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‘El guant de plàstic rosa’ / ‘The Pink Plastic Glove’
                        As read by Dolors Miquel
                        & Nadia de Vries
‘Rescat’ / ‘Rescued’
                        As read by Dolors Miquel
                        & Nadia de Vries
‘Tic-Toc, ¿hi ha algú?’ / ‘Knock Knock, is Anyone There?’
                        As read by Dolors Miquel
                        & Nadia de Vries
‘Fregall’ / ‘Scourer’
                       As read by Dolors Miquel
                       & Peter Bush
‘Cita amb el fred’ / ‘Date with the Cold’
                       As read by Dolors Miquel
                       & Nadia de Vries
‘Si jo hagués dit’ / ‘If I Had Said’ 
                        As read by Dolors Miquel
                        & Nadia de Vries

Dolors Miquel is a leading Catalan poet. From an early age, her distinct and critical voice—as evidenced in her writing for the page and the stage—upset many in her provincial birthplace. Expelled from a school run by nuns, Miquel studied in Barcelona, where she founded the literary magazine La Higiènica and, in the mid-90s, began to publish poems in a variety of styles. In collaboration with other Catalan poets, Miquel would organise week-long tours of small towns (ever keen to perform her works) and her writings—sharp, clear-eyed and ever-political—distill her roving criticality in a poetry that desecrates everything: ‘the Church, politics, and, naturally, the male figure’ (María Eloy García). In Gitana Roc (Llibres Del Segle, 2000), Miquel would express the core of her work as follows: ‘I talk about the damage caused by social structures, such as the family or the police. Love is the most frightening contract of fear, also the most powerful safeguard of society, and sex is the carrot.’ This aura of critique defines Miquel’s extensive bibliography (with over twenty collections under her name to date), and she has received numerous awards, such as the Rosa Leveroni (1989), Ciutat de Barcelona (2005), Gabriel Ferrater (2006), and Ausiàs March de Gandia (2016). She has published numerous collections, among them La dona que mirava la tele / The woman who watched TV (Edicions 62, 2010) and La flor invisible / The invisible flower (Bromera, 2011). Her latest book, Sutura / Suture (Pagès, 2021) is her final work as a poet; Miquel lives and works in Torredembarra, and continues to publish theatrical texts and other writings. 

Peter Bush is a translator. His first literary translation was Juan Goytisolo’s Forbidden Territory (North Point Press, 1989) and Bush has to date translated eleven other titles in Goytisolo’s bibliography, including The Marx Family Saga and Exiled from Almost Everywhere. He has translated many Catalan writers including Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales, Najat El Hachmi and Teresa Solana. His most recent effort is A Film (3000 meters) by Víctor Català, the classic 1919 feminist novel set in Barcelona’s criminal underworld. Bush lives and works in Bristol.

Nadia de Vries is a writer from Amsterdam. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Know Thy Audience (Moist Books, 2023) and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). She also writes fiction in Dutch.</sub>



<sup>The Pink Plastic Glove is language fighting for its life, or more appropriately, for its death. It points to what lies beyond language in a way that opens onto the archaic, and in a way that makes you gasp. Dolors Miquel is the grand disappearer of words, with a style so lucid, and savage, that it makes tangible the invisible behind words and the long blank at the end of meaning without ever losing faith in the power of language to do exactly that. I’m struggling to say exactly what the experience of reading this book feels like, which is exactly the effect of this supremely discomfiting book, to be in the un-worded presence, through words themselves, of the sacred. The Pink Plastic Glove is a supreme act of faith and despair.


David Keenan

Miquel’s unmistakable love for language is infectious, and her narrative skill will suck you right in. How often do you read a poetry collection that tells an actual story? The Pink Plastic Glove is a tale about mourning. It’s intense, rhythmic and menacing, like grief. From the book’s preface, we learn that Miquel wrote these poems after suffering a deep, personal loss. But there’s no self-pity in these poems, no sentimentality. Miquel alchemizes pain and twists it into abstract song. The Pink Plastic Glove is a mysterious collection, in that regard. It gives us intimacy and riddles all at once. And Miquel’s poems are all the more exciting for it. They are erotic, caustic, and uncompromising—a pulsating delight.

