“This is a collection of attempted manifestos whose composition began in 2011. It does not pretend to be completed and any life it has is in its capacity for change, movement and instability. These manifestos are described as such because at the time of their composition they felt like attempts of preservation; of life and of the capacity to struggle against life. They are all improvisations. They have not been heavily edited, and they are untidy. We're unsure what we are." — preface by the author   Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England. She is the author of the books Gideon, Click Away Close Door Say, We Will Bury You, The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity, Prayers Manifestos Bravery, Poems of Sappho (in translation), Hopelessness, Coronelles Set 1 and 70 Sonnets. Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek.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 multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects?I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt.What do you think would happen?People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.'When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.

‘A brilliant and engrossing poetic meditation on the self that places its multitudes under a kaleidoscopic microscope. Lovebug takes up the risks involved in living and loving, as well as the radical vulnerability required to be open to the spectrum of intensities – from animating to infecting – that lead to irrevocable change.’ ­– Nuar Alsadir ‘Lovebug is a wonder. With her warm, welcoming intelligence and razor-sharp prose, Daisy Lafarge moves from microbiology to poetry, from chronic illness to crushing desire. Lovebug is at once a work of critical theory, an intellectual biography, and a detective story, in which nothing less is at stake than the mystery of our connection to one another. It’s also that rare find: a serious book that’s impossible to put down, infectious in the very best sense of the word.’ – Anahid NersessianThe 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.

“Writing elegantly about the music as well as William Parker's work as an activist and organizer, Cisco Bradley gives a full sense of Parker's centrality to the development and maintenance of the free jazz scene in New York as well as his efforts in presenting the music across the globe. Universal Tonality is a book worthy of its object.” — Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur “We have precious few monographic works on creative musicians, fewer still on living ones, and none quite like Cisco Bradley's fascinating biography of bassist, bandleader, organizer, and composer William Parker. Bradley situates Parker as part of a historical legacy, skillfully illuminating Parker's career—including his crucial term with Cecil Taylor—as well as the entire underground scene, including the groundbreaking Sound Unity Festival, the enduring Vision Festival, and manifold developments in the New York creative music community. An essential entry in the critical culture reading list.” — John Corbett, author of Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying MediumSince 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.

Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, François Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne WongThe contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies.

—Mark Anthony Neal:Ed Pavlic’s words have always heard the music and with Who Can Afford to Improvise?, he shows the exquisite ways that James Baldwin’s words both heard the music and was the music itself. —Robin D. G. Kelley:“Ed Pavlic’s strikingly original meditations reveal a James Baldwin swaddled in Black music whose masterful ear heard the overtones, the changes, echoes of memory, cries of agony and joy. By excavating experience from song and turning social critique into lyric, Baldwin produced a deeper, more dangerous truth.” —Yusef Komunyakaa:“In Who Can Afford to Improvise?, Ed Pavlić unearths James Baldwin’s epic song—one shaped and honed by sacred and popular music. This rumination of intricate details celebrates Baldwin’s vision of democratic conscience. Pavlić gives us a flesh-and-blood subject formed through a lyrical determinism of deep feeling. Through turn of thought and juxtaposition of historical and personal evidence, he embraces Baldwin’s need for justice and truth.”More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B.; Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.Presented in three books ― or movements ― the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin’s career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of “The Hallelujah Chorus,” a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin’s voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of “lyrical travel” with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin’s work invokes into the world.

"Tate has been an important if underread critic for the past several decades, and this collection will allow more readers to discover him. Not a fast or simple read, but a worthwhile one for fans of music and culture."  — Craig L. Shufelt, Library Journal "Flyboy 2 will be like no other collection of writing you will read this year, and probably this decade. Refer back to the original Flyboy book to whet your palate, and to note and compare the evolution of Tate’s voice and his perception of the world and music around him. Take comfort in knowing that there is a Black writer who has no choice but to be real, poised and dignified, denying all pressures to bastardize the class and power of Black arts criticism and literary excellence." — Jordannah Elizabeth, Amsterdam NewsSince 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.

