About — Tenement Press

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^{Tenement Press is an independent and unfunded publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion of experimental literary works—in English and first-time English language translation—wherein which the poetic and the political intersect.}

_{Series edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle

& designed by Traven T. Croves

(Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister)}

_{Editor & Publisher
Dominic J. Jaeckle}

_{editors@tenementpress.com
+44 (0)7532 128558}

_Design
_{Traven T. Croves

traven-t-croves.co.uk

info@traven-t-croves.co.uk}

_{Water-tanks are tramp directories.

Not all in idle wantonness do tramps

carve their monicas, dates, and courses.

Jack London, The Road (1907)}

_{Tenement’s insignia is borrowed from the ‘signal code’—a pictograph languange popularised during the great depression as a means of communicating vital information between itinerant workers as they traversed North America. Although there is some dispute as to the veracity and extent of the code’s usage (with some scholars claiming the code a fiction conjured up to portray unity and solidarity between vagrants), it’s place in folklore as a subterranean means of communication underwrites the aims of a Tenement spine.}

_{^{(Left) An artist’s re-rendering of a ‘signal,’ meaning
‘a safe place to rest,’ ‘to take the night.’ See John E. Fawcett
and Elizabeth D. Rambeau, ‘A Hobo Memoir, 1936,’

Indiana Magazine of History, 90.4 (1994)

(Right) John Divola, from the ‘Zuma’ series, circa 1977}}

Distribution
_{Asterism (asterismbooks.com)

Tenement’s catalogue is represented by Asterism Books,
an online bookstore and wholesale portal designed, built, and run
by independent publishers.

SEE HERE FOR TENEMENT’S CATALOGUE ON ASTERISM

For any press queries or trade enquiries, please contact the editors here.}

The Yellowjackets
_{A sideways resuscitation of Penguin’s abandoned, yellow-topped miscellany series, an effort to win the colour back from cowardice, Tenement’s “Yellowjackets” are a thread of angular, interdisciplinary and experimental works in English and first-time English language translation in which the political, poetic, and philosophical intersect.

I. Joan Brossa

El saltamartí / The Tumbler
Translated from the Catalan

by Cameron Griffiths
978-1-8380200-1-9

See here

Joan Brossa creates distilled excitement. He is both wise and wild. His poems are surreal and matter-of-fact, playful and minimalist and utterly original. In his ability to make it new, Brossa is an essential modern poet.

Colm Tóibín}

_{II. Stanley Schtinter, et al

The Liberated Film Club
An anthology publication of ‘introductions’ to the unknown.
978-1-8380200-3-3

See here

Schtinter runs with wolves. His Liberated Film Club was, throughout its brief, perfect existence, the antidote to contemporary cinephilia. It was impious and sexy, mysterious and unsober, a ululatory free zone for refuseniks, a place of magic and mayonnaise. If you never made it to one of its mad, baffling nights, this book is guaranteed to make your loss all the more deliciously unbearable.

Sukhdev Sandhu}

_{III. Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger

Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi
978-1-8380200-4-0

See here

A White Review ‘Book of the Year’ 2022

Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless—it can dance this way and that, and then turn and turn again. The exchange of voices, singing lines that meet and part, pick up on the presence of the lover and the beloved in the poems; as Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger pass each newly wrought phrase back and forth between them, the distance between Seale in Istanbul and Moger in Cape Town is bridged, and so are the centuries that separate us from Ibn Arabi, his motifs, his mystical ascents and descents, and his anguished yearning. This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.

Marina Warner}

_{IV. SJ Fowler, MUEUM
A novella
978-1-8380200-6-4

See here

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2022/23

Deeply, beautifully unsettling, and somehow so complete that I have screwed up and rewritten this endorsement seventeen times. As a text, MUEUM seems to eat any potential response to it. Sometimes I called it a mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation; sometimes I called it the psychopathology of the institution; sometimes I just made sub-animal noises. Initially I just felt awe at how compelling Fowler can make the sheer tedium of labour, in an environment terrifyingly regimented, curious (and intimate, like being let backstage behind existence itself), but this was gradually replaced by an increasing suspense and horror which got its claws into me for the whole last half of the novella. Anyway. It makes me very happy—and also insanely jealous—that works like this are being written.

Luke Kennard}

_{V. Jeffrey Vallance

A Voyage to Extremes
A bible-long collation of the artist’s selected spiritual writings.
978-1-8380200-5-7

See here

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!

