Rolling News & Reviews

12.02.26

Sharon Kivland’s Envois
reviewed by Frank Wasser
ArtReview

See Here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

In this careful reading of Lacan’s work, understood as an act of writing and creative editing, Kivland performs a literary critique, reshaping Lacan’s seminars through selective interventions that illuminate interpretive possibilities and bring the subtleties of his discourse into sharper focus. She interrogates Lacan’s voice, his rhetorical authority and his pedagogical methods, producing a more pointed engagement than recent purely fictive reimaginings of writers, such as the appropriation of Kathy Acker’s writing and identity in recent works by Chris Kraus and Olivia Laing.
Envois shows that engaging with Lacan is less about mastering a stable theory than inhabiting a language that illuminates lack, repetition and the persistent labour of desire, while also exposing the pressures, contradictions and many foibles of the man himself. Shedding light on a figure whose personal life was at times as fraught and theatrical as his clinical and philosophical output, the book also makes concrete Kivland’s methodological making, positioning reading itself as material. Accidentally or not, it provides a more approachable path into Lacan’s seminars than many canonical readings, blending his key ideas with the pleasures of Kivland’s endlessly mischievous, intimate literary play.
—Frank Wasser

10.02.26

New Canons

A special event at the ica, london /
A celebration of ‘innovative authors’
& ‘independent publishers.’

See here. / Ticket Link.

A first reading from Nadia de Vries’ entry in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, All My Dead Jesters.

Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

16.01.26

SJ Fowler, BARABUS Graft II / III

The twenty-third title in Tenement’s rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series—the second work in a percolating trilogy of fictions by SJ Fowler—out now.

ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE.

Frenetic and exhilarating outbursts, as eye-witness accounts from a mind's eye of true originality. Harnessing a sublime gift-of-the-gab, Fowler—garbed as a healthcare professional—rushes headlong into a world full of genuine trepidation and make-believe.
Convincingly performative and harrowingly memorable with great tracts that remain branded-on-the-brain long after the event, he digs breathlessly into episodes of hardcore mundanity as if he/we were actually there.
Sometimes some things need to be said ...

Melancholy, an appetite
no misery satisfies [E.M Cioran].

—Andrew Kötting

Back to top.

03.12.25

New Statesman ‘Books of the Year’ 2025

Jacqueline Rose selects Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

In the face of a genocide that has rendered many speechless, the outpouring of writing from Gaza has shown a people who will not be silenced, who have managed to go on living even in a world that can feel devoid of life. Two books recently circulated by the new Palfest Bookshelf beautifully make the point. Batool Abu Akleen, who has been writing and winning poetry prizes since the age of 15, has now begun to translate herself into English. In her bilingual collection 48Kg. (Tenement Press), she shows us the hell of Gaza sinking into the innermost recesses of the self: ‘I pour the mixture into my heart / Until it blackens. / This is how I cook my own grief.’
In the anthology Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Comma Press, 2025), she takes her place alongside three other writers, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana and Ala’a Obaid, who each live or have lived in Gaza, who use the diary form to record the worst with stripped-back simplicity, day by day. This is writing against atrocity, every line a pitch for freedom. In the words of Sabra, it involves walking ‘on a taut thread, balancing in mid-air.’
—Jacqueline Rose

Back to top.

05.11.25

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat
reviewed by Lucy Thraves
The Wire (December 2025 / Issue 502).