A beautiful collection of poetry by Verity Spott Ben Graham had this to say about the book:"The brilliant Verity Spott has a new book out, called Hopelessness and published by the 87 Press. The work defies categorisation: Verity is a poet, and this book is certainly poetry, but large parts are in prose form and towards the end it even takes on the structure of an absurdist play. There seems to be a loose narrative, and even recurring character voices, so I’m tempted to call it a short experimental novel, in the vein of Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal Of Albion Moonlight (a personal favourite). Ultimately though I’d just call it a book; one full of words that are profound, moving, silly, sad, challenging and beautiful in equal measure. Even though it’s still a boldly experimental piece, in some ways Hopelessness feels like the most accessible thing Verity’s done. Without wanting to sound condescending, it’s also the most mature. You don’t get much more universal than death, love and loss, and these seem to be the main themes explored here. Another is language itself, the way it defines and limits our experience, and the way that we’re constantly at the mercy of words and phrases as they’re deployed by the authorities, the media, and eventually our own thought processes. Dissenting voices continually talk over one another throughout Hopelessness, often sampled from outside sources, or parodies thereof: Sappho, MR James, traditional hymns and folk songs, Hollywood movies, talk radio, tabloid newspapers, dreams and demagogues. Through it all there’s a painful lesson about how loss can make us bitter and hard, and how by refusing to move forward we become empty caricatures mouthing meaningless clichés to wound and hurt. But grief and loss can also teach us about love, if we let them, and there is so much grief and love in this book. Verity continually rearranges reality (that is, language) as if searching desperately for a way out, but in the end, as always, there is just life, love, and death. Hopelessness is a bravura performance, wholeheartedly recommended."

130 x 200mm86 pagesblack and white printingperfect boundsoftcoverReleased 2023Rimming 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

Fran Lock is the former Judith E, Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-2023), and the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently 'a disgusting lie' (further adventures through the neo-liberal hell mouth), published by Pamenar Press in September 2023. She is member of the New Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. A collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary is forthcoming from Out-Spoken Press later this year. Fran is an Associate Editor at the arts and culture cooperative, Culture Matters. She lives with Manny, her beloved pit bull and eternal muse.  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.

Jackqueline Frost is an emerging force in poetry and criticism. A queer-feminist author living in France and scholar of Caribbean culture and politics, Frost writes about the revolutions of the past and future. She is the author of the full-length collection, The Antidote (Compline Editions), and several chapbooks including You Have the Eyes of a Martyr (O’clock Press), The Third Event Pt. 1 & 2, (Tripped Press) and The Third Event Pt. 3 (Crater Press).    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.’

Translated from French by Patrick Love 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.

Paperback B&W; Edition of 2500 Released: March 2019 ISBN: 9780991558520 Published: Primary Information & Ugly Duckling PresseConstance 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).

136 pp. | 4.5 in x 7.3 in Edited by Marie Roux and Rod Hunt Introduction by David Toop  Victor Segalen (1878–1919) had one of France's most curious literary careers, applying his imagination to musicology, ethnography, exploration, medicine, synesthetics, Chinese history, and the occult. This collection gathers together his previously untranslated essay “Synesthestics and the Symbolist School” and his novel In A Sound World, a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space. Segalen's medical training (he had a career as a ship's doctor) inspired an interest in the link between the prevailing Symbolism of the time and synesthesia, the condition whereby one sense affects the perception of another. This edition also includes an essay by the musician and cultural historian David Toop that explores the historical context of Segalen's ideas. Also included is Segalen's libretto for Orpheus Rex, a collaboration with the composer Claude Debussy, which he would use as an opportunity for further explorations of his synesthetic concepts. This book makes available all three texts for the first time in English.

