A historically grounded and embodied understanding of geological transformation. Kathryn Yusoff examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. She initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.

Samuel R. Delany is one of literature's most iconic voices. An acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. his works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction through their formally consummate and materially grounded explorations of difference. This anthology of essays, talks, and interviews addresses topics such as sex and sexuality, race, power, literature and genre, as well as Herman Melville, John Ashbery, Willa Cather, Junot Diaz, and others. The second of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. This diverse collection displays the power of a towering literary intelligence. It is a rich trove of essays, as well as a map to the mind of one of the great writers of our time.

20th anniversary ed. in blueTwentieth anniversary edition of a landmark book that cataloged a vibrant but disappearing neighborhood in New York CityIn the two decades that preceded the original publication of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there.Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city's physical and psychological landscape.This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel.Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers―collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography. Her lush color photography and candid style demand that the viewer go beyond the surface to encounter a profound intensity. As Goldin writes: “Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life.” Through an accurate and detailed record of her life, Ballad reveals Goldin’s personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak, and the struggle between autonomy and dependency. Over the past twenty-five years, the influence of Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms has continually grown, making the work a contemporary classic. Nan Goldin’s story of urban life on the fringe was the swan song of an era that reached its peak in the early eighties. Yet it has captured an important element of humanity that is transcendent: a need to connect. This new edition of Ballad has been printed using new scans and separations created by master-separator Robert Hennessey from Goldin’s original transparencies, rendering them with unparalleled sumptuousness and impact.

To grasp sex in all its complexity - its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power - we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane—and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados—Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

n Pink Noise, sometimes like a crackling icicle you see a glimmer of diamond dust, pink by nature. Here, in this book of poems. The lines are electric, conveying a new kind of sensuality, all quick and zapped. An oncoming fusion of poetic thinking with the sciences. Exciting! What we’ve been waiting for. - Fanny Howe This book is like a vardøger. I felt it before it arrived—“a former ghost.” Holden’s formations come together, crystalline and spinning, into consummate shape. Geometry, mathematics, gay sex, earth, cosmos, mysticism, and skepticism are held together in these pages as in a polyhedron, semitransparent, where each facet is visible at a certain angle but from another angle disappears to show a facet on the shape’s opposite side. Beautiful and distinct, this work is filled with discrete infinities. -Edgar Garcia, Lit Hub A book of prismatic, lyrical poems that enhance and disrupt the pastoral tradition to consider organic and mineral worlds, queer desire and experience, the mathematical and the spiritual, struggle and resistance. Pink Noise orbits in spaces of memory, longing, violence, solidarity, the ecological, and the mystical. Experimental in its forms and lexicon, in poems ranging widely in style and scale, it moves through layers of musical intensity as it reworks the visual space of the page to generate sensations of presence and revelation. Simultaneously lucid and syntactically disjunctive, these poems are queer and radical not only in their content, but in their grammar.

Pub: Reaktion Books ISBN: 9781789142235 Published: May 2020Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues tradition, Ornette and jazz grew up together, as the brassy blare of big band swing gave way to bebop, a faster music for a faster, post-war world. At the dawn of the Space Age and New York’s 1960s counterculture, his music gave voice to the moment. Lauded by some, maligned by many, he forged a breakaway art sometimes called ‘the new thing’ or ‘free jazz’.Featuring previously unpublished photographs of Ornette and his contemporaries, this is the compelling story of one of America’s most adventurous musicians and the sound of a changing world.

Essays and occasional writings from one of literature's iconic voices. Samuel R. Delany is an acclaimed writer of literary theory, queer literature, and fiction. His "prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters," wrote the New York Times in 2019; "Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality, and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world." This anthology of essays, lectures, and interviews addresses topics such as 9/11, race, the garden of Eden, the interplay of life and writing, and notes on other writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Hart Crane, Ursula K. Le Guin, Holderlin, and a note on―and a conversation with―Octavia Butler. The first of two volumes, this book gathers more than twenty-five pieces on films, poetry, and science fiction. These sharp, focused writings by a bestselling Black, gay author are filled with keen insights and observations on culture, language, and life.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. André Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

The Summer Writing Program at Naropa University has drawn some of the country’s most innovative writers since its inaugural year in 1974, when Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and others gathered on the Boulder campus to “revolutionize the act of creative writing.” New Weathers: Poetics From the Naropa Archive gathers lectures transcribed from the Summer Writing Program’s audio collection, offering a compendium of thought on experimental poetry as both an artistic practice and a way to “wake the world up to itself,” editors Waldman and Emma Gomis write in their introduction. Organized in five sections addressing poetry’s intersection with a range of subjects—Sanctuary and Apocalypse, Ecopoetic Attentions, Communal Action, Identity in the Capitalocene, and Against Atrocity—the volume compiles lectures by Baraka and Ginsberg as well as contemporary avant-garde poets such as Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, and Roger Reeves. - Poets & WritersA collection of lectures, transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing—our “new weathers” to posit strategies of resistance.

This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry's traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble's performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world's premier musical groups.

Pages: 912 Size:6 x 9 in. Illus:16 b/w illus. When did the “silent deeps” become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending to sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for a trajectory of changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise.From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epic to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly-mythic Echo to loudspeaker feedback, Making Noise follows “unwanted sound” on its path through terrains domestic and industrial, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage of this tour de force, crafted in the inimitable prose of one of America’s most innovative cultural historians, Schwartz widens and deepens our sense of the reverberations of soundful lives, urban, suburban, rural, or lost. Never so much a question of the intensity of sounds as of the intensity of relationships, the continual redefinition of noise is a sensitive register of contending generations, classes, and genders.Drawing upon the archives of children’s authors and anti-noise activists, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters of worried parents and marine biologists, Making Noise traces the process by which noise has become as potently metaphorical as the original Babel. In astrophysics as in fiction, in economics as in art, noise is no longer bound to acoustic experience. Following the visuals of his Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz has spent two decades listening in to that which, literally and figuratively, makes a perfect copy impossible — those booms, hisses, and rasps that are at once the burden and token of our shared humanity. Unprecedented in its scope, this book will transform sound studies and contemporary assessments of cacophonies loud or uncomfortably quiet.

A classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounding the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels. --- Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a British born Surrealist painter and writer described, alongside people such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. Born in Lancashire to a strict Catholic family, she first came into contact with surrealism through her lover, Surrealist painter Max Ernst, before moving to Mexico in 1942. The Hearing Trumpet, her most famous piece of writing, was first published in France in 1974.

A portrait of the tempestuous life of the pioneering and iconic blues singer by Scotland’s National Poet. Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies, making her a star. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life. Editor Alexa von Hirschberg said: ‘Jackie Kay on Bessie Smith. Could there be a greater combination? Bessie Smith influenced artists from Bob Dylan to Mahalia Jackson to Billie Holiday and was the top-billed artist in the 1920s and 30s. Yet there are so few books about her. Jackie Kay’s evocation of Bessie’s life blew me away, and her story and her struggles take on a striking resonance today. I can’t wait to get this book into the hands of readers.’ Jackie Kay is a Scottish poet and novelist, and has been the National Poet of Scotland since 2016. She is the author of a number of works, including The Adoption Papers, Trumpet and Red Dust Road. The recipient of numerous prizes, she was also twice shortlisted for the Scottish Book of the Year Award. She is currently chancellor of the University of Salford, and divides her time between Glasgow and Manchester.

In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure.But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding?This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more. --- LONGLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE --- Faber & Faber, 2017

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call. --- Bloomsbury Press, 2021