Produced on the occasion of The Art of Connecting: Atsuko Tanaka at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, which illustrated an unprecedented balance between all aspects of Tanaka’s practice, ranging from her earliest gestures, including documentation of Gutai performances in the 1950s, to paintings made shortly before her death in 2005.

Through variety it conveys a remarkable consistency of vision, connecting art and everyday life as we know it. It articulates an artistic proposition that makes Tanaka one of the most important figures of the Japanese post-war avant-garde.

Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style of which readers of Ariana Reines’ first two books are wildly enamoured, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, “communicated” between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema, the nation-state, currency, alchemy, and internet porn.

Now in paperback, a career-defining retrospective by a much-beloved contemporary master. Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems gathers together the finest work from her distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most brilliant, expert and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining, need look no further than this capacious retrospective.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Henrik Olesen: How Do I Make Myself a Body? Malmö Konsthall, 4 December, 2010–30 January, 2011 and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, 14 May–11 September, 2011.

Edited by Jacob Fabricius and Nikola Dietrich. Texts by Nikola Dietrich, Jacob Fabricius, Lars Bang Larsen, Judith Hopf, Ariane Müller, Antonin Artaud and contributions by Kurt Schwitters, Antonin Artaud. Designed by Martin Johansson and Henrik Olesen.

For this booklet Marc Nagtzaam selected a series of drawings by painter Roeland Zijlstra. The pages are filled with drawings of men and women, often in unflattering poses in a day at the beach. To these scenes of unabashed and carefree amusement Marc Nagtzaam has added a series of quotes by artists, taken from various art magazines. The juxtaposition of this contrasting material results in a playful and surprising publication.

Carrot Jokes are a genre of dense, joke-like texts first proposed by cognitive linguists Chlopicki and Petray (1981) to undermine emerging computational models of humor analysis. These jokes, further developed by others in the field, depend on a preponderance of background incongruities, blunt omissions, faulty script switch-triggers, “gray” implicature, and missing links in inferencing.

Michael Portnoy’s practice spans dance-theater, vocal power-tools, Relational Stalinism, reptangles, abstract gambling, the improvement of biennials, and Icelandic cockroach porn. His art circles the rules of play and communication—language itself playing a crucial role in the works.