
Tenement Press, cousin to a magazine called Hotel (see here), is an occasional publisher of experimental; esoteric; accidental; and interdisciplinary literatures. Founded in 2020, the press works to forge a space for new voices and critical approaches to literary forms with an eye on actively ignoring the borderline between creative, critical, poetic and political practices. Series edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle (see here) and designed by Traven T. Croves (see here).
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EVENTS & BROADCASTS ...
MMXXIII
24/06
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
The Stranger (Part III of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
31/05
Dominic J. Jaeckle, On Craquelure
(Publication as Philosophical Project)
Culture Lab / Seminário Experimental
de Filosofia e Literatura
Colégio Almada Negreiros, IFILNOVA
Lisbon (Portugal)
bit.ly/3TZrQNz
27/05
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
The Wild One (Part II of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
23/05
Cristina Viti & Rosa Mucignat
Pier Paolo Pasolini:
La rabbia & the Friulian Works
The Italian Bookshop, London
bit.ly/42g9oTK
06/05
Cristina Viti, Helen Dimos,
Billy McKinnon, William Rowe,
& Stephen Watts
Hundred Years Gallery, London
bit.ly/3oh133z
29/04
Kyra Simone, reading with Lucy Ives
Familiar Trees
Great Barrington, MA (USA)
bit.ly/3ySYMgZ
29/04
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
Tarzan the Apeman (Part I of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
27/04
Bristol Poetry Institute;
Catalan Poetry Showcase:
Jaume C. Pons Alorda,
Míriam Cano,
& Eduard Escoffet
(with Dominic J. Jaeckle & Peter Bush)
University of Bristol
bit.ly/41UaQuW
27/04
Dolors Miquel, Peter Bush, & Nadia de Vries,
(Poems from) The Pink Plastic Glove
[online; pre-recorded; see here ... ]
Sant Jordi USA
New York, NY
bit.ly/3H82mII
09/04
A Voyage to West Sunset Blvd.
[Postponed]
Jeffrey Vallance,
with Doug Harvey,
Dave Shulman,
& Daniel Rolnik
Stories Books & Café,
Los Angeles, CA (USA)
bit.ly/3C2Z9GZ
16/02
Yasmine Seale & Kate Briggs
(A Coversation On & Around)
Agitated Air, chaired by Oliver Taylor
Perdu, Amsterdam
bit.ly/3KrkhvN
16/01
Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia / Anger
Cristina Viti,
Dominic J. Jaeckle,
& Gareth Evans
The Italian Cultural Institute, London
bit.ly/3VK1LSs
07/01
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part IV of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
MMXXII
03/12
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part III of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
28/11
Kyra Simone & Anna Moschovakis
Stories Books & Café,
Los Angeles, CA (USA)
bit.ly/3C2Z9GZ
05/11
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part II of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
28/10
Tenement Press at the Small Publisher’s Fair
Kyra Simone,
reading from Palace of Rubble;
SJ Fowler,
reading from MUEUM;
Cristina Viti, reading from
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
bit.ly/3SGu7Mb
13/10
SJ Fowler
Waterstones (Kingston), London
bit.ly/3BAt5LG
05/10
SJ Fowler, Iain Sinclair,
Chris McCabe & Chloe Aridjis
Bricklane Bookshop, London
bit.ly/3L8K7TX
01/10
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part I of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3LYV4bo
28/09
Kyra Simone & Emmalea Russo
McNally Jackson / Seaport, NYC (USA)
bit.ly/3qxwPqU
22/09
Big Doom Above Me:
45 Minutes in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A broadcast-special with Montez Press
bit.ly/3DvL2MI
27/04
On Agitated Air
Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger
& Marina Warner
The Warburg Institute (Online), London
bit.ly/40OAeBu
(with thanks to Bea Bottomley)
08/03
Yasmine Seale
& Vahni Capildeo
On Agitated Air
(The “Writer’s at York” Series)
University of York, York
bit.ly/3Zyp2bh
MMXXI
24/11
On Joan Brossa
John London, Cameron Griffiths,
Dominic J. Jaeckle, & Stephen Watts
The Centre for Catalan Studies
Queen Mary, London
bit.ly/3KbeXeW
23/10
The Liberated Film Club
Stanley Schtinter & Stephen Watts
introduce the UK premiere of
György Fehér’s Twilight
to launch Schtinter’s collection ...
Close-Up Film Centre, London
bit.ly/40BvLCB
︎ (A blog called) Rehearsal
︎ Railroad Flat Radio