Nadia de Vries

Dolors Miquel is a blast of fresh water
irrigating the stony terrain of Catalan poetry.
Francesc Gelonch





One day, when I happened to be holding The Pink Plastic Glove, my grandmother, who has lived ninety-eight years and is wiser than all the literary critics I have ever known, used the word ‘miquel’ as a noun: ‘Aquell em fot cada miquel!’ she said, (‘That book gives me such turns!’). It was then I discovered that the word ‘miquel,’ according to the Institute of Catalan Dictionary, meant ‘an unexpected swipe, refusal, reprimand, contempt, scorn, etc. that leaves someone in a bad place, that mortifies and humiliates them.’ That lexical find seemed an appropriate way to enter into Miquel’s project and measure its tone: fierce, cheeky, firm, spare, bitter ... Take, for example, ‘Voluptuous Finale’ in which the wretched dead man resting on his autopsy bed only craves to be buried ‘stark naked with my erect penis marking position 32º latitude North.’ That is, even with both feet on the other side, this poor male can’t give his testosterone a rest, or free himself from the very heterosexual modus operandi practiced by many men and women who have an allergy to hosting a hint of dissidence between their legs, because Miquel doesn’t just hand out gratuitous “miquels” and keep quiet, but calls on women shoring up the patriarchy with their aesthetic and matrimonial submission to savour a spot of disorder.

Laura G. Ortensi, La Lectora

The Tenement translation of Miquel’s
El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
was supported by the Institut Ramon Llull.</sup>

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Tenement Press
& Prototype Publishing _{Rehearsal’s (Eternally) Open Season}‘I THINK THEREFORE I AM OTHER …’      

In Reza Baraheni’s Lilith, the mythological demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the lucidity of the rebel. Rather than renouncing freedom, Lilith is outcast for her outspokenness and sensuality—sequestered to a place wherein freedom is crucially situated in the power and beauty of language, and where that language is seated in stark opposition with the oppressive forms of authority that seek to make it mute.

Lilith can be seen as an allegorical take on the condition of the poet in exile. Like the banned and persecuted author, the demon refuses to yield to force and is, resultantly, a pariah. Her body becomes the dumping ground of all power-driven fantasies, and the figure of the exile is invested with the projected fears and compulsions of the dominant society. But it is the creative drive of language that permeates these pages.

A deeply lyrical and irreducibly subversive work, over a little less than a hundred pages Lilith investigates the limits of a linguistic freedom via encounters between Lilith and a cast of fabled figures, and the vulnerable courage of the poet is set against avatars of patriarchal oppression and authoritarian rule alike via the demon’s dance with language. In Lilith, it is language that disrupts ordinary chronology; language that allows for the shade of a dream life to dint the light of day; harking back to an envisaging of poetry as music, as ritual. This is not language as an evocation of some distant golden age, but as celebration.

An experiment in word alchemy; a dance of grace and danger on the fault-line of prose and song; Lilith explores the reality-making function of language to pinpoint the antagonistic faculty and political felicities of poetry itself.

<sub>In 2006, Lilith was adapted for the theatre and produced in France and Geneva by Thierry Bedard (under the title Exilith). Bedard has also previously presented Reza Baraheni’s play Enfer to great acclaim at the Avignon International Festival in 2004.

This Tenement text is a translation of Clément Marzieh’s brilliant French version (Fayard, 2007). No edition of Lilith, as far as is known, seems ever to have been published in Persian and, indeed, the original manuscript appears to have been lost. The English translators of Lilith have chosen to remain anonymous, but are very grateful to Reza Baraheni for his enthusiastic support. In addition to Baraheni’s Lilith, this edition also includes—as afterword—Baraheni’s poem ‘Daf’ (translated by Stephen Watts and Bareheni), and this edition is punctuated by a series of paintings by London-based artist, Oliver Bancroft.</sub>  Kyra Simone’s ‘Temporary Palaces’

        [...] 

The first in a triplicate of broadcasts
with Resonance Extra, ‘Tarzan the Apeman’

_{29.04.23 / 13:00 (BST)}

_{extra.resonance.fm}

<sup>In which the author reads the following works
from her collection, Palace of Rubble ... 

