I wasn’t questioning what I thought was happening though. I also thought I knew the extent of it: the voice. Thought that the ghost might on some days be something that attached itself physically like a node on my vocal chords, or was vocal chords, the extra thick ones I’d need to produce that sound, like in films about puberty you get shown in science classes in school.Roy Orbison in Ruins stages an imagined correspondence between a young hospitality worker on a road trip, and the musician David Berman. Unfolding over a series of four unanswered letters and karaoke interludes, we learn that our narrator has been possessed by the voice of Roy Orbison. Accompanied by her chorus of Roys, she slowly transforms into his image as she writes about dreaming, leisure time, haunting and ventriloquism from the rest stops, bars and motels of Florida.

A 24-page A4 2 colour riso zine inspired by the words and music of Arthur Russell.

One night a satellite falls out of the sky and splits a girl in half. Disquiet Drive is a book scraped together from the shorn parts of a person who may no longer exist. Beginning with an admission that language and embodiment seem indistinguishable, yet refusing to claim a singular voice, the texts in this collection lurch between the fiery crucible of a transition and the weird jaggedness of our own continuity; between inverted memoir and prose-poetry; the raw, irrepressible lyric and the essay as an exercise in the art of digging-one’s-heels-in. Disquiet Drive is about undoing the words we’re handed so that language can survive, and undoing the body so that it can find a way to live.  

This publication is a compilation of all three issues of the journal Black Phoenix published as a single volume. Edited and published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal between 1978 and 1979 in the United Kingdom, Black Phoenix remains a key and radical document of transnational solidarity and cultural production in the visual arts, literature, activism, and beyond. More than a decade after the liberation movements of the 1960s and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences, which called for social and political alignment and solidarity among the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in order to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, Black Phoenix issued a rallying cry for the formation of a liberatory arts and culture movement throughout the Third World. International in scope, Black Phoenix positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain and beyond—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses of race, class, and postcolonial theory in the decade that followed. Black Phoenix proposed a horizon for Blackness that transcended racial binaries, across the Third World and the West. Contributors include art critics, scholars, artists, poets, and writers, including Rasheed Araeen (Pakistan) and Mahmood Jamal (Pakistan), Guy Brett (United Kingdom), Kenneth Coutts-Smith (United Kingdom), Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), N. Kilele (Tanzania), Babatunde Lawal (Nigeria), David Medalla (Philippines), Ayyub Malik (Pakistan), Susil Siriwardena (Sri Lanka), and Chris Wanjala (Kenya). Rasheed Araeen is a Karachi-born, London-based artist, activist, writer, editor, and curator. Aareen founded the critical journals Black Phoenix, Third Text, and Third Text Asia, and took on activist roles with the Black Panthers and Artists for Democracy. His work has been exhibited widely, including, most recently, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Chicago; BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art, Gateshead; MAMCO, Geneva; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Tate Britain, London; the 2017 Venice Biennale; and Documenta 14, Athens/Kassel, among others. Mahmood Jamal was born in Lucknow, India, and moved to Britain from Pakistan in 1967. He published several books of poetry, including Sugar Coated Pill (2007), and translated the Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi (2009) and Faiz: Fifty Poems (2013), among other titles. In 1983, he co-formed the all-Asian Retake Film and Video Collective production company, and initiated Epicflow Films in 1989. Jamal worked as an independent producer and writer; produced several documentary series, including Islamic Conversations; was a lead writer on Britain’s first Asian soap, Family Pride (1991–92), and wrote and produced Turning World (1996) for Channel4 television. He died in London in December 2020.

An archive of Noise vinyl and cassette covers by Masala Noir.