EVENTS & BROADCASTS ...
MMXXIII
24/06
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
The Stranger (Part III of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
31/05
Dominic J. Jaeckle, On Craquelure
(Publication as Philosophical Project)
Culture Lab / Seminário Experimental
de Filosofia e Literatura
Colégio Almada Negreiros, IFILNOVA
Lisbon (Portugal)
bit.ly/3TZrQNz
27/05
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
The Wild One (Part II of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
23/05
Cristina Viti & Rosa Mucignat
Pier Paolo Pasolini:
La rabbia & the Friulian Works
The Italian Bookshop, London
bit.ly/42g9oTK
06/05
Cristina Viti, Helen Dimos,
Billy McKinnon, William Rowe,
& Stephen Watts
Hundred Years Gallery, London
bit.ly/3oh133z
29/04
Kyra Simone, reading with Lucy Ives
Familiar Trees
Great Barrington, MA (USA)
bit.ly/3ySYMgZ
29/04
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces ...
Tarzan the Apeman (Part I of III)
A serialisation of Simone’s Palace of Rubble
bit.ly/40Xfvw5
27/04
Bristol Poetry Institute;
Catalan Poetry Showcase:
Jaume C. Pons Alorda,
Míriam Cano,
& Eduard Escoffet
(with Dominic J. Jaeckle & Peter Bush)
University of Bristol
bit.ly/41UaQuW
27/04
Dolors Miquel, Peter Bush, & Nadia de Vries,
(Poems from) The Pink Plastic Glove
[online; pre-recorded; see here ... ]
Sant Jordi USA
New York, NY
bit.ly/3H82mII
09/04
A Voyage to West Sunset Blvd.
[Postponed]
Jeffrey Vallance,
with Doug Harvey,
Dave Shulman,
& Daniel Rolnik
Stories Books & Café,
Los Angeles, CA (USA)
bit.ly/3C2Z9GZ
16/02
Yasmine Seale & Kate Briggs
(A Coversation On & Around)
Agitated Air, chaired by Oliver Taylor
Perdu, Amsterdam
bit.ly/3KrkhvN
16/01
Pier Paolo Pasolini, La rabbia / Anger
Cristina Viti,
Dominic J. Jaeckle,
& Gareth Evans
The Italian Cultural Institute, London
bit.ly/3VK1LSs
07/01
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part IV of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
MMXXII
03/12
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part III of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
28/11
Kyra Simone & Anna Moschovakis
Stories Books & Café,
Los Angeles, CA (USA)
bit.ly/3C2Z9GZ
05/11
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part II of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3rqG5xt
28/10
Tenement Press at the Small Publisher’s Fair
Kyra Simone,
reading from Palace of Rubble;
SJ Fowler,
reading from MUEUM;
Cristina Viti, reading from
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
bit.ly/3SGu7Mb
13/10
SJ Fowler
Waterstones (Kingston), London
bit.ly/3BAt5LG
05/10
SJ Fowler, Iain Sinclair,
Chris McCabe & Chloe Aridjis
Bricklane Bookshop, London
bit.ly/3L8K7TX
01/10
Tenement Press & Resonance Extra;
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM (Part I of IV)
A serialisation of the poet’s debut novella
bit.ly/3LYV4bo
28/09
Kyra Simone & Emmalea Russo
McNally Jackson / Seaport, NYC (USA)
bit.ly/3qxwPqU
22/09
Big Doom Above Me:
45 Minutes in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A broadcast-special with Montez Press
bit.ly/3DvL2MI
27/04
On Agitated Air
Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger
& Marina Warner
The Warburg Institute (Online), London
bit.ly/40OAeBu
(with thanks to Bea Bottomley)
08/03
Yasmine Seale
& Vahni Capildeo
On Agitated Air
(The “Writer’s at York” Series)
University of York, York
bit.ly/3Zyp2bh
MMXXI
24/11
On Joan Brossa
John London, Cameron Griffiths,
Dominic J. Jaeckle, & Stephen Watts
The Centre for Catalan Studies
Queen Mary, London
bit.ly/3KbeXeW
23/10
The Liberated Film Club
Stanley Schtinter & Stephen Watts
introduce the UK premiere of
György Fehér’s Twilight
to launch Schtinter’s collection ...
Close-Up Film Centre, London
bit.ly/40BvLCB

