Poetry

De eerste tekstuitgave van theater- en filmmaker, schrijver, wildplukker en ecoseksueel/klimaatactivist Nora Ramakers, die in haar werk de erotische essentie van de natuur poogt bloot te leggen.

The translated transcripts of two radio broadcasts by Artaud: To have done with the judgement of god (1947-48) and Madness and Black Magic (1946). Correspondences from that period are also included.

In the last two years of his life, following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project, To have done with the judgement of god, 1947-48, in which he attempted to create a new language of texts, screams, and cacophonies: a language designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for “road-menders”. In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the “body without organs”, crucial to the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned transmission, to Artaud's fury.

This volume collects all of the texts for To have done with the judgement of god, together with several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work's censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic, written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton Eshleman's extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme provocation.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theater director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theater and the European literary avant-garde.

This book follows the first exhibition of Robilliard’s notebooks, ‘Disorganised Writings and Sketches’ with Rob Tufnell in Cologne in April 2019. It was made with support from the Elephant Trust and the book’s designers, A Practice for Everyday Life and with assistance from James Birch, one of David’s gallerists, and Chris Hall, custodian of the estate of Andrew Heard. The book is dedicated to Andrew Heard.

Rob Tufnell presents a new publication of extracts from the notebooks of the poet and artist David Robilliard (b.1952 – d.1988). After his premature death from an AIDS-related illness in 1988, Robilliard left a large number of notebooks in the care of his close friend and fellow artist Andrew Heard. These were obsessively filled with drafts of poems, diary entries, addresses and telephone numbers, blunt observations, quiet reflections, short stories, ideas for paintings, portraits and crude drawings. Robilliard’s superficially simple, pithy prose and verse is riddled with the dichotomies of an era that was both exuberant and miserable. His notebooks reveal his creative process, his interests, ideas, ambitions and then his illness but always embody his often repeated belief that ‘Life’s not good it’s excellent.’ 

Many of the books contain the inscription: ‘If found please return to 12 Fournier Street, London E1. Thank you’ – the home and studio of his patrons, Gilbert & George. In their lament ‘Our David’ (1990) they describe their protégé as: 

“...the sweetest, kindest, most infuriating, artistic, foul-mouthed, witty, sexy, charming, handsome, thoughtful, unhappy, loving and friendly person we ever met... Starting with pockets filled with disorganised writings and sketches, he went on to produce highly original poetry, drawings and paintings.”

The publication exists in two editions: yellow and pink.

Diane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago.

During the last years of her life, di Prima worked on the final iteration of her enduring project. This volume brings together fifteen new poems with all the previously published Letters in an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition.

With a Foreword by Francesca Wade and an Introduction by Sophie Lewis

Publication: 20 October 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9957162-6-1
Extent: 232 pages

'Di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation.' - Chris Kraus

Yesterday as they smoked, a cigarette butt leaked and burned
their delicately stitched summertime pyjamas. A round hole
on their torso reminded the holes drilled in the wall the day
before to ventilate their room.

Trompette gathers three short texts by Soto Labor, along with their beautiful drawings, that tell about magnificient animals who observe and eat the world. 
Bilingual, French & English.

Trois courts textes de Soto Labor, accompagnés de ses dessins, où des animaux magnifiques observent et mangent le monde. 
Bilingue français/anglais.

The Presage Pamphlet Series welcomes new, shorter and more portable text formats, printed in-house (it’s cheap & chic!).

The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson's research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust's Á la recherche du temps perdu.

"In Eileen Myles's newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles's new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet's previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles's work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom." — Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

This book, from inter-genre, bilingual writer Nathanaël, investigates the relationship between image and language through a philosophical and poetic meditation on a self-portrait by Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun.

"In Absence Where As, Nathanael reads the unread book, ‘the book that comes’ to us nevertheless, that haunts and hovers unopened and dreamt, proceeding from the Ecrits of the visionary and revolutionary artist-activist Claude Cahun, to life’s library. Through this constellatory essay in the faults of thought, in reading’s flaw, Nathanael comes to know and know how, creating new epistemological and aesthetic territory in the radiant continuum between lyric and narrative, the text and the dream of text, which is literature itself." - John Keene

This third issue reviews the many ways in which medicine has pathologized non-procreative sexual desire— those bodies that challenge gender binaries or expose different abilities—while imagining other ways of collectively well-being.

"The issue opens with a commissioned work by visual artists CANDICE LIN and P. STAFF that evokes the central concerns of the journal in subtle and unexpected ways. Lambda Literary Award–winner INDRAPRAMIT DAS speculates on other forms of kinship in a new science-fiction story, while a transnational questionnaire offers insights into the continuous fight for reproductive justice.