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

The buzzing of the cicada is an example of acousmatic sound—a sound whose source is obscured. The pressure that this phenomenon exerts, and has exerted, on different kinds of embodied imagination is the theme of Audible Heat, Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s gently psychogeographic meditation on the sound of the cicada and the ways in interacts with different actors' senses of their bodies in space.
He begins in 1737 with John Bartram, the first botanist born to North American settlers, imparting the heady effect of the insects: ‘When we are in the woods, we can scarcely hear anything else.’ To the early settlers of North America, the sound of the cicada was quickly associated with an intense and unfamiliar heat, and therefore became invested with all kinds of fears about sickness and death—it didn't help that they were all too ready to understand the insects through a biblical lens, as the locusts wreaked havoc on crops. Thesiger-Meacham deftly compares the colonisers' responses to those of the Indigenous people who's land was being colonised: the Navajo (Diné), for instance, turned to eating the cicadas due to loss of hunting land and crop failure.
The buzz of the cicada has been incorporated musically, via the hardy-curdy's so-called buzzing bridge: Thesiger-Meacham highlights Austrian composer Matthias Loibner's folk piece ‘Crystal Waters,’ which was ‘played in communication with cicadas from the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in Australia.’ It crops up in films, too: a significant chunk of Audible Heat offers a close analysis of the ways Sergio Leone deploys the sound in his spaghetti westerns, most notably The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, which is plaited together with reflections on Socrates's mythologising around the cicada (that the ‘energetic nature of the sound is a deliberate mockery of humans as “slavish” in the sun.’) In the final stand off between the three titular characters in Leone’s film, Thesiger-Meacham observes that the men fall silent, while the background of the cicada is brought to the fore: ‘This lack of speech in the face of the cicadas’ sound is something which, according to the myth told by Socrates, would cast a spell on the gunmen.’ His suggestion that it is as though the characters have forgotten the bags of gold at their feet unlocks a way of thinking about the film's morality that might otherwise be overlooked.
An interesting link is implied between the geographical dislocation inherent to the spaghetti western (filmed in Italy, or in the case of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Spain, but set in the ‘Wild West’ of America) and the geographical dislocation experienced by the colonialists in North America: in both cases, the cicada could be understood to symbolise a sort of phenomenonological anxiety, a feeling of foreignness, of being out of place.

Thesiger-Meacham curates this considerable research in an unlaboured way, and expresses it in a cool, detached tone—though opening and closing anecdotes about his own relationship to the subject matter give the whole endeavour a warmly personal frame. Illustrations and photographs are deployed in the manner of WG Sebald to provide a light, occasionally offbeat, visual commentary on the text; on the CD version, which is read by Thesiger-Meacham, music and sound extracts provide an audible one. Extracts from lyrics and political speeches that reference cicadas pepper the text, affirming the notion that these creatures are always buzzing in the background of our cultural imagination, hiding in plain sight.
—Lucy Thraves,
The Wire (December 2025 / Issue 502)

Back to top.

29.10.25

Support Batool Abu Akleen
following her evacuation from Gaza.

DONATE HERE

Batool Abu Akleen is an award-winning young Palestinian poet who was evacuated to France during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, arriving in Paris on October 28, 2025.

Abu Akleen has been accepted into the third year of a bachelor's degree program in the Department of Cinema at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. We have committed to providing her with a monthly scholarship, which was a necessary condition for her to be included on the evacuation lists of the French Consulate in Jerusalem. We now need your help to ensure that this scholarship can be a collective effort.
The goal of €21,600 would allow us to pay her a monthly scholarship of €900 for 24 months, which would be added to another modest scholarship from Campus France.
Batool is an emerging voice in Palestinian poetry. At only 15 years old, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I Did Not Steal the Cloud.’ Her first collection of poems, 48Kg., was published in June 2025 by Tenement Press in the United Kingdom. Also in 2025, her poems were published in Letters from Gaza (Penguin, edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer), and her diaries were collected in Voices of Resistance (Comma Press, edited by Caryl Churchill and Gillian Slovo, soon to be translated and published in France by Actes Sud). As poet in residence with Modern Poetry in Translation, she was the co-editor and translator of the pamphlet, SEA SHELLS: An Anthology of Emerging Poets from Gaza (Modern Poetry in Translation). She also contributed to the 58th issue of The Funambulist, dedicated to ‘Return’ (March/April 2025). She is a mentor for the SOAS Hands Up Project—a Creative Writing mentor/mentee programme in London—and recently received a Jean-Jacques-Rousseau Fellowship from the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
Your help, whatever the amount, will enable us to provide her with the material means to stay in France, so that she can continue her work in dignified and peaceful conditions alongside her studies.

