Books and Magazines


Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss. Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.   •     ‘The remarkable poems that make up Tremble record a body’s descent into vertiginous, all-encompassing desire. Abdoolcarim is fearless in her determination not to look away from what is monstrous in our world, yet her writing also reflects what it is to be fully human. The clarity of her image-making eye, her wit, her compassion, and her rage carry us and challenge us to stay with the trouble, to set our ears to the darkness and listen for the beauty in its hollow ring, to allow it to speak to the very limits of our longing. Her words shimmer like a pool of jade at the centre of a black ceramic bowl, a sensual riposte to Hélène Cixous’ imperative: Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’ – Rebecca Hurst   ‘Fatema Abdoolcarim is the rare artist I would follow anywhere, whose work astounds and moves me across every genre. Tremble is a gift of profound proportions, conveying with her signature brilliant and caring gaze the variable inner and outer textures of life. I hold this remarkable text—its vast and intimate reach—to my chest in gratitude.’ – Gabrielle BatesStaplebound, 44pp Monitor Books, London, Oct 2025

Fatema Abdoolcarim – Tremble

Kwame Dawes speaks for all those for whom reggae is a major part of life. He describes how reggae has been central to his sense of selfhood, his consciousness of place and society in Jamaica, his development as a writer - and why the singer Ken Boothe should be inseparably connected to his discovery of the erotic.Natural Mysticism is also a work of acute cultural analysis. Dawes argues that in the rise of roots reggae in the 1970s, Jamaica produced a form which was both wholly of the region and universal in its concerns. He contrasts this with the mainstream of Caribbean literature which, whilst anticolonial in sentiment was frequently conservative and colonial in form. Dawes finds in reggae's international appeal more than just an encouraging example. In the work of artists such as Don Drummond, Bob Marley, Winston Rodney and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, he finds a complex aesthetic whose inner structure points in a genuinely contemporary and postcolonial direction.He identifies this aesthetic as being both original and eclectic, as feeling free to borrow, but transforming what it takes in a subversive way. He sees it as embracing both the traditional and the postmodern, the former in the complex subordination of the lyric, melodic and rhythmic elements to the collective whole, and the latter in the dubmaster's deconstructive play with presences and absences. Above all, he shows that it is an aesthetic which unites body, emotions and intellect and brings into a single focus the political, the spiritual and the erotic.In constructing this reggae aesthetic, Kwame Dawes both creates a rationale for the development of his own writing and brings a new and original critical method to the discussion of the work of other contemporary Caribbean authors.Natural Mysticism has the rare merit of combining rigorous theoretical argument with a personal narrative which is often wickedly funny. Here is a paradigm shifting work of Caribbean cultural and literary criticism with the added bonus of conveying an infectious enthusiasm for reggae which will drive readers back to their own collections or even to go out and extend them!Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. Softcover, 290pp Peepal Tree Press, 2008

kwame dawes – natural mysticism - towards a new reggae aesthetic

n this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.   --- AHMED ABDULLAH joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn. LOUIS REYES RIVERA (1945–2012) was a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn. Known as the “Dean of Nuyorican Poetics,” he led creative writing workshops in community centers and prisons across New York, lectured on Latin and Black diasporic history and literature at New York colleges including Hunter, Boricua, Pratt, and Stony Brook; and was a leader in the 1969 student movement at CUNY, leading to the founding of its department of ethnic studies. Rivera was also a prolific editor, working on books such as John Oliver Killens’s Great Black Russian: The Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, and a translator of works by Puerto Rican poets Clemente Soto Velez and Otto Rene Castillo. His own poetry collections include Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), which received an award from the Latin American Writers Institute. SALIM WASHINGTON is a saxophonist, composer, and scholar based in Durban, South Africa, where he is a professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a co-author, with Farah Jasmine Griffin, of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis,  John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (2009) and a contributor to Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho  (2013).

AHMED ABDULLAH – A STRANGE CELESTIAL ROAD

I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectations, their sense of the world, their predispositions toward the way they think or use their language, and then to use these things perversely, politically, colorfully, “expressively.” —Tony Conrad, “Dolomite: Having No Trust in Readers”Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961 – 2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, Loose Connection, Four Violins, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, Early Minimalism, Yellow Movies, Slapping Pythagoras, and Music and the Mind of the World, as well as that of his peers: Tony Oursler, Jack Smith, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt, among others. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. He also writes on media activism, network communications, censorship, and the political and cultural implications of corporate and global media. No matter the topic or theme, Conrad always approaches his subjects with erudition, precision, and a healthy twist of humor. Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was a multidisciplinary artist known for his groundbreaking art, music, films, and videos, although his work doesn’t fit comfortably within any of these disciplines. He eschewed categorization and actively sought to challenge the constraints of media forms, their modes of production, and the relationships of power embedded within them. --- 576 pages5 x 7.4 inchesPaperbackEdition of 2000

Tony Conrad – Writings

The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” — Cornelius CardewOriginally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist critique of two of the more revered avant-garde composers of the post-war era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. A former assistant to Stockhausen and a champion of Cage in England, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers’ works and ideological positions, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting and serving the struggles of the working class. The author also provides constructive criticism of his contemporaries Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski for utilizing politically progressive content, yet failing to work in a musical form that would appeal to the proletariat. Cardew’s music does not escape his own scrutiny: the book contains critiques and repudiations of his canonical compositions from the 1960s and early 1970s, Treatise and The Great Learning. Complimenting Cardew’s essays are writings by Rod Eley, who contributes “A History of the Scratch Orchestra,” and John Tilbury, who contributes an “Introduction to Cage’s Music of Changes.” Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was initially published in a single edition by Latimer New Dimensions in 1974 and this edition is the first time the book has been published in its original form since. Cornelius Cardew was an English composer and musician. He became well known in the 1960s for his experimental music and as a proponent in the United Kingdom of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and La Monte Young. He was one of the founders of the Scratch Orchestra and an early member of the free improvisational group AMM. Several of his works from this period are considered hallmarks of post-war experimental music. In the early 1970s, Cardew abandoned avant-garde music and devoted his work to the people’s struggle, becoming more directly involved in left-wing activism. His music from this period took the form of class-conscious folksongs that prioritized drawing attention to social issues over formal innovation. Cardew maintained a critical cultural stance throughout his life, later going on to denounce David Bowie and punk rock as fascist. He took an active role in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Part of Britain. He was killed in a hit-and-run accident in 1981 under circumstances that many consider mysterious. 126 pgs, 22 × 14 cm, Softcover, 2020.

CORNELIUS CARDEW – Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

Available for pre-order Softcover, 407pp Blank Forms Editions, June 2025 The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and composition on tape has long evaded historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the composer’s idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening. Among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue’s, examining the composer’s earliest experiments with feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic configurations of time and presence. A number of detailed conversations between the composer and researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard provide crucial insights into her working methods at different points throughout her career. Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects upon Radigue’s profound synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) in the context of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its history, while texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone examine, in notably different ways, the technical characteristics of Radigue’s sound practice. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera mapping the performance history of Radigue’s early work are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone, and Anthony Vine, untangling the knot of paradoxes at the center of Radigue’s artistic practice to trace the thread of her continued “ethos of resistance.”

Blank Forms – Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue