Remi’s collection of poems looks at race, gender, childhood and relationships. There’s poems about bodies, sex, injustice and love. We can’t wait for you to fall in love with them.   A former Barbican Young Poet, Remi’s work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, at St Paul’s Cathedral and elsewhere. Recent commissions include ‘don’t text me, i’m dreaming’ for Apples and Snakes and ‘On Breathing’ for Barbican Centre. Remi has taught courses at The Poetry School and delivers workshops in schools and libraries across London and UK. Remi was a 2017 National Poetry Day Ambassador and has performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Tate Modern and more.

First published in 2018, Prayers Manifestos Bravery is a collection of Verity Spott’s “Trans* Manifestos”. Written from 2011 and originally published on her blog, the book’s content ranges from concrete poetry to long-form dispatches, confessions and manifestos touching on questions of identity, gender, justice and society.

The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life. Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host. Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa via the Carolinas to his childhood in the South Bronx, and illustrates his rise from the 1970s jazz lofts and extended work with pianist Cecil Taylor to the present day. He outlines how Parker’s early influences—Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and writers of the Black Arts Movement—grounded Parker’s aesthetic and musical practice in a commitment to community and the struggle for justice and freedom. Throughout, Bradley foregrounds Parker’s understanding of music, the role of the artist, and the relationship between art, politics, and social transformation. Intimate and capacious, Universal Tonality is the definitive work on Parker’s life and music.

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate was one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America. 

An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

Rimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, ‘a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,’ a brutally disruptive ‘xenogenerosity’ (Harney & Moten). This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon’s tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain. Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also ‘out of control,’ Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out.. Published by  The 87 Press

The Hyena! poems are concerned with therianthropy – the magical transformation of people into animals – as a metaphor for the embodied effects of sudden and traumatic loss. Through the figure of Hyena! Fran negotiates the multiple fraught intersections of dirty animality, femininity, grief, class and culture to produce a work of queer mourning, a furious feral lament. Hyenas in legend and lore are shape-shifters, and Fran's work has been said to shape-shift between lyric and innovative modes, fiercely concerned with the expansion of "innovative" to include the kinds of poetry and performance strategy typically accessible to and practiced by working-class and marginalised people.   Inspired by the rich web of folklore surrounding the hyena, an animal whose reputation spans from loathsome savage to magical sex-shifter, Lock finds in this creature a figure of kinship, relating its fabled shape-changing properties to the emotional and bodily fluctuations of grief— the grief of and for those rejected or refused by neoliberal society. Emerging from the polarizing isolation of our pandemic times, Lock's work of "queer mourning" cuts through the grimey sheen of performative Instagram politics and all its unbothered authenticators.

If Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (2021) tendered a feral poetics through the lens of therianthropy, then ‘a disgusting lie’ is concerned with animality in its most abject and excessive forms. Hyena! returns, but changed, not merely beastly, but monstrous: physically, psychically, morally, and politically. This Hyena!, like all monstrous bodies, knocks aside her receiving subjects, gestures to a terrifying excess of meaning beyond all of those tired canons of the “natural”.   With her habitual disregard for the language of accommodation or catharsis, Lock interrogates what it means to inhabit an impossible (queer) body within a (politically) unbearable present. ‘a disgusting lie’ is preoccupied with violence as both a rhetorical and territorial strategy – all the weakly murderous uses English is put to – and with the smug inertness of literature’s response.   The phrase ‘a disgusting lie’ is taken from Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, and the notion that without ‘sincere passion, the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the unity of thought, word, and deed’ revolutionism ‘inevitably degenerates into rhetoric and becomes a disgusting lie’. Yet Lock is – at best – an ambivalent subscriber to this school of thought; her disgust is capacious, and she bestows it with as much energy on the sentimental overtures of extremism as on the guarded and self-regarding soundbites of “moderates”.   What drives Lock’s poetry, however savage or uncompromising, is a fierce and compassionate regard for the ill-used o/Other in our midst; those whose minds and bodies cannot or will not reproduce the values and forms neoliberalism wills on them.   In Dead Girl Industrial Complex, the final section of the book, voices of murdered women and girls break out in strange and puzzling polyphony. Featuring a cast of characters including the Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, and the alleged sixteenth century witch, Mary Bateman, strips of whose skin were tanned into leather and sold to bind books – specifically The Hurt of Sedition and Arcadian Princess – following her execution, this section of the book is perhaps the darkest and most troubling, yet it is also the funniest, full of rangy wit, slant asides, knowing winks, and Lock’s characteristic word-play. Lock uses language to undo it, to return its hex three-fold to sender. Hyena! wants a grammar of irrational possibility, to carve a space in and through poetry for a feral commons.