Batool Abu Akleen, Paris,
on October 28, 2025.

Back to top.

25.10.25

Sharon Kivland, Envois /
The Complete Correspondence : Love Letters from
Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland, 1953-1981

Order direct from Tenement here.

The twenty-second title in Tenement’s rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series—a sister to Her Discourse (Joan, 2025) and a cousin to These are addressed to you (Bricks from the Kiln, 2025)—out now.

The sum of all values in a letter is its meaning. What it means is up for grabs, its grabbiness tied, like the knot, to the love, here, of the woman. But what we know is that the woman does not, cannot, exist. Kivland, here, is this non-existent woman, meaning everywhere, and everywhere drives meaning. The meaning of this book is desire, its way of constricting, dilating, evading, enveloping... The problem with this book is that it is beautiful, which is also the problem of the woman. Still, there is no stopping the encore.
—Vanessa Place

A new book from Sharon Kivland is always an event that upends form and deliciously enlivens the field of possibility, and Envois does not disappoint. It’s less a demystification than an erotic re-visioning of Lacan’s seminars, and of the epistolary form itself: bombastic, voluptuary, and fraught with unconsummated fantasy. Above all it’s an exhilarating read, in which the reader, through a desiring deixis, becomes interpolated as the writer’s object. I loved it.
—Daisy Lafarge

Back to top.

19.10.25

Writing Gaza / Ibraaz Publishing

(eds.) Omar Berrada
& Shivangi Mariam Raj

See here.

Featuring writings by ...

Omar Berrada
Shivangi Mariam Raj
Marwan Nassar
Batool Abu Akleen
Hamed Ashour
Haidar Al Ghazali
Shahd A. Alnaami

& artworks / photography by ...

Marwan Nassar
Samaa Abu Allaban
Hamza Mansour
Al-Da’alsa
& Alaa Al-Shawa

Writing Gaza is an editorial initiative that supports writers and artists enduring genocide. Fire, blood, and rubble have emerged as documents of unspeakable violence unleashed against the Palestinians besieged in Gaza. The voices gathered here encourage us to construct an alternative political imagination. Moving across streets, dwelling in the pages of a diary, and rattling against windows, these voices carry the texture of their everyday life, of an ordinariness denied under occupation.
These are not only tender portraits of a city that refuses to be annihilated, they also crackle with questions addressed to a world that has allowed and normalised annihilation. Batool Abu Akleen, Haidar Al-Ghazali, Hamed Ashour, Marwan Nassar, and Shahd A. Alnaami produced these texts under duress: fighting long periods of hunger, mourning their loved ones killed by the occupation forces, nursing the sick and the wounded, displaced over and over again, arranging for tents.
Appearing alongside each text are artworks by Gazan artists whose practice, in some cases, the writer is encountering for the first time. Against the occupation’s logic of fragmentation, we wish to place different voices in dialogue with each other. We hope that over the course of three months—October, November, and December 2025—this dialogue will expand and these fragments will crystallise into a togetherness that seems difficult to envision at the moment.
Throughout these texts, the murderous noise of drones is unmissable, but so is the writers’ insistence on the promise of life. Each contribution attests to immense pain, even as it embodies a refusal to be reduced to this pain; each word, each image, presents a kernel of dignity and steadfastness amidst the debris of the hour.
—Omar Berrada
& Shivangi Mariam Raj

29 September 2025
Paris / New York

Back to top.

09.10.25

Batool Abu Akleen in conversation
with Wiam El-Tamami / The Palfest Podcast

Batool Abu Akleen,
Gaza City, © 2025.

Wiam El-Tamami, photographed
by Maria Kousi, © 2025.

Subscribe to the Palfest Podcast here.

Back to top.

06.10.25

New work by Batool Abu Akleen on the cover page of the The New York ~~Times~~ War Crimes

Vol. III / No. XX

See here.

‘The Birds’ Catalog’
Batool Abu Akleen

When we stopped crying
and were about to explode like cans of expired food
the plane approached
and with the tip of the missile’s wing it split open
our heads.
No one blamed it
for it was sincere: it feared
we would explode.

