing in favour of housekeeping.''

Edited by Ana Baliza and Baptiste Pinteaux.

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson.

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness."

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

A collection of twenty-six abécédaire missives by Sharon Kivland, written and sent daily to the editors (MS & AWL) between Friday 7 February and Tuesday 4 March 2025. Interjected with melancholic ‘Mes horizons’ postcard erasures and an insert of abcedminded replies by Matthew Stuart titled ‘A Letter Always Suggests a Word’, this publication is both a standalone edition and precursor to BFTK#8, which focuses on letters (alphabets) and letters (correspondence). 

‘These are Addressed to You’ addresses what it means to be addressed and to address, to write with love and scorn, to seal with a kiss and conceal impressions and hair within a letter’s folds, to inscribe with ink and thread, to speak with and to those we admire. Drawing on / from Freud and Lacan, Joyce and Carringdon, Camille Corot and many more, these letters are about writing and reading, about language falling and bumping you on the head.

Imagine words approaching a dance eyes closed or sleepwalking, words adrift beyond what can be envisioned beforehand, prompting writer and reader alike into a zone where time multiplies, where bodies grow footnotes and paper skin, savour the taste of language, attune their ears to the wavelength of blue. In a string of brief essays on her practice of writing choreographic poetry and scores, Janne-Camilla Lyster offers reflections on time, memory and the senses, on translation, punctuation and rhythm, on mistakes and crevasses, on the impossible and yet other things. What does it take to enter another form of existence, say, a chair?

Janne-Camilla Lyster is a writer, dancer and choreographer. She has published poetry, novels, essays and plays.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Natasha Stagg is the author of Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 and Surveys: A Novel, both published by Semiotext(e). Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Texte Zur Kunst, n+1, Spike Art, Flash Art, Dazed, V, Vice, 032c, and other publications.

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance. 

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

Published by Xing & Varamo Press
XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)
First edition, September 2023
Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen
Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve
Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists

The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution. There is a protesting group of commuters with a missing leader. There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the midst of all this, the language of news reporters mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exist, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently. — Juliana Spahr

"Whether this is a dream in which I'm captured or I've been captured and made to think I'm in a dream, I can't figure." Apropos to the rapturous tension The Activist evokes. A covert narrative operating as an event disguised as a repot. A grass trap glimpsed through the lashes of a sleepwalker. Topography of disrupted positionality, reflection girders flaccid memory against the romantic high up. Flea-bitten news and neuralgic placards. You are here**. Is dreaming the medium for crossing the ambiguous borders of talk, responsibility, collectivity, solitude? Or does reading anatomize a phantom bridge that carries you over to an unmappable reality and calls you by your secret name? Root, plan and faction, armed with tongue-tied intensity. You may ask how Renee Gladman knows that this city of slippage is your city, how she holds you within it, riveted. And therein lies the magic of this book. — Tisa Bryant

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.