In (a, b, c) Ulises Carrión presents one if his early linguistic exercises in English, originally handwritten in green ink in 1972. The author observes and explores the structure of the sonnet. He develops fourteen interrelated sequences, which he uses as a key to codify a narrative. The text of each poem follows the schematic order of its title.

Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) is one of the most important figures of Mexican conceptual art. His 1975 manifesto The New Art of Making Books helped defined artist’s books as an autonomous artistic genre. His work includes numerous artist’s books—which was then designated as bookworks—but also video art, sound arts, performance and mail art.

Edited and designed by Line-Gry Hørup, this long-awaited publication presents the first-ever translations of the fourteen (and only) poems written by the Danish art historian and publisher R. Broby-Johansen in 1922, for which he was sentenced to jail. In vivid and gory details, the poems depict the red-light district of Copenhagen’s underbelly. In them, he defends those subjected to misery and poverty, and comments on the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie responsible for their misery. The appendix of the book gives a unique insight into Broby-Johansen’s methodology, interests and life following the end of his career as a poet, through photographs taken by Johannes Schwartz and translations of the archive by Hørup.

Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking and Censorship is a two-part collection of poems by typesetter, activist and poet Karen Brodine. First published posthumously in 1990 as a reflection on her life as a typesetter, union organiser and lesbian, this series of ‘work poems’ chronicles labour struggles, both personal and collective, and draws on her experience growing up surrounded by socialist feminists immediately following the wrath of McCarthyism.

It is the second title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

Produced on the occasion of CAConrad’s Mapping Dimensions 27, a multi-part series of writing workshops at: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

“CAConrad will create a (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual at KW Institute for Contemporary Art based on the work of Ian Wilson. For the two-day workshop he will use handmade maps and a reconfigured version of Jason Dodge’s sculpture A golden lightning rod pointing north to study the many aspects of our planet’s directional points of East and West. He will use these references to explore life and death, as the known and the unknown forces of our world and how these directional archetypes help and hinder our lives. This is a love letter to the Future Wilderness of our world.”

Brief, risible, finicky, the limerick is a form whose greatest successes never rise above the mildly embarrassing. Yet despite never having enjoyed unqualified approbation from critics or public, the form has its enthusiasts and eminent ­aficionados: there is no lack of literary luminaries who have lavished love on the limerick. This title continues this queer minor tradition, ­presenting seventy-seven limericks about writers and philo­sophers from St Thomas Aquinas to Simone Weil. Of all the grades of doggerel, the limerick is one of the lowest. Populist and participatory if not precisely popular, the limerick first becomes a hit in Victorian England with Edward Lear’s books of nonsense. It spreads at once across the English-speaking world like a highly contagious linguistic rash. Including a critical essay that delineates the limerick’s salient features, along with a dictionary that collects brief physiognomies of the subjects of the limericks, this book dares to descend into the maelstrom of ­mediocrity and to return, arms overflowing with mixed metaphors and mouldering microplastics.

David Robilliard (b.1952, Guernsey) moved to London in the late 1970s where he established himself as a self-taught painter and poet. He began working for Gilbert & George after appearing as an ‘angry young man’ in their film The World of Gilbert and George (1981). They actively promoted him as their favourite artist and in 1984 published ‘Inevitable’, his first volume of poetry. Three years later, in 1987, Robilliard was diagnosed as HIV positive and in 1988 he died at the age of 36. In his short life he produced a modest but important body of work now held in significant public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. His work is direct both in content and form, comical and yet ultimately deeply romantic.—Rob Tufnell, David Robilliard Disorganised Writings and Sketches