The ravenous plane consumed us
The world turned upside down
The ground above us
We were completely submerged in the sea
The three of us flew together like that
and for the first time, everything seemed logical

The mountains carried empty cans of beans
pursued by the mouse that had devoured
the last triangle of yellow cheese in the city
The sharks lay on top of the planes
Roared in their faces
Broke their wings if they rose above ours

The yellow roses fled from the earth’s embrace
Their stigmas kissed the mouths of bees
Such that they couldn’t buzz

All of the fish appeared as mermaids
And for the first time, we weren’t afraid
The sky was biting its tongue the whole time
warning everyone
not to reveal the secret
and reminding us that
only a moment ago
we were dying.

Back to top.

04.10.25

Batool Abu Akleen interviewed by Claire
Armistead in The Guardian’s ‘Saturday’

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

At just twenty years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.
In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the streets carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to buy a second-hand ceasefire (she can’t, because the price keeps going up). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it consists of forty-eight poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. ‘I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed & there was no one there to bury me.’
—Claire Armistead

Back to top.

30.09.25

Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles
ein Trauerspiel / A mourning play

Translated from the German
by R. Martz

Recorded & arranged
by Seth Tillett

Order direct from Tenement here.

The twenty-first title in Tenement’s rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

This powerful poem, part bardic chant and part street-corner rant, is delivered with such sustained force, pedal to the metal, that it sounds as if R. Martz were practicing circular breathing techniques, like a saxophone player, even on the page.
Martz’s mistranslation [term of art] of Hölderlin gets to the heart of the matter: a human who wants to be like the gods but is brutally repressed by them. She sets her action today—meaning Summer 1984, forty-one years ago—when the ongoing dehumanisation of the city was only just beginning.

There is something asleep there.
Don’t think that it is dead.

—Lucy Sante

Back to top.

17.09.25

The Burden of History :
Christina Chatzitheodorou
on Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.
in Asymptote.

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48Kg., is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heartbreaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.
A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.
Through her poems, Batool reveals her experiences of the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza. She wrote, ‘In this book, I am collecting the parts of myself I have found, in case there isn’t anyone there to do so if I am killed.’ Her poems not only represent her personal recollections of the everyday struggle, but also mirror the collective story of the Palestinian people in Gaza and their survival over the last two years. Her narrative voice is both personal and collective, embodying the voices of the countless victims whose names we did not learn. Through this double approach, the poems are both an intimate testimony of Akleen’s experience and a form of collective witness, often blurring the line between the author and the unknown victim.
Indeed, in the two years of genocide, countless Palestinians have been killed by Israel, including writers who have been immortalised by the words they left behind. The martyr Refaat Alareer wrote: ‘If I must die, you must live, to tell my story,’ and Hiba Abu Nada, who also provided her firsthand testimony of genocide before becoming a martyr, wrote in Passages through Genocide: ‘And if we die, to speak on our behalf, there were people here who dreamt of travel and love and life and other things.’ Along with them, thousands of others have lost their voices.
48kg. lays bare the atrocities the Palestinian people endure. It does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war. Batool writes about ‘images’ that we have all seen over the last two years, images of a genocide in live streams. In her poems, you can see the flesh of people burned alive, ‘The smell of charred flesh rises from the mouth of hell its breath lines the souls of our living,’ the dispersed bodies of Palestinians after Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza.
—Christina Chatzitheodorou

Back to top.

07.09.25

‘Best Recent Poetry’ Roundup /
Kit Fan, The Guardian

Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg.