The Matrix by Norman H. Pritchard (1939–1996) gathers a selection of the Concrete and Black Arts poet’s work from 1960 to 1970. The seventy-one poems collected here might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems, being tethered not only to the literature of the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York. Drawing as much from the visual arts and concrete poetry as from sound-based experimentation and music, Pritchard utilized the simple tools of spacing and typography to create syncopations, vibrations, and musical rhythms. What emerges is nothing less than a self-contained system of mimetic codes that challenge modernist modes of perception and representation. Formally innovative and anticipating what Michael Riffaterre would come to call the semiotics of “ungrammaticalities,” the book is a syntactical and visual experience in repetition, stutters, and structure.  Born and based in New York City, Pritchard was trained in visual arts and art history at New York University and Columbia University. As a member of the Umbra group (1962–65)—a collective of young Black writers that included Steve Cannon, Thomas C. Dent, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, and Lorenzo Thomas—he met with fellow members in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to read and discuss writing and politics. They channeled their sense of urgency in developing and promoting Black culture into the literary magazine Umbra. Following the group’s dissolution, Pritchard continued to be involved in New York’s art, music, and film worlds in the late 1960s. The Matrix was published by Doubleday in 1970, marking one of only a handful of books on concrete poetry to be published by a major American publishing house. His second and final book Eecchhooeess was released by New York University Press in 1971.   If Pritchard’s work testifies to the Black poetics of “broken witnessing,” it is also deeply philosophical and spiritual. “I feel that there’s only one reality, and that reality is God,” says Pritchard in an unpublished video from 1981. “Everything else is actual—or what I call ‘transreal.’ In other words, everything is transreal except God. Trans meaning through, across, within, into within.” In a 1969 letter to fellow Umbra member Ishmael Reed, Pritchard writes: “Transreal is a word which visited me in the fall of 1967 while making initial probes into a book which I call Origins: A Contribution to the Monophysiticy of Form. My ‘definition’ is: Transrealism = O.”  While leaving it open to interpretation, “transrealism” was a vector through which Pritchard organized a host of collaborations—in March 1972, for instance, the poet hosted an event in New York called “The End of Intelligent Writing: A Transreal Awakening,” which featured artists such as Vito Acconci, W. Bliem Kern, and Richard Kostelanetz. Describing Pritchard’s work in terms of “ironic materiality,” Reed has remarked: “At the limit, Pritchard’s self-undermining poems ask us whether poetry needs words at all.” Indeed, his is a poetics of both anti-transcendence and revelation. Norman Henry Pritchard was born in New York City in 1939 and studied at New York University and Columbia University. His work has been published in two collections: The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970 (1970) and Eecchhooeess (1971). His poetry was featured in the journals Umbra and The East Village Other, performed on the jazz poetry compilation New Jazz Poets (1967), and anthologized in The New Black Poetry (1969) and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969). Pritchard taught poetry at the New School for Social Research and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary. He died in eastern Pennsylvania on February 8, 1996.

'In this book Tim Stüttgen considers the paradigm of (post-)slavery as an important epistemological break within predominantely white Gender and Queer Studies, as well as within critical Film and Cultural Studies. Departing from what E. Patrick Johnson has proposed as a specifically intersectional »quAre«, instead of an »unmarked white queer perspective«, this book contrasts Deleuze’s cinema theory with Frantz Fanon, queer theories of color, the history of the African diaspora and utopian quAre futurisms to establish notions of a black locality, mobility and temporality in what Stüttgen calls the first emancipatory black cinema: Blaxploitation. Digging deeper in the imagery and temporalities of Blaxploitation film, his analysis deals with the sexualization of racism and mass media imagery of armed black liberation struggles, and shows the development of more and more complex spaces, main characters and representational constellations, including black revolutionary women (with guns) and also queer subtexts.

To mark the 30th anniversary of his death, Polari Press are publishing a finger in derek jarman’s mouth. Accompanied by cyanotype impressions, a finger in derek jarman’s mouth is a poetic tribute to Jarman’s inspiring legacy spun from the multi-coloured threads of his extraordinary life – writer, artist, queer and AIDS activist, designer, filmmaker, and gardener. After his diagnosis Jarman bought Prospect Cottage, facing Dungeness nuclear power station, where he created a beautiful garden in the harshest of environments. Unashamed of his HIV status, Jarman died of AIDS-related illness on the 19 February 1994, aged 52. Simon Maddrell is a queer Manx poet thriving with HIV in Brighton & Hove. They are published in twenty anthologies and over eighty publications including Acumen, AMBIT, Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar. In 2020, Simon’s second pamphlet, Queerfella, jointly-won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition. In 2023, Isle of Sin (Polari Press) and The Whole Island (Valley Press) were Poetry Book Society Selections.