        •         ‘Palace of Rubble’
        •         ‘When Language is Gone from Bodies’
        •         ‘The Boys of Summer’
        •         ‘The View from the Tower’
        •         ‘World Business’
        •         ‘County Fair’
        •         ‘Still Life with Parrot’
        •         ‘Museum’
        •         ‘Today, Clouds’
        •         ‘Foreign Affairs’
        •         ‘The Empty Lot’
        •         ‘Dear Pauline’
        •         ‘Cadets No More’
        •         ‘The Wedding Exit’
        •         ‘The Nomad’
        •         ‘Blue Moon’
        •         ‘The Diver’s Song’
        •         ‘Pawns Talk of Scars’
        •         ‘Den of Millionaires’</sup>

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^{Life asked Death why he needed her to live /
And Death asked Life why she needed him to die …}

<sup>So begins Miquel’s El Guant de Plàstic Rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove, a lyrical, acute, and metaphysical sequence of poems some fifteen years in the making. At the heart of Miquel’s collection, we’ve a central image. An unnamed man in a state of constant decomposition, rotting away in the kitchen sink. Piece by piece, his slow unbinding underpins a train of images wrought in sensuous, playful, and dynamic language. Stark vignettes spun from everyday colloquy—run through with the aura of Catalonian Renaissance writings—and gilded with a patina of light, a glut of shadow, and a blur of sensory experiences.

El Guant de Plàstic Rosa houses 36 studies of the dynamics of decay. The purr and buzz of bees humming, off-stage asides, slaughtered cows, mountains made of olive stones, the hum of a permanently empty refrigerator, and edible dreams littered with dahlias and roses, with carnations and colourful chrysanthemums...

Here, sex rattles the bones; Miquel’s pages percolate with love, with life—the subjectivist and social connotations of disease and decay—and on the prospect of mass destruction in a world itself on the brink of a self-inflicted extinction. In Bush’s visceral new translation, this chaos of signifers sing-speaks its way through the undying days of a century beyond its “sell-by,” and cogitates on life—so furnished with all its illusions and ironies—in an age consistently defined by its constant decline.</sup>


 Publishing 10/07 


<sup>Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 18 July 1960) is a leading Catalan poet. From an early age, her distinct and critical voice—as evidenced in her writing for the page and the stage—upset many in her provincial birthplace. Expelled from a school run by nuns, Miquel studied in Barcelona, where she founded the literary magazine La Higiènica and, in the mid-90s, began to publish poems in a variety of styles. In collaboration with other Catalan poets, Miquel would organise week-long tours of small towns (ever keen to perform her works) and her writings—sharp, clear-eyed and ever-political—distill her roving criticality in a poetry that desecrates everything: ‘the Church, politics, and, naturally, the male figure’ (María Eloy García). In Gitana Roc (Llibres Del Segle, 2000), Miquel would express the core of her work as follows: ‘I talk about the damage caused by social structures, such as the family or the police. Love is the most frightening contract of fear, also the most powerful safeguard of society, and sex is the carrot.’ This aura of critique defines Miquel’s extensive bibliography (with over twenty collections under her name to date), and she has received numerous awards, such as the Rosa Leveroni (1989), Ciutat de Barcelona (2005), Gabriel Ferrater (2006), and Ausiàs March de Gandia (2016). She has published numerous collections, among them La dona que mirava la tele / The woman who watched TV (Edicions 62, 2010) and La flor invisible / The invisible flower (Bromera, 2011). Her latest book, Sutura / Suture (Pagès, 2021) is her final work as a poet; Miquel lives and works in Barcelona, and continues to publish theatrical texts and other writings.

Peter Bush is a translator. His first literary translation was Juan Goytisolo’s Forbidden Territory (North Point Press, 1989) and Bush has to date translated eleven other titles in Goytisolo’s bibliography, including The Marx Family Saga and Exiled from Almost Everywhere. He has translated many Catalan writers including Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales, Najat El Hachmi and Teresa Solana. His most recent effort is A Film (3000 meters) by Víctor Català, the classic 1919 feminist novel set in Barcelona’s criminal underworld. Bush lives and works in Oxford.</sup>

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SANT JORDI USA
27/04/23, Online Programme
14:00-17:00 (EST) / 13:00-16:00 (CDT) / 19:00-23:00 (BST)


Kyra Simone & Lucy Ives
reading at FAMILIAR TREES
29/04/23

80 Railroad St
Great Barrington, MA
17:00-19:00 (EST)


<sub>familiartrees.com

kyra-simone.com / tenementpress.com/palace-of-rubble
lucy-ives.com / graywolfpress.org/books/life-everywhere</sub>

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HELL IS THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Fowler’s MUEUM
in the LA Review of Books

Up online with the Los Angeles Review of Books, read Guy Stevenson on SJ Fowler’s MUEUM. Order a copy of the novella here, and download Fowler’s reading of the work (as first broadcast on Resonance Extra), here.