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

This remarkable debut by a 20-year-old Palestinian, born and raised in Gaza, stands out among poetry of witness on the genocide there. It contains 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of bodyweight, with the book literally thinning as the pages turn. The final poem declares: ‘I die without a voice. / He skins me, flesh from bones. / Cuts me into forty-eight pieces. Distributes the parts in blue plastic bags / & throws them to the four corners.’ Unlike the Muses who buried Orpheus’s dismembered limbs, the poem ends with the paramedic guessing ‘which of these bags / contain my flesh.’ Written in Gaza between 2023 and 2025, Abu Akleen’s poems disassemble and painstakingly reassemble the body to interrogate injustice, death and grief. She creates a world where absurdity and reality, irony and humanity coexist—from the ice-cream man crying out ‘corpses for sale’ while noting that ‘no grave buys them,’ to death wanting to have a birthday party and picking ‘an arm the missile hadn’t shattered.’ Abu Akleen self-translated 38 of the 48 poems, describing the process of translation as making ‘peace with death,‘ while writing in Arabic meant being ‘torn apart without … anyone there to recollect it.’ The book articulates the vital linguistic bridge she establishes in the present between Arabic and English, and includes historical photographs of Gaza from 1863 and 1908 and the 2022 discovery of a fifth-century Byzantine mosaic, highlighting the city’s rich cultural history. Throughout 48Kg Abu Akleen transforms witnessed details into fragile interpretations: the ‘broken plates they make homes for their younger siblings,’ the ‘moment War became a school,’ and the ‘Ring Finger I lend to the woman who lost / her hand and her husband.’ She notes that poetry gives ‘a form to feelings in order to understand them,’ and these heartbreaking and risk-taking poems protest with uncompromising clarity and tenderness against continuing atrocities.
—Kit Fan

Back to top.

05.09.25

Alix Chauvet, Cyclamen

Order direct from Tenement here.

The twentieth title in Tenement’s rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

Chauvet, photographed by
Daria Lou Nakov, © 2025.

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue.
—Mia You

Back to top.

29.08.25

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat
22:00 / A ‘Deep Dream,’ as broadcast
on Tai Shani’s ‘Dream Radio’

Somerset House Studios
London

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani presents The Spell or The Dream, a major free commission celebrating Somerset House’s 25th birthday. Alongside The Spell—a new sculpture in the Edmond J Safra Fountain Court (featuring a newly commissioned soundscape by composer, producer and double bassist Maxwell Sterling)—and an ongoing public programme, Shani has curated a 24hr-seven-day-a-week broadcast roster, ‘The Dream Radio.’
A rich assembly of bespoke and collated recordings, ‘The Dream Radio’ envisions ways of being and building together, dreaming of futures beyond the prevailing destruction. Co-curated by Shani and broadcast globally, the radio features new commissions and contributions, alongside archival work, by an extensive list of artists, writers, musicians, academics, economists, activists and thinkers, exploring dreaming as a radical act of imagination.

Back to top.

24.08.25

Luke Kennard on Steven Zultanski’s Help
in The Observer.

Order direct from Tenement here.

(Alongside the fine art of boxing, the ‘beautiful songs’ of NYC band Geese, and Birmingham drinking hole, The Picture & Pint—Kennard cites the Tenement publication of Steven Zultanski’s Help, the eighteenth title in our ‘Yellowjacket’ series.)

Zultanski has written ten collections & collaborated on films with the British artist Ed Atkins. Some of the long poems in Helptranscribe conversations between friends with prompts like ‘recount a death that you remember.’ Then the text is the conversation, laid out like a play. Another long poem is someone repeatedly being offered a glass of water. A lot of poetry leaves me irritable, but Help is painfully funny, minutely observed, and showers life with meaning again.
—Luke Kennard

Back to top.

11.08.25

Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.
& Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox & Rafeef Ziadah’s
Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism & Race in Palestine

see here.

Verso, August 2025.

Tenement Press, June 2025.

Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Bookshelf’ :
August / September 2025

Back to top.

05.08.25

Maria Sledmere’s Midsummer Song shortlisted for
the Association for the Study of Literature
& Environment (ASLE-UK) Book Prize 2025

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

28.07.25

‘Re: (Not) Capitulating’
An essay by Samuel Martin
Hopscotch Translation

see here.

On Mahmoud Khalil /
on W.S. Graham /
on John Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ /
on Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza /
on Edwin Muir /
on Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.

Back to top.