Artillery Magazine}

_{VI. Kyra Simone

Palace of Rubble
978-1-8380200-7-1

See 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. 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.

Alexandra Kleeman}

_{VII. Pier Paolo Pasolini

La rabbia / Anger
Translated from the Italian

by Cristina Viti
978-1-8380200-8-8

See here

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

VIII. Reza Baraheni, Lilith

A novella
978-1-8380200-9-5

See here

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}

_{IX. Dolors Miquel

El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
978-1-7393851-0-1

See here

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

X. Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies
A book of endings.
978-1-7393851-1-8

See here

All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment.

Alan Moore}

_{XI. Mario Benedetti

El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Angel’s Birthday

Translated from the Spanish

by Adam Feinstein
978-1-7393851-2-5

See here

It’s extremely difficult to find a poem which fulfils the condition of a novel and a lyrical text without betraying both. El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel achieves this feat through experimental verse. It’s an extraordinary river-poem in which, without abandoning the nucleus of poetic art, Benedetti takes the genre of militancy and the pamphlet a step further. As if a true Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the protagonist passes through different stages as revolutionary as they are imbued with a biblical, epic quality. It is so fortunate for all those discerning English-speaking readers that this book is now published.

Agustín Fernández Mallo}

_{XII. Edwina Attlee

a great shaking
978-1-7393851-8-7

See here

In mediaeval manuscripts, engravings of the steps of life from birth to death often omitted women completely. In this fascinating collection, Attlee talks to them directly, making them entirely visible as she explores the legacies of indentured labour, the toils of women and the mythologies of motherhood, all in real time: the crows eat up the corn / the baby is back / and the women open their legs to the stove / pushing soft porridge into his mouth / like companionable silence. This empathy and companionship are the backdrop to her own negotiations of work, family and political activity, and expose how impossibly intermingled these are. She weighs the magical thinking of folktale and childhood against the real world to expose the gap between there and here, while continuing the ancient task of trying to find a way to make it all work. Her language is present and exact, and razor sharp: my mother is here / laughing like a broken plate. Throughout, there is love and wry humour: You are the word I will use to call the cows home at night (‘Old English love song, Traditional’). This is a deeply affecting collection; these poems come from a very genuine sense of communion with all those semi-visible individuals who labour and have always laboured for love, family and fairness. Forgive us this standing. Forgive us in strength. / Unforgive if forgiving undoes sorrow. Do not unstep your step.

Lesley Harrison}

_{XIII. Giovanbattista Tusa
Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism
978-1-7393851-9-4

See here}

_{Giovanbattista Tusa finds the words that won’t fill the disquiet and the terror of the illegible revolt of the elements against our way of production. The fury of climate deregulation and the ecological crisis have a history and a foreseeable future that we now must become acquainted with. This book is a magnificent tool to help us begin to accomplish the most urgent task of contemporary humankind: the only one that can save us.

Claire Fontaine}

_{XIV. Chris McCabe
Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism
978-1-7393851-9-4

See here

[Chris McCabe] is a man to be respected and enjoyed.

Ivor Cutler}

_{XV. Lucy Sante
Six Sermons for Bob Dylan
978-1-7393851-9-4

See here}

_{What the world needs now are these conjured sermons from the always brilliant mind of Lucy Sante. In these rollicking and clarifying exhortations, she urges us to find the good and the God in everyone. We look inward, see how we have faltered, and discover our humanity. What is so refreshing is the call to love all of us: the fallen, the fools, the forgotten.

Dana Spiotta

This beautiful book will appeal to sinners and the saved alike.

Scott Bunn, Aquarium Drunkard

Sante’s sermons sing on the page.

Greil Marcus}

Forthcoming

_{XVI. Wadih Saadeh
A Horse at the Door / A chronological survey of poems
978-1-7393851-9-4

Forthcoming in December / See here}

_{In a 2014 AlMayadeen TV interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work ‘an autobiography of other people’s lives.’ At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six year old—very arguably the greatest living Arabic poet—did not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murray’s All Writing Is Autobiography is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be you—that feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is ‘a momentary, illusory cure’ from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to ‘the absent one,’ ‘a shadow self, the self that cannot be present.’ Summoning that inner absence, switching on the reader’s presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time.

