This comprehensive edition of Russia's greatest modern poet, Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966), includes the complete texts of her major works Requiem, commemorating all of Stalin's victims, and Poem Without a Hero. Akhmatova published her first book of poems in 1912, and in the same year founded the Acmeist movement with her husband, the poet Gumilev. Her intense, highly personal love lyrics were later attacked as anti-revolutionary, and in 1925 her poetry was banned. Gumilev was shot in 1921 for alleged involvement in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and in the years of terror which followed under Stalin, Akhmatova was persecuted for her work along with fellow poets Mandelstam, who died in a camp, and Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide. She was able to publish some work during the war, but in 1946 she again came under attack, this time from Zhdanov, who denounced her with Pasternak and others for trying to ‘poison the minds’ of Soviet youth. These were attacks on her published work. What she was writing – but could not publish – was far more dangerous. For she had entered her years of silence. As she fought for her son’s release from prison, she was writing her greatest poetry: the cycle Requiem, which commemorated all of Stalin’s victims, and Poem without a hero, which she began in 1940 and worked on for over 20 years. All she wrote she committed to memory. Several trusted friends also memorised her poems, among them Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda. She wrote nothing down, and so survived, the people’s conscience, the one who kept 'the great Russian word' alive.Translated by Richard McKane Softcover, 336pp Bloodaxe Books, 1989, 1992, 2006

No Tags is a podcast and newsletter about underground music culture hosted by Chal Ravens and Tom Lea. Following the original ‘Conversations on underground music culture’ book in 2024, Volume Two collects the best interviews and discussions from No Tags’ second year, along with five new pieces exclusive to the book Featuring: Paul Woolford, Liz Pelly, Emma Garland, the perfect night out, Field Maneuvers, umru, Derrick Gee, Grace Sands, aya, the zombie internet, Yu Su, the AI slopwave, Shaad D’Souza, Big Beat Cinema, Holly Dicker, boycotts for Palestine, Dan Hancox, the new UK rap underground, Jeff Weiss, erotic trip-hop, Nono Gigsta, Mattie Colquhoun, Henry Bruce-Jones, Finn McCorry and watching DJ AG.Softcover, 336pp NO TAGS, 2026

Available in print for the first time in 50 years, Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike has long enjoyed cult status. It is the record of a poet whose life has been shattered by poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness. Wieners creates a complex schizo-analysis of language, capitalism, incarceration, and state power, while reflecting on unpopular themes of aging and loneliness in the gay world. It is also a paean for his beloved city of Boston, as he witnessed its destruction by the onerous forces of urban renewal. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, the book was met variously with indifference and outrage when it was published in 1975. In 1982, most remaining copies of the book were destroyed in the arson fire of Fag Rag/Good Gay Poets offices.Already known as a "poet’s poet" from The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), Ace of Pentacles (1964), and Nerves (1970), in 1972 Wieners moved to 44 Joy Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill, where he was involved with anti-war and gay liberation movements, the Beacon Hill Free School, and organizations devoted to the rights of people with mental health conditions. Out of this milieu emerged Behind the State Capitol, described by its author as “cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights.” The book would be John Wieners’s last major poetical statement. He was forty-one.This facsimile edition contains new afterwords by Wieners’s friend and scholar James Dunn, and the poet’s biographer, Robert Dewhurst.  Softcover, 227pp The Song Cave, New York, 2025 (originally published 1975)

An extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez.Softcover, 155pp Beacon Press, Boston, 1999

Of Weapons and Words brings together six essays of political commentary and analysis that offer a thought-provoking vision of Palestine and the wider region. Each essay considers the historical, political, and economic contexts that have sustained the ongoing siege on Gaza. These essays help us respond to the martyred Palestinian writer Basel Al-Araj’s call: “Keep Palestine firmly within your sight.”Featuring: Mousa Alsadah, Vivian Aqiqi, Abaher El-Sakka, Mudar Kassis, Nidal Khalaf, Lena Meari, Amer Mohsen, Abdaljawad Omar, and Sari Orabi, with translations by Rouqaya Alkhateeb, Mohammed Elabadsa, Shadi Hamada, and Alaa Salaymeh.All proceeds will go directly towards commissioning further work from translators living in and connected to Gaza, Palestine.  Softcover, 80pp Autearoa, Palestine, 2025

by Raschka using ‘watercolour, ink and torn paper’ it’s a playful book that’s lovely to hold, read and admire. The book examines 29 poetic forms, explaining their rules, giving examples and sometimes breaking the rules. Each page also includes a wonderful little pictorial explanation that aids the understanding of some of the more obscure forms. As well as examining the forms, the book introduces young readers to a wide collection of mainly contemporary US poets and should whet their appetite to explore new writers and to look more closely at poems in a fun way.Illustrated by Chris Raschka   Softcover, 61pp Candlewick Press, 2005