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. DempseyJuly 27 – August 17, 2013Includes an essay by Jim DempseyDesign by Sonnenzimmer softcover, 48 pages, 9 x 7 inches

Publisher: Lenke Lente published in April 2021 texts in English and French 10 x 15,5 cm (softcover) 180 pages (b/w ill.)   ISBN : 979-10-94601-39-6 EAN : 9791094601396169 fundamental free jazzrecords recommended in 180 pages by Maurizio & Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) and Philippe Robert, from must-have classics to indispensable curiosities. Free Jazz Manifesto is not simply a list of 169 recommended records, but a poetic vision, a parallel universe based on a personal aesthetics of perception and an in nite love for the most creative, incendiary, spiritual music. If Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton are well present, many unknown musicians make a place in this list of essential curiosities: Ahmed Abdullah, The Baden-Baden Free Jazz Orchestra, Black Unity Trio, Byron & Gerald, Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, CCMC, Ric Colbeck, Jerome Cooper, Michael Cosmic, Phill Musra, Leo Cuypers, GL Unit, Griot Galaxy, Stephen Horenstein, INTERface, Interspecies, Clint Jackson III, Milo Fine Free Jazz Ensemble, Muun Music, Robert F. Pozar, Abdullah Sami, Synthesis, Motoharu Yoshizawa... --- My Cat Is An Alien is the world-renowned outsider duo of radical, experimental instantaneous composers and intermedia artists formed by brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio in early 1998. They started their activity in Torino, Italy, before moving in a remote, secret region of the Western Alps. MCIAA is a single intermedia entity that acts through music, shamanic live audiovisual performance, painting and drawing, art design, photography, “cinematic poetry” films & videos, installation, writing and poetry, phonographic editions and artists' books. French musical critic Philippe Robert works for Revue & Corrigée, and is a former collaborator for Jazz Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, Octopus, and Mouvement. He runs the blog Merzbo-Derek (merzbow-derek.tumblr.com). --- Lenke Lente, 2021

Published: Trost Released: March 2021 Language: english Hardcover: 222 pages First edition, 2021A doumentation of art made while on the road from 2010-2020 by the one and only Peter Brötzmann. --- Being on the road so much, the time-space between the tours is not long enough for preparing big canvases and starting oil-paintings. You use what’s on the table - paper, cardboard, an empty cigar box, pens, felts and brushes, ink in a glass or a Chinese ink stone.You use what there is and that’s what we musicians call improvising and that’s what the works in this book are about [and my life too]: IMPROVISATION - Peter Brötzmann, Wuppertal, October 2020 --- Texts by Brötzmann, Stephen O'Malley, John Corbett, Karl Lippegaus, Heather Leigh, Sotiris Kontos, Thomas Millroth, Markus Müller --- Trost, 2021

Published by: Lenka Lente published in June 2021 texts in English and French 14 x 19 cm (softcover) 478 pages (ill.)   ISBN : 979-10-94601-40-2A polyphonic evocation of the American saxophonist through the testimonies of some forty international musicians.   And you, how do you hear him? As we approach the twentieth anniversary of Steve Lacy' death (or the ninetieth anniversary of his birth), Guillaume Tarche asked the question, in English, in French, in Italian, to Steve Adams, Irene Aebi, Guillaume Belhomme, Etienne Brunet, Frank Carlberg, Kent Carter, Andrea Centazzo, Allan Chase, Alvin Curran, Martin Davidson, Jean Derome, Jorrit Dijkstra, Jean-Marc Foussat, Christoph Gallio, Ben Goldberg, Guillermo Gregorio, Phillip Johnston, Peter Katz, Suzanna Klintcharova, Gilles Laheurte, Vincent Lainé, Pablo Ledesma, Urs Leimgruber, Dave Liebman, James Lindbloom, Giancarlo nino Locatelli, Michala Marcus, Gianni Mimmo, Uwe Oberg, Roberto Ottaviano, Evan Parker, Jacques Ponzio, Jon Raskin, P.-L. Renou, Patrice Roussel, Bill Shoemaker, Josh Sinton, Bruno Tocanne, Jason Weiss, Elsa Wolliaston, Seymour Wright.   A specialist of improvised music, Guillaume Tarche (born 1973) is a saxophonist, writer and music journalist (Le son du grisli, Improjazz...) and translator (of Evan Parker).   ---   Lenka Lente, 2021