While Standing in Line for Death
CAConrad
Published by Wave Books, Seattle, 2017, 208 pages, 17.8 × 24.5 cm, English
Price: €19

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. After his boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

#2017 #caconrad #poetry #wavebooks
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics
CAConrad
Published by Wave Books, Seattle, 2012, 240 pages, 20.3 × 26.5 cm, English
Price: €17 (Out of stock)

Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.

#2012 #caconrad #poetry #wavebooks
(the drum)
Ulises Carrión
Published by Boabooks, Geneva, 2017, 24 pages, 10.5 × 14.4 cm, English
Price: €15

(the drum) is one of Ulises Carrión’s early linguistic exercises in English, originally handwritten in black ink in 1972. The artist fragments the names of musical instruments to express a sound. His attitude to poetry precluded, to a certain extent, his book The New Art of Making Books: “The text of a book in the new art can be a novel as well as a single word, sonnets as well as jokes, love letters as well as weather reports.”

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.

#2017 #boabooks #poetry #ulisescarrion
(a, b, c)
Ulises Carrión
Published by Boabooks, Geneva, 2017, 48 pages, 10.5 × 14.4 cm, English
Price: €15 (Temporarily out of stock)

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.

#2017 #boabooks #poetry #ulisescarrion
Blood: The Poems And Archive Of R. Broby-Johansen
Line-Gry Hørup
Published by Kunstverein, Amsterdam, 2020, 434 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 20 × 24 cm, English
Price: €40

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.

#2020 #kunstvereinamsterdam #kunstvereinpublishing #linegryhorup #poetry
Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking and Censorship
Karen Brodine
Published by Unbidden Tongues / Publication Studio, Rotterdam, 2020, 32 pages (b/w ill.), 14 × 22.5 cm, English
Price: €8

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.

#2020 #isabellesully #karenbrodine #poetry #publicationstudio #unbiddentongues