26.07.25

Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan
as delivered by Toby Jones
& Vanessa Onwuemezi

21.05.25
The Old Church
Church Street
Stoke Newington
London
N16 9ES

Listen again via Ursula / Hauser & Wirth.

Order direct from Tenement here.

Inspired by sermons recorded in Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty.
—Randy Kennedy, Ursula

Toby Jones & Vanessa Onwuemezi,
The Old Church, London (21.05.25).

Back to top.

18.07.25

Gabriel Levine Brislin, ‘For Sharon Kivland, Writing
is an Act of Connection,’ Frieze.

see here.

On Sharon Kivland’s These Are Addressed to You
(Bricks from the Kiln, 2025) /
On Sharon Kivland’s Her Discourse
(Joan, 2025) /
On Sharon Kivland’s Envois
(Tenement Press, 2025).

Kivland’s definition of the letter encompasses the alphabetic and the epistolic, both of which have appeared consistently throughout her published work. For Kivland, letters are key to the history of psychoanalysis in the 20th century and the people who populate its case studies and waiting rooms. Her pamphlet series Freud on Holiday (2006/13) ransacked the psychoanalyst’s correspondence for minor details, collecting his remarks on the quality of weather, food and hotels on his travels abroad. Envois, forthcoming with Tenement Press later this year, reimagines Lacan’s seminars as if they were private love letters. Her 2022 book Abécédaire, published by MOIST, drew on the format of alphabet primers to make associative links between the disparate biographies of women whose names started with the letter A, their surnames reduced to an elusive initial: Anna O., Anna F., Annie D., Annie E.
—Gabriel Levine Brislin, Frieze

Back to top.

14.06.25

Samuel Martin on Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg.
Hopscotch Translation

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Poetry may seem a flimsy thing at any time, let alone twenty-one months into a genocide. And whether one seeks either to confirm or to refute that impression, weighing a book of poems on a kitchen scale is not the method generally recommended. Then again, everything about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza already defies reason. Since the young Gazan poet Batool Abu Akleen has been ‘fighting absurdity by its own weapons’ [p.9], as Cristina Viti says in her preface to Abu Akleen’s book 48Kg., perhaps she would forgive this reader’s resorting to absurd criteria to assess her work.
48Kg. weighs two hundred and eleven grams. Another patent absurdity. One could mistake it for a conversion rate, adjusting the amount of food aid faithlessly promised by the international community into the paltry amount deemed deliverable to a famished people—a grotesque equation reminiscent of Western institutions’ ‘exchange rate on human [i.e., Palestinian] life,’ which Omar El Akkad has scathingly denounced.
The formula 48Kg.= 211g. condenses the book’s own agonising logic of diminishment: the forty-eight poems of Abu Akleen’s collection are numbered in reverse (48Kg., 47Kg., 46Kg., and so on), as if her body were wasting away or being chopped to pieces before our eyes. The poet thereby makes the reader complicit in her destruction. This terrible countdown only heightens the impact of the poems themselves, each of which is wrought with a craft that belies the poet’s age (she is scarcely out of adolescence) and a care incredible to imagine amid the carnage around her. Whatever the book’s conceit of self-disintegration, whatever the kitchen scale may read, 48Kg.carries an emotional weight that puts heftier tomes—and the conscience of nations—to shame.
—Samuel Martin

Back to top.

30.06.25

Alaa Alqaisi, ‘In Fragments / In Fire :
Four Books from Gaza,’ The Avery Review

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

In review—
(eds.) Mahmoud Alshaer & Mohammed al-Zaqzooq,
Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025)
Translated from the Arabic
by the ArabLit Translation Collective.

Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg.
(Tenement Press, 2025)
Translated from the Arabic
by Batool Abu Akleen,
Graham Liddell,
Wiam El-Tamami,
Cristina Viti
& Yasmin Zaher.

Nasser Rabah, Gaza: The Poem Said its Piece
(City Lights, 2025)
Translated from the Arabic
by Ammiel Alcalay,
Emna Zghal
& Khaled Al-Hilli.

Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide
(Comma Press, 2025)
Batool Abu Akleen,
Sondos Sabra,
Nahil Mohana
& Ala’a Obaid.