Some think Eric Dolphy was an otherworldly apparition. His stellar career lasted little more than 5 years. He was one of the most important pioneers of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s. As a multi-instrumentalist, Dolphy played flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone and clarinet. He also composed and arranged. His brilliant solos in performances with the Mingus Band, among others, are milestones in jazz and music history. Guillaume Belhomme traces his biography in sketches. “For having been an innovator, Eric Dolphy became an original. The depth of his message then caught up with him. At the source he created, a lineage of individual musicians that has not yet faded out of sight has continuously drawn, searching, perhaps, for ways to cross to the other side, beyond the obvious and the easy.”Guillaume Belhomme “Finally we have an English translation of Guillaume Belhomme’s wonderful biography of Eric Dolphy. I can read just enough French to know that it is a heart-felt homage to the great man. This translation will make a fuller appreciation possible.” - Evan Parker

23 Sentences from DESERT PLANTS MORTON FELDMAN: Something that is beautiful is made in isolation. CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I try wherever possible to discourage competitive sort of careerism. JOHN CAGE: So that it takes an old fogey like myself to suggest again as Thoreau did all of his life, revolution. PHILIP CORNER: A lot of people hang up to restrictions which are not only in the external institutions. They are in your own mind. PHIL GLASS: The quintessence of harmonic music is in cadence for me. STEVE REICH: You must love music or be a duck. ROBERT ASHLEY: If you record a conversation with fifty people in the United States about their ideas, and if you get into each conversation really deeply, that when you get to the end, you will have one of me, one of Steve Reich, but you will have fifty of yourself. ALVIN LUCIER: But when you stutter, you scan the language. You are scanning your past. JOAN LA BARBARA: You know, instead of trying to direct the voice, I try to let the voice direct me. PAULINE OLIVEROS: I’m aware of my own physiology. And then I’m hearing it as a whole, and I’m aware of the various rates that are going on, the kinds of breaks in concentration that occur and how they are corrected. DAVID ROSENBOOM: What I’m looking at really is the existence of regularly pulsing energy. RICHARD TEITELBAUM: I played the same synthesizer for ten years. Me and it are very close to each other. LARRY AUSTIN: Ives’ main thing, I feel, was the concept of layering and getting us out of the idea that the sounds always had to come from the same place; that is, right in front of you. JAMES TENNEY: I realized in writing these pieces that this was one way to avoid drama, which I’m still trying to find ways to avoid. J. B. FLOYD about NANCARROW: Somebody actually brought up what was going to happen to the piano roles after he died; and he said, “Why? Do you want one?” LA MONTE YOUNG: You can always say that you wanted La Monte Young, but it was impossible. He was so mercenary, he wanted money. CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE: I’m searching for sort of this golden sonority. CHARLES MORROW: The high art itself is a form of power consciousness, that in a way one listens to the high art in the same way that one walks around being a flirt. GARRETT LIST: The only way for a one-world kind of feeling is where each nationality, each locality, has its own strength; so that people don’t need to have to take from another place. FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners. JOHN MC GUIRE: But sooner or later I am sure that I will return to America. BEN JOHNSTON about HARRY PARTCH: He was really willing to be as direct and as simple and as corny as you like, as people are when they aren’t trying to be concert artists."Desert Plants" was a cult book in the seventies because it brought the first information about the US-American composer-performer scene to Europe. Numerous examples of sheet music and entire scores enrich this insight into a time of experimentation that needs to be brought back into consciousness. The book, which has been reprinted unchanged, is dedicated to Carol Byl, who at the time transcribed the tapes largely literally in order to maintain the "stream of consciousness". The cover picture was drawn by Michael von Biel. The edition is accompanied by a CD which makes the surviving sound documents available in restored form as mp3 files, including the famous telephone conversation with La Monte Young. Thus the original voices from 1975 can be heard – a contemporary document.   Walter Zimmermann's interview partners are Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (about Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire and Ben Johnston (about Harry Partch).

English-German Edition in two volumes 906 pages. These lectures, discussions were within the last years of Feldman's life, he died in September 1987, these were 1985 to 1987, for the "Nieuwe Muziek" in Middleburg, and the topics, subject matter runs the entire cornocopia of post war music, modernity, complexity, post-modernity, post-truth, post metaphysics. The discussion(s) are with all top-recorgnized composers Kaija Saariho, Iannis Xenakis, pianist Geoffrey D. Madge, Louis Andriessen, and not-so-well-known composers but important nonetheless as Konrad Boehmer and Bunita Marcus, Feldman's companion.Feldman was always a very engaging talker, conversationaist, he primed himslef with into-the-night discussions at the Cedar Bar in New York City, speaking with great painters de Kooning, Franz Kline, Pollock, Marc Rothko, Philip Guston his close friend.There is much anecdotal shibboleths here as well, as when a student who came to Alban Berg, and after some hours was not examining the student's composition. Berg said something like "how can you be a composer and not smoke cigarettes?". Time spent with Stefan Wolpe was also productive, right out of high school, and the house concerts of his works and others.

Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond. These early portraits of their budding relationship are followed by several playful postcards from Thek in 1960 and his first letter to Hujar in 1962, written while the artist is in the Philadelphia harbor aboard a containership bound for Europe. In the letter, Thek is brimming with joy and new discoveries and exclaims that the world “seems bigger and more gloriously strange than ever before in my entire life.” The two eventually meet in Rome, where they both begin to evolve into the icons we know them as today, and the remaining letters trace Thek’s travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work, and financial ups and downs through 1975. More than fifty letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera, are reproduced in Stay away from nothing and their poetic, quotidian, and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar’s relationship as it wavers with seduction, glamor, tumult, and mischievousness. Throughout this period, Hujar was photographing Thek in his now-iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios, and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist’s classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek, as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark, and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers, and friends. An afterword is provided by Andrew Durbin, author of A Wonderful World that Almost Was, a biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.Edited by Francis Schichtel Paperback, 9 x 12 inches, 192 pp Primary Information, 2025   Paul Thek (b. 1933) is among the most legendary and elusive artists of the post-1960s generation. He burst onto the New York scene with his Technological Reliquaries series, then known as “meat pieces,” which challenged Pop and Minimalism with an idiosyncratic approach that merged earnest posthuman embodiment and a critique of contemporary art trends. In Europe in the 1970s, he created new modes of exhibition-making that involved the creation of elaborate, ephemeral installations composed of sand, candles, newspaper, chicken-wire, Polaroids, and discarded furniture. Upon returning to New York in the later years of his career, he produced his deliberately “bad paintings” while continuing his longest-running series of paintings executed on newspaper, works that poignantly underscore his sustained engagement with themes of ephemerality and the passage of time. Thek died of AIDS in 1988. Peter Hujar (b. 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.

Articles: aja monet by Ayana Contreras, Azymuth by Ben Lee, Henry Threadgill by Bret Sjerven, Sven-Åke Johansson by Magnus Nygren, Anna Webber by Stewart Smith, Rafiq Bhatia by Florent Servia, Talk Show (Steph Richards & Qasim Naqvi) by Andy Cush, Ganavya by Tina Edwards, Cosmic Tones Research Trio by Blake Gillespie, Quincy Jones by Rob Garratt, Devin Daniels by Samuel Lamontagne, album design essay by Alex Coles, Discaholic column by Mats Gustafsson, album reviews, live reviews, photo essay & more. “Weathering” for aja monet Issue 17 / Winter 2025, 128pp We Jazz Magazine

You don't have to remember usbut know that we were here -the genius of light that shonethrough the green and purple glassThese poems play out in part against the backdrop of the 1980’s and early 90’s, including glimpses into the hedonistic fashion industry of the time and teenage life in the North of England, where sexualities are challenged and identities forged amongst excursions into club culture, as a means of escape - a rite of passage of sorts.Paperback, 182 mm x 128 mm, 74 ppJoan Publishing, December 2025

Sometimes it’s very uplifting to feel one’s fleshy boundaries dissolve. To not know where one ends and the world begins. To feel someone's breast is your breast too. Total immersion can be very transporting indeed.‘I think Fish Out of Water is about recognition, that extraordinary moment of encountering a work of art that makes you reel because it seems to beckon you, to know what you once did but have had to forget, to lead you back to yourself but as a stranger. It reminds us that we might well arrive in this world too soon, or the wrong way round, and what’s meant to nourish us might choke us, but we were never long for all that, anyway. There’s still chance to recover ourselves and the world as new and totally strange.’   Fish Out of Water was originally published in 2020 by Juxta Press, Milan, as part of their Words for Portraits series. This new edition also contains Self-Portrait with Wings, a response to the text by Chloe Aridjis.Paperback, 182 mm x 128 mm, 45 pp

Issue #14 of TALKER is a conversation with Mayo Thompson. As a member of rock group, the Red Krayola, since its formation in 1966, he has made a body of innovative and radically experimental music. The group has been a vehicle for prolific collaboration with contributions from Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, Lora Logic, Gina Birch, Sandy Yang and Albert Oehlen among others. The Red Krayola has worked with conceptual art collective Art & Language to release six albums together to date. In the early 1980s, Mayo was a member of Pere Ubu and provided soundtrack music for Derek Jarman. His celebrated 1970 solo record Corky’s Debt to His Father was re-released by Drag City in 1994 and Mayo T. & The Corky Band continue to perform this music live. He is also a visual artist and has published two novels. This interview discusses performance throughout Mayo’s work, exploring links between happenings and early Red Krayola live shows, formative encounters with performance art as well as the band’s participation in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.Softcover, 20pp, 280 x 180mm, Riso printed Talker, Giles Bailey, 2025

Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as “one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field,” saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the eighties, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and newly separated from his wife and kids. “I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year,” Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin in Better Do It Now Before You Die Later. “I would go to North Beach, and I’d sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out.” The resurrection of Simmons’s career—upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994—has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, embarking on successful European tours, leading new ensembles, and recording a series of twenty-first-century albums that inducted him, by his death at the age of eighty-seven, into the pantheon with the great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first-ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats: Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane. His testimonies from each time and place add up to a cultural history of the late twentieth century: Simmons saw Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk at the Black Hawk, lived through the Watts riots, stashed guns for the Blank Panther Party, brushed shoulders with Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, and toured Europe amid the multiculturalist boom of the nineties. But it’s his keen memory for the underdogs and up-and-comers that distinguishes Simmons’s voice. He talks plenty of shit on his rivals—Pharoah Sanders and John Handy were, in Simmons’s words, “hip … great players, but I was the cat who was moving.” Meanwhile, Miles Davis was “arrogant and blasé and talking shit,” and Prince Lasha “got scandalous with his lover-man shit.” But Simmons reserves his most ferocious loyalty for names elsewhere unremembered, like the altoist Alfred Franklin, the mononymous Hop, or the Wild Man, Stanley Willis. Of the "brilliant motherfucker" and tenorist Jewel Sterling, as of many others, Simmons declares, “I don't want to forget that brother. I want to resurrect him too.”  Whether he’s writing about his many love affairs; his turbulent romantic and creative partnership with the accomplished jazz trumpeter Barbara Donald; the pain of seeing his friends and heroes laid low by addiction; or the racism he endured in evolving forms across decades and states, Simmons brings the ferocity of style that animated his music to every sentence. And underneath it all remains the electric charge of his artistic passion. “I think all I needed during them terrible periods in darkness and despair was to play,” he writes, of his hardest years in San Francisco. “To be able to express the music in me was like a cleansing ritual.” Like Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog and Art Pepper’s Straight Life, Simmons’s Better Do It Now Before You Die Later delivers an unfiltered, firsthand account of life in the bebop business in all its brilliance and brutality, capturing the devastating lows of addiction, poverty, and obscurity and the ecstatic highs of a life dedicated to The Music.Hardback, 170x240, 560pp Blank Forms, 2025

The Whistle and Sing! handbooks were designed by the author, Eamon Jordan, with a dual purpose; to offer modern arrangements of the more tuneful songs, airs and dance music of Ireland and to write these down from actual players in a  Songs, airs and dance music from Ireland. A delightful book containing eighteen songs and more than sixty tunes in simple, modern arrangements. Beginners can approach this book with confidence and more experienced players have theopportunity to elaborate. There are specific notes and hints for most traditional instruments. Eamonn Jordan is the son of Brigid McElroy, a traditional folk singer from Lurgan, Co. Armagh and grandson of Thomas McElroy, fiddler and healer.  He has always been fascinated by the richness of the folk tradition in Ulster, a meld of the Scottish. English and native Gaelic traditions. Donegal, that cultural bridge between Scotland and Ireland, is where he has chosen to make his home. Arising from the years spent by Eamonn in teaching traditional music in Ulster. Thomas O'Canainn, lecturer, composer and musician, and author of the influential 'Traditional Music in Ireland' has described Eamonn as 'the teacher of a whole new generation of Irish musicians'.     Softcover, 96pp Ossian Publications, originally published 1974

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.Softcover, 123pp The 87 Press, London, November 2025

Staring Into The Sun is the latest ethno-folk cinema classic from Sublime Frequencies. Ethiopia is known to be one of the oldest areas inhabited by humans and presently has over 80 diverse ethnic groups. In 2009, photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt explored 13 different tribes throughout Ethiopia in this visually stunning film on DVD with accompanying 136-page book of Polaroid photographs and audio CD of field recordings. Traveling from the northern highlands to the lower Omo Valley via bush taxi, Isuzu cargo trucks, and by any means possible, Wyatt brings together the worlds of Zar spirit possession, Hamer tribal wedding ceremonies, Borena water well polyphonic singing, wild hyena feedings and bizarre Ethiopian TV segments, presenting an enchanting look at these otherworldly images, stark landscapes and captivating sounds from the horn of Africa. The featured tribes are captured with an unflinching sense of realism and poetic admiration resulting in a visual and aural feast of the senses. 136-page hardcover photography book with one music CD and one film on DVD. 5 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, landscape format. 117 color photographs and liner notes by Olivia Wyatt. Sublime Frequencies' most elaborate package yet. One-time limited edition pressing of 1,000 copies.