ROLLING NEWS ...
26/05/23
Kyra Simone’s ‘Temporary Palaces’
[...]
The second in a triplicate of broadcasts
with Resonance Extra, ‘The Wild One’
27.05.23 / 13:00 (BST)
extra.resonance.fm

In which the author reads ...
• ‘The Great Escape’
• ‘The Revolving Door’
• ‘The Tunnel’
• ‘May’s End’
• ‘A Certain Music’
• ‘The Era is Over’
• ‘Obituary for Mrs. H’
• ‘Empty Chairs’
• ‘Somewhere Else’
• ‘The Prairie is on Fire’
• ‘The Lonely Pioneer’
• ‘The Last Days of Winter’
• ‘Rooms That Aren’t There’
• ‘The American Falls from Below’
• ‘You Promised me a Kingdom’
• ‘The Great Escape’
• ‘The Revolving Door’
• ‘The Tunnel’
• ‘May’s End’
• ‘A Certain Music’
• ‘The Era is Over’
• ‘Obituary for Mrs. H’
• ‘Empty Chairs’
• ‘Somewhere Else’
• ‘The Prairie is on Fire’
• ‘The Lonely Pioneer’
• ‘The Last Days of Winter’
• ‘Rooms That Aren’t There’
• ‘The American Falls from Below’
• ‘You Promised me a Kingdom’
25/05/23

11/04/23
Cristina Viti & Rosa Mucignat,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettura Poetica
The Italian Bookshop, 18:30, 23/05/23
A reading of works from Pasolini’s La rabbia (Tenement Press, 22)
and the poet’s works in Friulian.
The Italian Bookshop
123 Gloucester Road
London, SW7 4TE
RSVP: italian@esb.co.uk
italianbookshop.co.uk/events
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lettura Poetica
The Italian Bookshop, 18:30, 23/05/23
A reading of works from Pasolini’s La rabbia (Tenement Press, 22)
and the poet’s works in Friulian.
The Italian Bookshop
123 Gloucester Road
London, SW7 4TE
RSVP: italian@esb.co.uk
italianbookshop.co.uk/events

29/04/23
[...]
The first in a triplicate of broadcasts
with Resonance Extra, ‘Tarzan the Apeman’
29.04.23 / 13:00 (BST)

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’
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’
28/04/23
Dolors Miquel’s
El guant de plàstic rosa /
The Pink Plastic Glove
El guant de plàstic rosa /
The Pink Plastic Glove
In a first-time English language translation
by Peter Bush, Tenement Press publishes
a bilingual edition of Miquel’s seminal
collection, awarded the Ausiàs March de
Gandia 2016 ...
by Peter Bush, Tenement Press publishes
a bilingual edition of Miquel’s seminal
collection, awarded the Ausiàs March de
Gandia 2016 ...
PREORDER HERE

Life asked Death why he needed her to live /
And Death asked Life why she needed him to die …
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.
Publishing 10/07
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.
25/04/23
SANT JORDI USA
27/04/23, Online Programme
14:00-17:00 (EST) / 13:00-16:00 (CDT) / 19:00-23:00 (BST)

This year’s Sant Jordi—a rich, hybrid programme of Catalan literatures to mark and commemorate the Barcelona bookfair and festival—will feature a pre-recorded reading of works from the forthcoming Tenement Press publication of Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove in a new translation from Peter Bush.
See here for their programme,
& here for notes on this upcoming title
in the “yellowjacket” series.
See here for their programme,
& here for notes on this upcoming title
in the “yellowjacket” series.
18/04/23
reading at FAMILIAR TREES
29/04/23
80 Railroad St
Great Barrington, MA
17:00-19:00 (EST)