Moving through time and across oceans, writer Sam Moore takes us on a poetic journey of self-discovery through queer history, pop culture and (auto)biography in this deeply personal encounter with queer identity a generation after the AIDS crisis.    Examining the violent political legacy of right-wing governments, the search for liberation through art and the endless quest for self-discovery, All My Teachers Died of AIDS serves as both eulogy and rallying cry, asking us to mourn the dead while lighting a torch to help guide us through grief towards a brighter queer future. 

Increase quantity for Verity Spott, The North Road Songbook   Add to cart   The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs. Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek.

My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.

Responses to Love's Work by Gillian Rose is the fourth publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.In this fourth iteration, responses were sought to the 1995 philosophical memoir Love's Work by Gillian Rose.Contributors:Cookie MuellerIan PattersonDodie BellamyKatherine FrancoJames McDermottLotte CrawfordMoss PepeJames MainNick BlackburnThea PetrouJosiah MoktarRoelof BakkerChristopher MaddenKashif Sharma-PatelMadeleine Pulman-JonesLucy SwanLou CollinsTed SimondsMolly GoughEdward ThomassonRichard PorterAlexandra Symons SutcliffeCecilia PavónKate MorganOlivia LaingAshleigh A. AllenReverend Joyce McDonald

This collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost; and when they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.  

"Substantially the book that devotees of the director have been waiting for: a full-length critical work about Ozu's life, career and working methods, buttressed with reproductions of pages from his notebooks and shooting scripts, numerous quotes from co-workers and Japanese critics, a great many stills and an unusually detailed filmography."—Sight and SoundYasujiro Ozu, the man whom his kinsmen consider the most Japanese for all film directors, had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution. The Japanese family in dissolution figures in every one of his fifty-three films. In his later pictures, the whole world exists in one family, the characters are family members rather than members of a society, and the ends of the earth seem no more distant than the outside of the house.

This book is dedicated to the history of the music label Free Music Production (FMP), which from 1968 to 2010 achieved incomparable things as a Berlin platform for the production, presentation and documentation of music and decisively shaped the musical development of the '70s and beyond. Based on many conversations from over thirty years with key protagonists such as Peter Brötzmann or Jost Gebers, Markus Müller tells the success story of a musicians' initiative that emerged in the context of the 1968 ideas of self-organization and self-determination and worked successfully in an international network for over 40 years. Thematic focal points include the Total Music Meeting and the Workshop Freie Musik, the production of recordings, relations with GDR musicians, FMP and women, the internationally groundbreaking collaboration with Cecil Taylor. The book builds on the major FMP exhibitions in Munich and Berlin, but in many aspects goes far beyond them. Thanks to unrestricted access to the FMP-Publishing Archive in Borken, many first-published documents and photographs from the history of FMP can be found.

Sometimes I pretended not to notice it (the black hole), but I knew it was always there. To tell the truth, I started to like having it around. I stuck quite close to it. Not too close, mind you. But it was useful, above all, to have somewhere to put things. Unwanted things. I am attracted to your attraction, he said. (I put it in the hole.) Night by night it got a little bigger.Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative.

‘Iris Colomb’s Where do you begin in this takes Joyce’s enthusiasm for linguistic interplay and reorientation and applies it to the fabric of the book. This book records the physical and psychical encounter of Joyce’s words with Colomb’s body. Ulysses has been chopped, cut, repeated, re-ordered, crumpled, and rolled into a whole new book. Colomb offers us a material re-organisation of Joyce’s epic in her own linguistically-dispersed, spatio-temporally-specific image. This is Joyce upgraded, a century on.’

Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.  Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There’s levitation.