Young Americans by Jackqueline Frost is a poetry collection that conjures a present teeming with the decadent violence of the confederate South   The book is a narrative of becoming in the wartime petroleum landscape of southern Louisiana. Faulknerian in its themes and in its taste for the baroque, Frost’s lyric explores the melancholy of ‘belonging to the enormous bliss of American death’ in places where one must ‘learn what love is from what it is not.’

THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT​​— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life.    "THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is thought turned [into] song. The singer, an ‘ambivalent woman / of non personhood’, trusts the productive energy of doubt to take her deeper into feeling and farther from naming. Lotte LS reveals the violent imperatives placed on us to speak and inhabit our pains as the limits of our personhood. In tracing the ‘tyranny of language under capitalist authoritarianism’ what emerges is the chance to become a subject always in motion, one who knows that what is not remembered is not identical to what is forgotten. " --Mira Mattar

Through lyric poems, prose poems and fragments, performance scores and visual collages, Mille Regretz writes towards, through and around the chansons of the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. Employing a translatory approach that draws on Josquin’s own procedural compositions, this book takes the ‘dubious and spurious’ nature of the chansons’ printed scores and partial lyrics as a starting point and an invitation to reimagine the relationship between poetry and song. The poems move centrifugally from past to present across the verbal, visual and sonic, welcoming chance encounters and mishearings into the process of making; they are, as Wilkes writes in the afterword, “a kind of opening to the world.”

Recovery is an exhibition, an inquiry, a translative text. It seeks to vivify experience through a politics of gayness and an active demonstration of queerness. It engages with, in Marcel Mauss’s term, “techniques of the body,” from discrete gestures to athletic maneuvers and intimate caresses. By exploring weakness, it reshapes everyday actions and words into poetic acts of recovery.   The book begins in the diverse: Recovery is comprised of tracks (as in skiing, as in DJ-ing, as in walking) that readers are free to mix, to dance on, or to roam around in. Its prose, its poetry, its essays, and its translations are like method air. As in skateboarding, you are alone on your board, you ride the curbs, you jump the obstacles, you alley-oops (from the French “allez hop”), or you do darkslides, and yet you are never alone; you are doing it with other skateboarders. A painter painting alone in front of a cave looks like one of the rocks; onomatopoeias seem universal, but are not; a poem in Persian gets translated into a collaboration.   Recovery was published originally in France as Récupérer. This English edition, translated by Cole Swensen and augmented by texts written directly in English by the author and collaborators, has been transformed to adapt to this new context.  

Al Haschische is a vivid and beguiling work by Safaa Fathy, a multi-talented artist who seamlessly delves into personal, humanitarian, and metaphysical matters through trance-inducing lyricism. Reminiscent of Benjamin's Über Haschisch, the book employs Hashish as a catalyst for interpretation, taking us on a journey into the depths of places, plants, and people within the realm of Language. Drawing inspiration from her experimental film, Hidden Valley, Fathy skilfully integrates stills that offer a visual, verbal, and textual glimpse into her quest. Al Haschische serves as an exploration of dreams, madness, and the intricate musings of the mind through an investigative and psychic travel. Its pages invite us to encounter elemental forces, ranging from the enigmatic Canticle Prophet to the interplay of shadows and remedies, employing hypnosis against a backdrop of a mesmerizing blue curtain. Fathy's poetic work beautifully underscores the notion that the body is the primordial abode of words, while the term "haschiche" resonates with profound significance throughout.

Part history, part inventory, part invention, Junk Percussion fuses personal experience to information with anecdotes, humour, and a questioning attention to music’s place in life. Making music is a serious thing to do, but also very much a real pleasure. "I laughed with joy when I first heard/saw Roger play, and so I knew I wanted to work with him. What delights me about animals (and children up to a point) is: there’s no separation between an impulse and the action - this is where truth, and great improvisors live—among them is Roger Turner." — Annette Peacock “Big ears, quick wits, sharp reflexes, unending awareness, casual erudition, unpredictable twists and turns—all the qualities that make Roger Turner an extraordinary improviser embodied in a fascinating read. The pictures are great too!” — Fred Frith

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end. An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication. Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

‘A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea’ Brian Eno ‘As memorable, pleasurable and irrational as all the highest quests’ John Higgs ‘A perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music’ Cosey Fanni Tutti What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn’s colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman’s intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.

In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story. She writes frankly about her route from girl to woman and pioneering icon within the music and art scene of New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as marriage, motherhood, and independence.Filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a remarkable life, Girl in a Band is a moving, evocative chronicle of an extraordinary artist.