familiartrees.com
kyra-simone.com / tenementpress.com/palace-of-rubble
lucy-ives.com / graywolfpress.org/books/life-everywhere
17/03/23
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM shortlisted
for the REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS
PRIZE FOR SMALL PRESSES 2023
MUEUM deftly toes the line between public and private life, the mundane and the fantastical. It is a funny, disturbing, subversive take on the human being as part of the institution, both in service to the public and invisible to it. In all its absurdity it reveals a truth which can only be felt while swimming through its pages. Tenement Press's book covers are bright, its future brighter as it marks itself as an ambitious publisher of poetry, prose and everything in between.
A word from the judge,
Vanessa Onwuemezi
See here for an interview between
Tenement’s publisher and editor,
Dominic Jaeckle, and 3AM Magazine’s fiction editor,
Daniel Davis Wood, on the editorship and publication
of Fowler’s novella ...
![]()
15/03/23
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM shortlisted
for the REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS
PRIZE FOR SMALL PRESSES 2023
MUEUM deftly toes the line between public and private life, the mundane and the fantastical. It is a funny, disturbing, subversive take on the human being as part of the institution, both in service to the public and invisible to it. In all its absurdity it reveals a truth which can only be felt while swimming through its pages. Tenement Press's book covers are bright, its future brighter as it marks itself as an ambitious publisher of poetry, prose and everything in between.
A word from the judge,
Vanessa Onwuemezi
See here for an interview between
Tenement’s publisher and editor,
Dominic Jaeckle, and 3AM Magazine’s fiction editor,
Daniel Davis Wood, on the editorship and publication
of Fowler’s novella ...

Fowler’s debut novella, MUEUM, appears on the 2023 shortlist alongside
Missouri William’s The Doloriad (Dodo Ink),
Thuận’s Chinatown (translated by Nguyễn An Lý, Tilted Axis),
Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book (Pilot Press),
& Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books).
republicofconsciousness.com
Missouri William’s The Doloriad (Dodo Ink),
Thuận’s Chinatown (translated by Nguyễn An Lý, Tilted Axis),
Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book (Pilot Press),
& Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books).
republicofconsciousness.com
15/03/23
Reza Baraheni’s LILITH
PREORDER HERE
Baraheni is a literary man, so his revolt took the form of breathing
“reality and harshness” into the Persian language,
and turning it against his oppressors.
Kirkus Reviews
Iran's finest poet ...
Harper's Magazine
[Baraheni’s] vision was not confined to Iran. He was instrumental in having the wording of charter of PEN International changed to make it more universal. Its first words used to be: “Literature, national though it may be in origin, knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” He proposed deleting the words, “national though it be in origin.” That simple yet profound change was approved at the 2003 PEN Congress in Mexico City, the first change to the document since it was agreed to in 1948. The revised Charter now reads: “Literature knows no frontiers...”
Haroon Siddiqui, former president of PEN Canada,
in tribute to Baraheni on his death in 2022,
PEN International
“reality and harshness” into the Persian language,
and turning it against his oppressors.
Kirkus Reviews
Iran's finest poet ...
Harper's Magazine
[Baraheni’s] vision was not confined to Iran. He was instrumental in having the wording of charter of PEN International changed to make it more universal. Its first words used to be: “Literature, national though it may be in origin, knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” He proposed deleting the words, “national though it be in origin.” That simple yet profound change was approved at the 2003 PEN Congress in Mexico City, the first change to the document since it was agreed to in 1948. The revised Charter now reads: “Literature knows no frontiers...”
Haroon Siddiqui, former president of PEN Canada,
in tribute to Baraheni on his death in 2022,
PEN International