We republish a chapter from the autobiography of the late South African, trans, traditional healer NKUNZI ZANDILE NKABINDE, which is introduced by RUTH MORGAN.

We continue to honor the power of poetry with works by ROSA CHÁVEZ and STELLA NYANZI, while celebrating the energy of collective action with a piece by WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? In anticipation to his new book on queer desire in the Caribbean, scholar ANDIL GOSINE shares a previous article addressing the notion of “against nature,” while our Columns section brings news from Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and the UK during a season of pandemic fatigue, but also care work, organization, and hope." — the editors

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

The notebook of American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti, in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world… The publication includes an interview with Forti by Annie Suquet, and an afterword by poet and Fluxus artist Jakson Mac Low.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance.

Adopting the role of a death doula or New Age religious leader, and drawing inspiration from the Theater of the Absurd, author Yearous-Algozin prompts readers to accept the already occurring end time. A Feeling Called Heaven oscillates between grief and humor as it imagines the nonhuman world that will grow from the ruins of this one, cultivating a sense of presence and intimacy with the inevitable destruction of our global environment.

Yearous-Algozin is the author of over 20 texts/files including Utopia (2016); Caller Removed (2016); Air the Trees (2012); and the multi-volume work, The Lazarus Project (2010-2013). With Holly Melgard he has co-authored a trilogy of texts: Liqudation (2017), White Trash (2014) and Holly Melgard's Friends and Family (2014). His poetry, poetics, and criticism have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Convolutions, Dreamboat, A Perfect Vacuum, and Social Text, among others. His work has been performed and/or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich. Yearous-Algozin is a founding member of the Troll Thread publishing collective and a former co-editor of P-QUEUE (2010-2013). He earned a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and now teaches at Baruch College.

In A Talk on Rhyme, a text distilled from a lecture given in 2014, poet David Brazil reflects on rhyme’s “emergence, progress, inoperativity, and prospect.” The Talk is supplemented by an essayistic bibliography on subjects ranging from classical prosody to American folk music, via writings on and by poets long dead whose names are obvious: Saint Paul, Dickinson, Herbert, Spicer, Hölderlin, Dante, O’Hara.

The poet and writer Cristina Campo (Vittoria Guerrini, 1923-1977) is primarily known in Italy as a translator, especially of modernist poetic works and the writings of Simone Weil. Translation was for her an essential task and experience. As Margherita Pieracci Harwell recalls, “the hospitality offered to the poet to be translated, this self-emptying of the interpreter (a participatory offering, in which all the powers of her genius are stretched to the extreme because the other’s voice lives without distortions)—Cristina more than anyone proposed this as a goal.” 

This bilingual volume proposes to reflect on this interface of reading and writing by focusing on the commentarial potential of Campo’s work, whose penetrating quality of attention flashes like a spark across the margin between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission. In a contemporary context in which the disconnection between the old and the new makes both strictly inaccessible, Cristina Campo’s work stands like a diamond point through which one may reflect on the multitemporal (and eternal) dimension of writing.

With translations and contributions by Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Visnja Bandalo, Laura Boella, Daniela Cascella, Monica Farnetti, Cristina Mazzoni, Nicola Masciandaro, Snejanka Mihaylova, Nicola di Nino, Adrian Nathan West, Chiara Zamboni.

Edited by Nicola Masciandaro & Andrea di Serego Alighieri.

published 2021

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.

Andrea Abi-Karam answers the call to action for poetry itself to become the radical accomplice it was destined to be in their second book, Villainy. In order to live through the grief of the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive. 

Published September 2021

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma and delayed healing. Selected by Bhanu Khapil, Andrea's debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in Fall 2021 at Nightboat Books. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics released by Nightboat Books in November 2020. They are a Leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles—an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

Originally published by Doubleday and Company in 1970, N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix was one of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page.

Praised as a "FREE souled" work by Allen Ginsberg, The Matrix feels as fresh and necessary today as when it was first published. This new facsimile edition, copublished by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, makes the book available to a new generation of readers.

Originally published in English in 2003, Nicole Brossard's Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body, our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire — that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each "crazy" silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.

Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard, recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of "pure seeing" and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.

Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.

"[Love and I] hurries to join a long and illustrious career, which, besides poetry, includes novels, stories, memoir, and short films. . . . Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her poems await illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life." — The New Yorker 

A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy.

The Trojan Women, follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).

Dionne Brand's hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world.

A work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.