<sub>There’s a whole history of 20th-century style in here that would take a thesis to decode: from the opening section’s Steinbeck-like panorama of apocalypse through the terseness of Beckett and Pinter to the European avant-gardists Fowler references in his epigraphs. The effect leaves the mind reaching not only for clues as to what the hell is going on but also for which great writer of experimental or apocalyptic fiction that this or that passage reminds you of, which bit of theory went into each bleak statement. Rewarding but hard to relax into, the process is broken up by moments of astonishing, often disgusting realism. Cormac McCarthy–like, the narrator remembers a soldier in the mess hall, his teeth stringy with human flesh, or his own time spent stalking unspecified victims: “[W]hen I found them, their imploring did not move me […] I was not cruel […] work is work.” All of this comes backlit by the horrible history of weaponry the museum commemorates, such as “the battle axe, the Bec de Corbin, the bludgeon and club. The flail and flanged mace. The horseman’s pick and the morning star,” among other “implements of gaining information.”

            [...]

A strange, absurd, difficult book by a hero of London’s poetry scene, MUEUM is disconcerting and enlightening. Reading it feels like walking beside the author through a lucid nightmare—as real and unreal as our own dreams, as illogical and packed with implication, but taken to horrendous extremes. At his best, Fowler shows us what would happen if we could freeze-frame and pursue the bits of our own daily lives that make it into our sleep states: a terrifying array of the small and menial alongside the vast, ghastly, and symbolic. Without affectation, in a voice very much his own, he comes close to the uncomfortable truth-telling of Ballard, McCarthy, Céline, and the rest of the minatory canon who form the backdrop to this remarkable fiction debut.</sub>

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Artillery / Doug Harvey 
(on Vallance’s Voyage)

Over in the pages of Artillery Magazine, read Harvey’s review in full here, and order a copy of Vallance’s “bible-long” journey of spiritual (and self) discovery, A Voyage to Extremes, here. 

Art historically, this ginormous yellow tome is a gold mine, providing off-the-cuff anecdotal accounts of Vallance’s legendary curatorial interventions in various off-beat thematic museums in Vegas, while elsewhere detailing extensive cross-cultural research into the religious, anthropological and philosophical significance of clowns. As promised by the subtitle, much of the work addresses spirituality, religion, shamanism and paranormal phenomenology. Richard Nixon, Thomas Kinkade, Martin Luther, Charlie Manson, Ronald McDonald, the Loch Ness Monster and other spiritual teachers all make appearances. It’s not a fluke that Vallance’s curiosity-driven ideational flow is so reminiscent of an extended Wikipedia surf.

            [...]

Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes seems to me to be the most successful literary embodiment of the human cognitive structures that have evolved with the internet—not from imitation, but from pre-existing structural resonance. A playful, weightless curiosity may seem like a fey and inconsequential thing, but when it drifts across a border as if the border wasn’t there, watch out! That’s when Luther’s excrement hits the Devil’s fan!

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A Complete MUEUM, 07/01/23 
(℅ Resonance Extra)



Care of our comrades at Resonance Extra ... To conclude our season-long serialisation of SJ Fowler’s debut novella MUEUM (see here) on 07/01—morning through noon—dial into the station for a broadcast of Fowler's novella in full. Kicking off with black coffee at 09:56 on the dot, spend the day sunk in the annals, corners, and corridors of Fowler's stranger galleries.

Order a copy of the novella direct from Tenement here, catch up on the series (and assorted materials) over on the Resonance Archive here, and download Fowler’s reading of the novella for posterity here.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 
La rabbia / Two Poems (℅ LitHub)

^{If you shout long live freedom without humility
you’re not shouting long live freedom.}



Care of LitHub, see here for two poems excerpted from Cristina Viti’s translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia ... ‘Anticommunist Youth Marches in Rome’ and ‘Series of Atomic Explosions.’

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Pier Paolo Pasolini
Translated from the Italian
by Cristina Viti
La rabbia / Anger

<sub>La rabbia remains one of Pasolini’s most singular achievements, an all-consuming expression of the restless and relentless fury that defined his work and his thinking. In an age of increasingly one-dimensional political art, this most welcome volume is an urgent reminder of its dizzying possibilities.

Dennis Lim

Pasolini’s poems thrive with passion and outrage. A 20th century Dante, he grieves at inequity, feels disgusted by corruption, and wails against the evil that people do. Pasolini doesn’t render a coming paradise, but contests hate with love, meanness with generosity, and through the reality of his beautiful poems, suggests the possibility of creating a better world.