Youssef Rakha, from his Afterword,
‘The Australian’}

Occasional Collaborations

_{I. Seven Rooms (Tenement Press & Prototype Publishing, 2023)
(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler
An anthology publication, an assembly of works from a magazine
series called Hotel.
978-1-913513-46-7

See here}

_{Once a magazine, now an anthology, a selection, a condensing, a celebration, a feast, call it what you will, for this volume takes on different forms in the eyes of each reader. Each generation should build their own edifices, whether hotels, factories or pleasure domes, places in which they gather their interests and ideas so that they can hand them forward.

Each editor must have a burning desire to research and draw from precursors and move with contemporaries, find a dialogue, or ideally a community and make it public, a way to share, to offer as a gift the work that one finds valuable and that one would like others to consider. I want to be made aware of that ongoing dialogue. I want something personal from its editor, an intimacy you might call it.

This hotel started as a series of dialogues in seven issues of a magazine. Now it is re-edited to found a new dialogue, drawing from theseries to make a fresh whole. Today technology allows us to use itto work with art, illustrations and markings to bind with the texts, helping the volume to gain its own rhythm. For me, there’s added interest in this volume with its global reach, with foreign works to thread through the weave. And further, many of the texts are shaped with referencing other writings, and thus further weaves. And yet, though the fabric shows such diversity and span in its contributions, there is a sense of intimacy overall. This anthology has acquired its own presence. And like any anthology of worth it makes me want to read more, to follow up various writers, people new, people who I’ve known about but who have slipped my net, too many to name, many in fact. This anthology does that, with panache. I love it. And as I re-read, seeking what I intend to follow through, I am listening to John Cale in concert making ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ his own.

Paul Buck

Literary diversity was always on show in Hotel.

Michael Caines, The Times Literary Supplement

II. Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies (Tenement Press & purge.xxx, 2023)
(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Stanley Schtinter
A limited run “glow-in-the-dark” big and black hardback edition of
Schtinter’s debut authored work.

978-1-7393851-6-3

See here}

_{Here is the endgame of endgames. A commendably perverse demonstration of how it is possible for something to be assimilated, by way of rumour and manipulated history, without being experienced.

Iain Sinclair, Sight and Sound

In Last Movies, artist-curator Stanley Schtinter turns the idea, that film captures the dead and turns them into ghosts, on its head. Rather than focus on deceased people onscreen, he finds out (or, occasionally, makes an informed guess at) what was the last film that various important twentieth-century political and cultural figures had watched, bringing together a potted history of the medium itself.

Juliet Jacques, ArtReview}

No University Press _{No University Press (NoUP) publishes argumentative work of any field, so long as it is also work that strives beyond its field; work possessing a presentist enthusiasm that works beyond the policies of enclosure that define and underwrite the mission of academic publishing. An imprint from Tenement Press, NoUP exists as both an open, digital library and print publisher. Concentrating on collaboration and cooperation in lieu of peer review, the press will advocate a fair remuneration for its authors, and consider the pace (and place) of publication as an (unerringly) collaborative process.

I. Radical Translation Workshop,
An Anarchist Playbook
A crowd-sourced set of workshop translations
of texts from the French Revolution.
978-1-7393851-3-2

See here}

_{An Anarchist Playbook is an essential collection of works that were the roots from which all later revolutionary ideas grew. Skillfully translated and beautifully designed, it belongs in every radical’s library.

Mitch Abidor

An Anarchist Playbook is an excavation of future thinking. In its radical mode of communal translation, it recovers equally radical political energies.

Adam Thirlwell}

_{I. Maria Sledmere,
Midsummer Song / Hypercritique
Sledmere’s Song is an interrogative appendix of
essayistic motifs and citational montage. A raised bed of
a book, a syncopated study of mutualism, commonality,
interdependence, and resilience.
978-1-7393851-7-0

See here}

_{Midsummer Song intermingles a lodestar of potent poetic sources into a lyric architecture which refuses to be singular in form or bound by convention. This book is plural—at once an elegy for our world—and also—seance and party you won't want to miss. Your tools, dear reader, include countless luminary texts, summer light while it lasts, meadows, cinders, glass, and clairvoyance. Can the poet be everywhere? If nuance is purple and writing is light, this book may convince us that dream space is the necessary elixir to take with us into impermanence, bursting with everything in the world, an ecstatic catalogue and a devastated delirium. Like Christensen's alphabet, this book at once beams and cautions—like a horn of plenty spiraling out from the ear of Athena, a cornucopia of Sledmere's poetic powers. No other poet can make me feel giddy at the end of the world, gorgeous with intimate tears and flight. Descendants of Bernadette Mayer rejoice—now at long last we can dream not only the winter's dark but also in summers blindingly bright. Like when we climb into the red- / threaded spiderweb / of another plague year / and we activate the starlight / stimulus package / in thermotaxis.

