HOLLY MELGARD'S FRIENDS et FAMILY is a collection of voice mails sent to Holly Melgard over three years (January 1, 2011 through January 1, 2014) and transcribed by her partner Joey Yearous-Algozin, both of them founding members of the print-on-demand publishing collective Troll Thread. This is one of the very few conceptual books by Yearous-Algozin not published directly via Troll Thread but as part of the Bon Aire Projects series "LOVE / LOVERS / LOVING," a publisher of experimental text that also uses Lulu. ...

At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form. Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound, poetry, and music, and celebrate the power of community, marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately, Poetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.

FETAL POSITION is a poetic study of different forms of labor in scenes of their emergence such as the noise of being born and transmissions of inter-generational violence. Here, voices speak who Melgard herself is not - or not yet - but who the poet operates in relation to becoming (potential parent, aspiring full-time employee, deranged cat lady, a hurt person automated to reproduce harm), all of whom work to navigate futures in foreclosure. Poetry.

In Utopia, Joey Yearous-Algozin rewrites the first of the seven Saw movies in the second person, using the undated version of James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s script available on imsdb.com. Reduced to the scenes that take place in Jigsaw’s traps, Utopia eliminates Jigsaw as well, leaving behind only a single character chained to a pipe in a room or pursuing themselves through darkened hallways.

Magic is largely a solitary endeavour, but the channels of its tips and tricks had a little???known heyday around a hundred years ago. That golden era circulated secrets in printed matter packed with flamboyant custom lettering, sensational language and mystifying illustrations ? largely made by and for its own community, compiled and consumed by dedicated practitioners and hobbyists. Often unregulated and infrequently archived beyond private collections, these magic papers collided with cults of personality, unshakable passion, and a thirst for notoriety. 00The book features a huge assembly of printed material from the collection of Philip David Treece, a magic expert dedicated to preserving a golden era of magic publishing. This collection celebrates journals, periodicals, books and other ephemera created for the magic community between 1890 and 1960. Each book includes a 16 page gloss insert featuring a collection of magical apparatus.

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.

This book is a revelatory guide to hundreds and hundreds of original 7" record cover sleeve designs - visual artefacts found at the heart of the most radical and anarchistic musical movement of the 20th century. Punk Rock 45 Soundsystem! is introduced (and co-compiled) by Jon Savage, author of the acclaimed definitive history of punk, England's Dreaming. As well as the encyclopaedic visual imagery featured inside, the book also includes a number of interviews with celebrated designers involved in creating punk's original iconic imagery. The revolutionary do-it-yourself ethic of punk was applied to the aesthetic of design as much as it was to music, and record sleeves acted as lo-fi signifiers of anarchy, style, fashion, politics and more with an urban and suburban invective courtesy of the 1000s of new bands - punk, post-punk, pre-punk, nearly-punk and more - that emerged at the end of the 1970s. This book is an exhaustive, thorough and exciting celebration of the stunning artwork of punk music - everything from the most celebrated and iconic designs through to the stark beauty of the cheapest do-it-yourself lo-fi obscurities.

'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.

Introducing a major new voice in Brazilian letters. Set among a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port of Manaus, The Brothers is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose mutual jealousy is offset only by their love for their mother. But it is Omar who is the object of Zana's Jocasta-like passion, while her husband, Halim, feels her slipping away from him, as their beautiful daughter, RGnia, makes a tragic claim on her brothers' affection. Vivid, exotic, and lushly atmospheric, The Brothers is the story of a family's disintegration, of a changing city and the culture clash between the native-born inhabitants and a new immigrant group, and of the future the next generation will make from the ruins.

The acclaimed author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine “explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result” (Asymptote). A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. When his grandmother—a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna—moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany: the doctors and teachers are incompetent, the food is toxic, and the Germans are generally untrustworthy. His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an inept, clueless weakling since he was a child and she’d spend the day sitting in the back of his classroom to be sure he came to no harm. While he may be a dolt in his grandmother’s eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor, Nina. When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max’s grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max’s all-powerful grandmother. Alina Bronsky, author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, writes of family dysfunction and machinations with a droll and biting humor, a tremendous ear for dialog, and a generous heart that is forgiving of human weakness. “[A] comic feel-bad novel. Bronsky has a Dickensian flair for writing about miserable children—or, rather, the miseries of childhood.” —Vulture