Lynne Tillman







‘Today,’ we read in La rabbia, Pasolini’s remarkable set of poems composed in 1962 to accompany his film by that title, ‘only four thousand subscribers have televised moving images in their homes; in a year they will be in the tens of thousands.’ And then the poet corrects the line: ‘No—in their millions. Millions of candidates for the death of the soul.’ Sixty years later, in the age of TikTok and Instagram, those ‘candidates’ may well be in the billions. Indeed, what gives La rabbia its uncanny accuracy is that its vision, however exaggerated and extreme, might well characterise our own moment in history. Not only ‘in my country, my country that’s called Italy’ (Pasolini’s refrain), but all over the world, the ‘noble’ solutions of the late 1940s and ‘50s, with their UN charter, their Marshall Plan, and their call for No More Wars, now seem to have been little more than Band-Aids that left things pretty much as they were. Whether he is dealing with the failed Hungarian Revolution or the Algerian War, or with the ‘new problem [that] breaks out in the world. It is called colour,’ Pasolini sees the real enemy as normality—the normality or qualunquismo that accepts things as they are. In Cristina Viti’s excellent translation, Pasolini’s anger would be devastating, were it not for the proviso that poetry can change consciousness. It is poetry, La rabbia insists, that provides the counterweight to the darkness that surrounds us.

Marjorie Perloff</sub>

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Launching LA RABBIA 
& PASOLINI / PEDRIALI:
Two Evenings at London’s
Italian Cultural Institute

Tenement Press presents
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

<sub>18:30, 16/01/23
The Italian Cultural Institute
39 Belgrave Square
London, SW1X 8NX


Join us in January—16.01.23—for an evening at London's Italian Cultural Institute to mark and celebrate the Tenement Press publication of Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger in a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary.



Pasolini / Pedriali
(09/12/22–18/01/23)

The launch of the Tenement publication of Pasolini’s La rabbia will conclude a special exhibition at the Institute of works by photographer Dino Pedriali (1950-2021), curated by writer and critic Marco Belpoliti. Twenty-nine portraits of Pasolini, the photographs—taken shortly before his death in '75—portray the poet at his two homes, Sabaudia and Torre di Chia, revealing an intimacy between artist and subject in striking stills that constitute one of the last traces of one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the Novecento.





On 09.12.22 (from 18:00 onwards), join us at the Institute to mark the exhibition's opening with curator Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (Serena Professor of Italian and Professor of Modern Italian Culture, University of Cambridge) in conversation.</sub>

_{This exhibition is free,
but registration for the opening is essential; 
see here to book a ticket ...}

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Three Readers at Conway Hall
for the Small Publisher’s Fair

_{A record of a reading in the Green Room on 28/10, with SJ Fowler reading from MUEUM; Kyra Simone, from Palace of Rubble; and Cristina Viti, reading from her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger ...}  

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Pier Paolo Pasolini
La rabbia / Anger

 


 Forthcoming in the Autumn,
 the sixth title from Tenement Press,
 a collection of one-sided stories,
 with photographs by John Divola ... 

^{PREORDER HERE}

Pier Paolo Pasolini
La rabbia / Anger

_{SEE HERE}

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SJ Fowler, 
MUEUM 

 A fourth title from Tenement Press,
 and the first work of fiction in
 the yellow-jacket series,
 Fowler’s MUEUM is available now ... 

_{ORDER HERE}

<sub>Down in the mire of London's grimpen, above the drained marshlands and drift of the fatbergs, exist the cultural centres that shine like jewels in the mudcake of the greatest city on earth: London's museums. Their great domes are craniums through which pass the crazy, unbidden thoughts of a culture always moving closer to madness.
With the apocalyptic vision of Ballard and the acerbic attitude of Céline, Mueum scatters human detritus over the shiny Perspex of our most dearly loved vitrines. Rimbaud's visits to the British Museum reading room come to mind: scratching himself down for lice as he flicked through the latest encyclopaedias. And Bataille, assembling curios so strange the Surrealists wouldn't touch them wearing gloves.

MUEUM is a novel of watchers and the watched, a testament to the fact that people are always more interesting—and far stranger—than things. And nothing is stranger than people's obsession with touching objects from the questionable past.

Prepare to travel the world, from Rome to Japan, with a travelling troupe of unforgettable characters who walk the world each day but never leave a building. SJ Fowler's MUEUM is an essential artefact for our troubled times, proving that travel of the mind is always more powerful than the real thing.

Chris McCabe</sub>

<sub>An autumn programme of events of events on (and around) Fowler’s publication will be announced soon.