Laynie Browne}

John Cassavetes

_{An occasional publication series, the ‘Cassavetes’ titles are a set of books in a sequenced train of thought (named not for the filmmaker’s body of work but for his “kitchen sink” forms of low and no budget production). An occasional assembly of collaborations and experiments by Dominic J. Jaeckle.

I. Dominic J. Jaeckle

& Hoagy Houghton
36 Exposures / A bastardised roll of film
978-1-7393851-4-9

See here

Does language need to be reinvented in order to talk? Or even, to see? Dominic Jaeckle thinks so, and provides a compelling, propulsive essay poetry to accompany a year-long suite of pictures by Hoagy Houghton. This twitterverse feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. While there are encounters by the galore, and biographical instants dropped like crumbs on a forest walk, the focus here is not on the story, but the lighting, the staging, the choreography of digression. Talk about talking. In these mirrors are reflections of a lost brother, an almost date, an almost self, on the times we used to have, the blood rites we shared until we couldn’t. Black and white photos offer starting points to think about colour. What colour is the memory of brother? The photographs offer shadowy basement creatures caught in the half light, as if the camera wasn’t even there, vacuuming up every decisive moment. Pensive, coiled, we are dropped in the midst of a drama that will need to bury a few Russian philosophers before life can begin again. And coursing through it all this essential belief: that the right painted apple, the right sentence, the right thought: would change the world. The revolution is in the waiting room.

Mike Hoolboom

Jaeckle shows us the difference between watching and looking. Between staring and focussing. Between thought-making and thinking.

[...]

36 Exposures is a source book containing enough ejector seats for Jaeckle to get high as a writer for the rest of his life.

Chris McCabe

II.   Dominic J. Jaeckle
  Magnolia or Redbud / Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs
978-1-7393851-5-6

   See here

My mother returning to me is one of the primal images of my life. Added to all this, I could not help marvelling, is what booksellers call a sort of brogue. These are all part and parcel of this precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me ...

   David Keenan

Dominic Jaeckle’s strange homage—is it really?—to William S. Burroughs’s mother Laura Lee takes the form of poetic assemblages that are invariably funnier and more subversive than the language of their anodyne source material would suggest. But this beautifully composed volume also goes beyond the more familiar uses of the cut-up, fashioning an unpredictable array of gifts through its trance-like modalities: These perishable arrangements / are the needle that holds our colder climates together.

David Grubbs}

_{Hotel Cordel

Hotel Cordel takes its cue from traditional Spanish “Cordel” literatures. A nineteenth century pamphlet culture that owes to the Portuguese ‘literatura de cordel’ (translating as a “string” or “thread” literature), ‘Pliegos de cordel’ (cordel sheets) are a cousin to the ‘bibliothèque bleue’ (blue library) in French publishing tradition; a brother to the German ‘Volksbuch’ (people’s book): an inexpensively printed pamphlet containing folk novelettes, poems, political statements and songs. So named because they were hung from strings in marketplaces to display these texts to theirpotential readers, Cordel sheets would conform to the traditional chapbook format; printed on a single sheet and then folded into a paper concertina of either 8, 12, 16 or 24 pages. Re-versioning this convention, Hotel Cordel will run as a series of collaborative pamphlets that’ll see Hotel partner with poets, authors, other small press projects, publishers, artists and curators to produce a series of pocket literatures in the Cordel tradition.

Forthcoming / Keep an ear to the ground.}

_{Editor & Publisher
Dominic J. Jaeckle

Contributing Editor(s)
Jon Auman

Benjamin Pickford
Stephen Watts

No University Press
Benjamin Pickford
Alexandra Dias Fortes

Design
Traven T. Croves
(Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister)

Radio, Audio, & Production
Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Milo Thesiger-Meacham

Guest Readers
Lucy Mercer (Open Call, May ‘22 / Poetry)
Vanessa Onwuemezi (Open Call, May ‘22 / Poetry)}