Forthcoming this Spring, a new entry in Tenement's "Yellowjacket" series (as designed by Traven T. Croves), Reza Baraheni's novella Lilith; a lyrical prism of prose and verse.
Lilith is an irreducibly subversive work in which the archetypal female demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the poet’s rebellious inquisitiveness (as she says, ‘I think therefore I am other’) while at the same time metaphorically embodying the fate of the outcast and the state of exile. The poet achieves this (in little more than a hundred pages) by disrupting temporal unity in the interaction of mythical figures, and by introducing elements of language-magic that hark back to poetry’s original reality-making function.
In 2006, Lilith was adapted for the theatre and produced in France and Geneva by Thierry Bedard (under the title Exilith); the novella has thus far only been published in France (Fayard, 2007) in the brilliant French translation by Clément Marzieh, and no edition of it has ever been published in Persian. Indeed, the original manuscript appears to have been lost. The Tenement translation is anchored in Marzieh’s version, fully authorised by Baraheni himself, and also—as afterword—includes Baraheni’s poem ‘Daf,’ as translated by Baraheni and poet Stephen Watts.
Preorder a copy of the novella prior to its May release; 100 first editions will feature a "sticker-as-adornment," a painting by artist Oliver Bancroft, 'A Rig' (2021).
![]()
Publishing 26/05
Reza Baraheni (1935-2022) is one of the twentieth century’s major writers, whose work transverses poetry, novels and essays. With more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism to his name (oft-cited as a “founder of modern literary criticism in Iran,” The Washington Post), he is revered as a key figure in contemporary Persian literary culture. Baraheni’s works have been translated into several languages, and he has taught at universities in Iran, the United States, and Canada. Imprisoned under the Shah in 1973, he was arrested in Tehran; Baraheni claimed he was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days—see God’s Shadow, Prison Poems (Indiana University Press, 1976), and The Crowned Cannibals (Random House, 1977)—and his involvement in the formation of the Consulting Assembly of the Writers Association of Iran necessitated his exile from the Islamic Republic. In Sweden, and in the United States thereafter, he joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with such authors and poets as Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Howard at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee. With Kay Boyle, Baraheni acted as the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. A celebrated and insightful commentator on literary freedom(s), his prose and poetry has been published in such periodicals as Time Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The American Poetry Review. Eventually settling in Canada, Baraheni lived in exile in Toronto, and held post as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature and as president of PEN Canada (2001-2003).
Lilith is an irreducibly subversive work in which the archetypal female demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the poet’s rebellious inquisitiveness (as she says, ‘I think therefore I am other’) while at the same time metaphorically embodying the fate of the outcast and the state of exile. The poet achieves this (in little more than a hundred pages) by disrupting temporal unity in the interaction of mythical figures, and by introducing elements of language-magic that hark back to poetry’s original reality-making function.
In 2006, Lilith was adapted for the theatre and produced in France and Geneva by Thierry Bedard (under the title Exilith); the novella has thus far only been published in France (Fayard, 2007) in the brilliant French translation by Clément Marzieh, and no edition of it has ever been published in Persian. Indeed, the original manuscript appears to have been lost. The Tenement translation is anchored in Marzieh’s version, fully authorised by Baraheni himself, and also—as afterword—includes Baraheni’s poem ‘Daf,’ as translated by Baraheni and poet Stephen Watts.
Preorder a copy of the novella prior to its May release; 100 first editions will feature a "sticker-as-adornment," a painting by artist Oliver Bancroft, 'A Rig' (2021).

Publishing 26/05
Reza Baraheni (1935-2022) is one of the twentieth century’s major writers, whose work transverses poetry, novels and essays. With more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism to his name (oft-cited as a “founder of modern literary criticism in Iran,” The Washington Post), he is revered as a key figure in contemporary Persian literary culture. Baraheni’s works have been translated into several languages, and he has taught at universities in Iran, the United States, and Canada. Imprisoned under the Shah in 1973, he was arrested in Tehran; Baraheni claimed he was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days—see God’s Shadow, Prison Poems (Indiana University Press, 1976), and The Crowned Cannibals (Random House, 1977)—and his involvement in the formation of the Consulting Assembly of the Writers Association of Iran necessitated his exile from the Islamic Republic. In Sweden, and in the United States thereafter, he joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with such authors and poets as Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Howard at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee. With Kay Boyle, Baraheni acted as the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. A celebrated and insightful commentator on literary freedom(s), his prose and poetry has been published in such periodicals as Time Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The American Poetry Review. Eventually settling in Canada, Baraheni lived in exile in Toronto, and held post as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature and as president of PEN Canada (2001-2003).
10/03/23
Tenement Press presents
A VOYAGE TO W. SUNSET BOULEVARD
Jeffrey Vallance is our Philip Marlowe, quite literally our private eye, with a private vision of pied beauty and sacred banality that extends to the horizon.
Dave Hickey
An evening to celebrate the Tenement Press publication of Jeffrey Vallance’s selected esoteric writings, A Voyage to Extremes, featuring readings from Vallance’s Voyage (and conversation on) the collection’s authorship, and a panel discussion with Vallance’s comrades and collaborators, Doug Harvey, Dave Shulman, and Daniel Rolnik.
Stories Books & Café
1716 W. Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
storiesla.com

