To write is not to tell stories. 
It is the opposite of telling stories.
        —Marguerite Duras, 
        La vie matérielle /                        
        Practicalities (1987)

        

PREOrder direct from Tenement here.

(04.09.26)

(Praise for Viti’s works titles prior.)

‘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 
        on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
         La rabbia / Anger

(See here.)

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

(See here.)



One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing.
        —Max Porter 
        on Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.

(See here.)