See here for a further word on Fowler’s novella.</sub>

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Jeffrey Vallance 
A Voyage to Extremes:
Selected Spiritual Writings


<sub>Jeffrey Vallance is one of the world's most original, thought-provoking and entertaining writers on visual culture—his essays are works of art in themselves.

Ralph Rugoff</sub>

^{PREORDER HERE}

<sub>A fifth title in Tenement’s run of “yellowjackets,” a feature-length anthology from the artist. Collecting published and unpublished essays, articles and fragments ranging from 1990 to 2022, A Voyage to Extremes offers an illustrated survey of the seemingly limitless breadth of Jeffrey Vallance’s esoteric writings.




Shipping worldwide come August, see here for a further word on this unique anthology of Vallance’s writings.</sub> 

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SJ Fowler
MUEUM           




_{A fourth title from Tenement Press,
and a first fiction in the “yellowjacket” series, 
a debut novella from the acclaimed poet and artist ...}

^{PREORDER HERE}

<sub>A novella of ludic menace, SJ Fowler’s M U E U M is a puzzle without pieces. Following the grand tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (one who dirties their own nest, vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), M U E U M pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.

Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion. Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.

Pacing the halls, the atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit? In Fowler’s curt, spiralling and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.</sub>

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Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger,
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi

^{ORDER HERE}

<sub>A third title from Tenement Press.

In this heavenly and heartbreaking collection, the nasibs, preludes or love-songs of Mohieddin Ibn Arabi are translated to vividly retell the human erotics of divine love. The dialogic method of the translator-poets means that each poem is a collaborative attempt to retrieve a passion that is elusive and ‘steady;’ set to ‘sliding scales,’ the lyric like a ‘waterski’ on the distance between them. The imagery is touching and evocative, sweet and spiritual. The reader is reminded of a love that is active and ongoing, told in a linguistic tense that subtly, tragically, holds the sought for moment away from us. We may never find anything that gets as close to the deferring grammar of love as the phrase, ‘when held.’

Through these translations of ancient poems, we remember that love produces a relationship with time. The lover of a love poem is looking forward to it, already in its wake, mourning and restarting to yearn. It’s like a spiritual lesson in how to love God, where the erotics of times’ surfaces react to each other, causing a space like grace, and a situated feeling ‘Regardless of where you are’. In nuanced and humble syntax, Seale and Moger recreate in English the event of fresh longing in every word, as accurate as it is provisional. They do this with tender and careful poetry, finding in the original a fleeting but piercing voice, as if from underneath another voice, fragmented and reaching for its reply. Small elliptic lines, ‘no fun being locked here,’ create all the more agitated air for intimacy. 

Love told as poem is always an act of devotion that is always in the a priori of wanting. Here the poems offer details of a life already lived together and prepared for loss. The lovers are longed for in third-person, with ‘he’ and ‘she’ passed back and forth, so, rather than the lyric emphasis of you spoken to in the Song of Solomon, these poems create a distant field of someone off the page, the one who is loved but isn’t there.

            Holly Pester</sub>

^{Seale & Moger will read from Agitated Air (& discuss their collaboration with Marina Warner) in an online event hosted by London's Warburg Institute on April 27th;
see here for (free) tickets.}

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Kyra Simone,
Palace of Rubble

_{Announcing a new Tenement title for 2022, a collection of one-sided stories from Kyra Simone composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources.}

SEE HERE

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SJ Fowler
M U E U M




_{Announcing a new Tenement title for 2022,
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM; a debut novella from the poet.}

_{SEE HERE}

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Yasmine Seale
& Robin Moger
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi




^{Forthcoming in February, 2022, Seale & Moger’s collaborative collection
is now available for preorders; for further word on this title, see here.}

_{PREORDER HERE}

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^{EVENT / JOAN BROSSA 
CENTRE FOR CATALAN STUDIES,
QUEEN MARY, LONDON
24.11.21 / 19:00}

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Stanley Schtinter, et al
The Liberated Film Club

 

^{ORDER HERE}

LAUNCHING IN LONDON 23/10
LUX in the AFTERNOON
(see here)
CLOSE-UP FILM CENTRE
in the EVENING
(see here)




^{° For Matilda Munro’s take on the Club in Sight & Sound,
    see here.}
_{° For Jonathan Rosenbaum on the Club for Screenslate,
    see here.}

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Joan Brossa
El saltamartí / The Tumbler

^{ORDER HERE}