ORDER HERE
Jeffrey Vallance was born in 1955 in Redondo Beach, CA. In 1979, he received a B.A. from CSUN and in 1981 an MFA. from Otis. His work blurs the lines between object making, installation, performance, curating and writing and his projects are often site-specific, such as burying a frozen chicken at a pet cemetery; traveling to Polynesia to research the myth of Tiki; having audiences with the king of Tonga; the queen and president of Palau and the presidents of Iceland; creating a Richard Nixon Museum; traveling to the Vatican to study Christian relics; installing an exhibit aboard a tugboat in Sweden; and curating shows in the museums of Las Vegas (such as the Liberace and Clown Museum). In Lapland Vallance constructed a shamanic “magic drum.” In Orange County, Mr. Vallance curated the only art world exhibition of the Painter of Light entitled Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth. In 1983, he was host of MTV’s The Cutting Edge and appeared on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. In 2004, Vallance received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation award. In addition to exhibiting his artwork, Vallance has written for such publications and journals as Art Issues, Artforum, the LA Weekly, Juxtapoz, Frieze and the Fortean Times. He has published over ten books including Blinky the Friendly Hen, The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994, Christian Dinosaur, Art on the Rocks, Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage, Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, My Life with Dick, Relics and Reliquaries, The Vallance Bible and Rudis Tractus (Rough Drawing). Vallance lives and works in Los Angeles.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. His first serious piece of art criticism was ‘Jeffrey Vallance: Lateral Drawing’ published in Peter Hamilton's UCLArt zine. His most recent curatorial project was the Vallance-led Valley Plein Air Club’s Views of the Desert Lighthouse at PRJCT LA. Apparently he can not escape.
Dave Shulman is an award-winning writer and visual artist, best known for his columns and features in LA Weekly from 1994 to 2010. He lives with chronic depression and his cat, Bear, in a small cottage near the mighty Los Angeles River.
Daniel Rolnik is a co-founder of the Creativity Crisis Center.
01/02/23
Fowler’s “Yellowjacket” MUEUM longlisted
for THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS
2023

(see here)
JUDGES:
Isabel Waidner,
Vanessa Onwuemezi,
& Lamorna Ash
John Smith,
LITTLE BOY (Boiler House Press);
Yewande Omotoso,
AN UNUSUAL GRIEF (Cassava Republic);
Missouri Williams,
THE DOLORIAD (Dead Ink Books);
Fatima Das,
THE LAST ONE (Hope Road);
Eva Ďurovec,
NEW MINDMAPPING FORMS (Montez Press);
Zoë Wicomb,
STILL LIFE (Peninsula Press);
Nate Lippens,
MY DEAD BOOK (Pilot Press);
Sheena Patel,
I'M A FAN (Rough Trade Books);
SJ Fowler,
MUEUM (Tenement Press);
Thuận,
translated from the Vietnamese
by Nguyễn An Lý,
CHINATOWN (Tilted Axis)

31/01/23
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.

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.
09/01/23
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!

06/01/23
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.
16/12/22
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.’
14/12/22
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Translated from the Italian
by Cristina Viti
La rabbia / Anger
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

05/12/22
Launching LA RABBIA
& PASOLINI / PEDRIALI:
Two Evenings at London’s
Italian Cultural Institute
Tenement Press presents
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
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.
This exhibition is free,
but registration for the opening is essential;
see here to book a ticket ...
11/11/22
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 ...
24/10/22
Jeffrey Vallance
A Voyage to Extremes
Selected Spiritual Writings
Announcing a new entry in Tenement's “yellow-jacket” series; collecting Vallance's 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.


Jeffrey Vallance is our Philip Marlowe, quite literally our private eye, with a private vision of pied beauty and sacred banality that extends to the horizon.
Dave Hickey
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
If Los Angeles were Paris, Jeffrey Vallance would surely be declared a national treasure.
Jan Tumlir, Artforum
Vallance, appearing on
Late Night with David Letterman
(NBC, 1983)
Out now via Tenement Press, for a further word
on this publication, see here.
ORDER HERE
04/10/22
Kyra Simone
Palace of Rubble
Announcing the publication of the sixth "yellow-jacket" from Tenement Press; a debut collection of prose works by Simone, with accompanying photographs by artist John Divola, composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources.
Out now via Tenement Press, for a further word on this publication, see here.
ORDER HERE


Majestic flights of fancy spun around ravaged landscapes
and savaged realities, these are remarkable prose poems
for the 21st century.
Chloe Aridjis
Like traditional methods of salting, pickling, drying, and smoking, Palace of Rubble saves transitory substance from expiration. From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, the patterns and variations on patterns that define the sphere of the daily, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure. The world she constructs is recognizable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact, possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time—a lamp store in Chinatown is “a gallery of lights all blinking in dissonant rays of color,” the disassembling of a famous church that will be put together a few miles up the road is rendered via “the villagers holding pieces of it in their hands as they head over the hill in a great procession into the distance.” As the author herself puts it, these texts retain “a distant ember of the world from which they were first generated,” an effect that can feel for the reader like peering into a place that is both familiar and unknown, gazing at this place through the blur and distance implied by the passage of large swathes of time, physical displacement or shifts in ontological perspective.
Alexandra Kleeman
Simone, reading four (of the forty-nine) ‘palaces’ collated in this edition; McNally Jackson Books (New York), 28/09/22.
01/10/22
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16/09/22
BIG DOOM ABOVE ME
45 Minutes in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A special-broadcast with Montez Press
22/09/22, 13:55
12/09/22
Pier Paolo Pasolini Tenement & Resonance Extra
present SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation...
Luke Kennard
Broadcasting on Resonance Extra at 13:00, 01/10/22, the first instalment in a special four-part, unabridged serialisation of SJ Fowler’s debut novella, MUEUM—as read by the author—recorded on location in Resonance’s South London studios.
See here.
present SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation...
Luke Kennard
Broadcasting on Resonance Extra at 13:00, 01/10/22, the first instalment in a special four-part, unabridged serialisation of SJ Fowler’s debut novella, MUEUM—as read by the author—recorded on location in Resonance’s South London studios.
See here.
SJ Fowler & Gareth Evans
The novella will air in monthly instalments...
I (01/10/22)
II (05/11/22)
III (03/12/22)
IV (07/01/23)
I (01/10/22)
II (05/11/22)
III (03/12/22)
IV (07/01/23)
Post-broadcast, all episodes will be archived on Resonance Extra (see here), and will be available to download direct from Tenement following the season’s finale in January. A paper copy of Fowler’s novella can be ordered direct from Tenement Press here.
The Resonance series launches with an evening’s affair at Brick Lane Books (19:00, 05/20/22) with readings from Fowler, Iain Sinclair, Choe Aridjis, and Chris McCabe; see here for tickets.
The Resonance series launches with an evening’s affair at Brick Lane Books (19:00, 05/20/22) with readings from Fowler, Iain Sinclair, Choe Aridjis, and Chris McCabe; see here for tickets.

Fowler recording
in the Resonance Chapel,
Spring 2022
16/09/22
BIG DOOM ABOVE ME
45 Minutes in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
A special-broadcast with Montez Press
22/09/22, 13:55
Broadcasting over on Montez Press radio, an hour’s worth of radio on and around Fowler’s recent Tenement title, MUEUM (see here). A forty-five minute long snowstorm of pages, BIG DOOM ABOVE ME features readings from the novella, from a suite of unpublished poems that preceded it, and concludes with a brief lecturette from the author. BIG DOOM ABOVE ME is introduced by a brief exchange between Fowler and author Eley Williams (for Fowler and Williams’ full conversation, see here).
12/09/22
La rabbia / Anger


La rabbia is about experiences which both question and answer leave aside. About the coldness of winter for the homeless. About the warmth that the remembering of revolutionary heroes can offer, about the irreconcilability of freedom and hate, about the peasant flair of Pope John XXIII whose eyes smile like a tortoise, about Stalin’s faults which were our own faults, about the devilish temptation of thinking any struggle is over, about the death of Marilyn Monroe and how beauty is all that remains from the stupidity of the past and the savagery of the future, about how Nature and Wealth are the same thing for the possessing classes, about our mothers and their hereditary tears, about the children of children of children, about the injustices that follow even a noble victory, about the little panic in the eyes of Sophia Loren when she watches a fishermen’s hands cutting open an eel…
John Berger
A hundred pages of elegiac prose and verse, a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions: in the workshop for La rabbia, Pier Paolo Pasolini experimented for the first time with a form differing from the conventions of traditional film narrative and documentary. In his own words, what he wanted to create was ‘a new cinema genre. To make a poetic and ideological essay with new sequences.’ La rabbia was meant as ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility—a record of the presence of a world that, unlike the bourgeois world, has a deep grasp of reality. Reality: a true love of tradition, as only revolution can give.’
Roberto Chiesi
For a further word on this collection,
see here.
John Berger
A hundred pages of elegiac prose and verse, a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions: in the workshop for La rabbia, Pier Paolo Pasolini experimented for the first time with a form differing from the conventions of traditional film narrative and documentary. In his own words, what he wanted to create was ‘a new cinema genre. To make a poetic and ideological essay with new sequences.’ La rabbia was meant as ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility—a record of the presence of a world that, unlike the bourgeois world, has a deep grasp of reality. Reality: a true love of tradition, as only revolution can give.’
Roberto Chiesi
For a further word on this collection,
see here.
15/07/22
Kyra Simone
Palace of Rubble
Palace of Rubble
Forthcoming in the Autumn,
the sixth title from Tenement Press,
a collection of one-sided stories,
with photographs by John Divola ...


PREORDER HERE
Like traditional methods of salting, pickling, drying, and smoking, Palace of Rubble saves transitory substance from expiration. From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, the patterns and variations on patterns that define the sphere of the daily, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure.
Alexandra Kleeman
Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble is a collection of one-page stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources. Written under constraint in the tradition of Oulipo, these hybrid works of prose are reconstructions that no longer resemble the original texts, yet draw from the same reservoir of vocabulary, conveying new images and ideas, while preserving some distant ember of the universe from which they were first generated. Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Saddam Hussein’s demolished palaces printed on the cover of a newspaper Simone found discarded on a café table during the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Palace of Rubble has since evolved into an accumulation of texts invoked by a historical moment spanning the eras of Bush, Obama, Trump, and into the present day. Offering surreal glimpses of what might be identified as echoes of a post-Republic America, an imagined Middle East, and some other unnamed and unreachable world, it chronicles a vivid landscape of crumbling towers and heart-broken animals, eclipses, comets, and lovers in abandoned rooms, still searching for beauty amidst the ruins of the catastrophe bequeathed to them.
See here for a further word
on Simone’s collection.
08/07/22
Pier Paolo Pasolini
La rabbia / Anger
Translated from the Italian by Cristina Viti
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle,
Cristina Viti & Stephen Watts
In a first-time English language translation
by Cristina Viti to mark
the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press
will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
groundbreaking, filmic work
of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger ...
by Cristina Viti to mark
the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press
will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
groundbreaking, filmic work
of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger ...
Announcing the last Tenement title of 2022,
forthcoming in December...
forthcoming in December...
Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.
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In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms.
SEE HERE
28/06/22
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
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


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.
28/06/22
Jeffrey Vallance
A Voyage to Extremes:
Selected Spiritual Writings
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
PREORDER HERE
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.
06/05/22
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
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.
28/06/22
Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger,
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi

ORDER HERE
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
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.
08/12/21
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


01/12/21
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
22/11/21
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
09/11/21
EVENT / JOAN BROSSA
CENTRE FOR CATALAN STUDIES,
QUEEN MARY, LONDON
24.11.21 / 19:00
An evening celebrating Tenement’s 2021 publication of The Tumbler / El saltamartí (translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths), featuring readings, reminiscences, and a reading of a new, commissioned work from Stephen Watts in response to Brossa’s writings and contexts. This event is free, but advance booking is essential...
See here for tickets.

23/10/21
Stanley Schtinter, et al
The Liberated Film Club
Featuring works by Shezad Dawood; Chris Petit; Andrea Luka Zimmerman; William Fowler; John Rogers; Ben Rivers; Gideon Koppel; Gareth Evans; Adam Roberts; John Akomfrah; Shama Khanna; Tony Grisoni; Damien Sanville; Mania Akbari; Xiaolu Guo; Sean Price Williams; Chloe Aridjis; Athina Tsangari; Juliet Jacques; Anna Thew; Adam Christensen; Laura Mulvey; Astra Taylor; Dennis Cooper; Stewart Home; Stephen Watts; Dan Fox; Miranda Pennell; Elena Gorfinkel; & Tai Shani.
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.

15/04/21
Joan Brossa
El saltamartí / The Tumbler
Translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths
Edited by Cameron Griffiths & Dominic Jaeckle
ORDER HERE