Where prior literary icons mythologised the land or the martyr, Abu Akleen scales Gaza down to the weight of a starving female body. Her poetics are granular, skeletal, and radically intimate. 48Kg. is not merely a title but a structuring device. Each poem is named for a declining weight—48Kg., 47, and so on—transforming the body into a site of measurement and testimony. The architecture of the book is deliberately skeletal: spare verses, minimal punctuation, abrupt line breaks. The effect is not aesthetic minimalism but physiological urgency. Hunger is not abstract here; it becomes the formal logic underwriting the text.
The language is severe, elliptical, and often surreal. In one of the early poems, the speaker confesses, ‘I pick fresh hearts from the street / the most defeated ones,’ rendering grief both grotesque and devotional. The body becomes a terrain of improvisation, where cooking, dreaming, and mourning merge into hybrid rituals. The absence of punctuation throughout the text mirrors the collapse of structure in siege-life. Sentences fracture like walls. Meaning stumbles and reassembles across enjambments.
Central to this work is the gendered experience of survival. Unlike heroic, masculine renderings of martyrdom or battle, Abu Akleen’s voice inhabits the soft infrastructures of war—kitchens, beds, toilets, menstrual blood. In the poem ‘Judgment Day,’ she writes: ‘Gabriel hasn’t blown into his trumpet yet / how did the resurrection happen?’ Her irony isn’t performative. It’s the confusion of a survivor who no longer trusts the calendar of catastrophe. Time in 48Kg. is erratic. Space is claustrophobic. Bodies vanish incrementally rather than explosively. This is a literature not of spectacle but of slow erasure.
In dialogue with other 2024 Gazan texts, such as Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025), where collective testimony dominates, Abu Akleen’s singular voice is a rupture. Where Letters archives the many, 48Kg. commits to the irreducible complexity of one. Its formal refusal of narrative cohesion contrasts with the epistolary shape of communal grief. The result is a poetics that does not explain Gaza to the world but carves Gaza into the body of language itself.
—Alaa Alqaisi, The Avery Review

Back to top.

16.06.25

Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg. /
An Italian Translation

see here.

Excerpts from the forthcoming Italian edition of Batool Abu Akleen’s debut collection (Poetry Therapy Italia).

Back to top.

16.06.25

Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg.

Translated from the Arabic
by the poet,
with Graham Liddell,
Wiam El-Tamami,
Cristina Viti
& Yasmin Zaher

Order direct from Tenement here.

A Palfest ‘Book of the Week’

The nineteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series—Abu Akleen’s debut collection—out now.

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

Back to top.

16.06.25

Sea shells : A digital pamphlet from mpt

Read Sea Shells via mpT.

Published in tandem with Abu Akleen’s debut collection, 48Kg., a digital pamphlet from Modern Poetry in Translation
spotlighting nine emerging Gazan poets—

Wadah Abu Jami
Rawan Qwaider
Mojeeb Al Bayed
Asmaa Dwaima
Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb
Heba Al-Agha
Tamer Khail
Yazeed Shaat
& Samar Al Guhssain

An array of works selected and translated by Batool Abu Akleen and edited by Cristina Viti.

But poetry is not dead, she has the seven lives of a cat. They harass her, drag her around the street, spit on her and mock her, confine her to drown her out, banish her, imprison her, shoot at her—and there she is, coming out of all these accidents with a freshly washed face and a smile like rice grains.
—Pablo Neruda, ‘Confieso que he vivido’
(Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979), p.63.

Poetry is the eternal voice of the slaughtered when slaughter binds their hands—or as Cristina Viti likes to say, it is medicine for the soul, protection against insanity in such situations.
We are presenting ten poems written by Gazan poets during the ongoing genocide. Each poem shows a different kind of pain: a man wants to place dates in the mouths of mourners so it won’t be said that throats were sore at the funeral of his beloved; a mother hates white sheets because death might sleep in them; a girl doesn’t know how to collect her friends’ wooden corpses; and many questions are drowning in confusion.
Poetry aims to raise questions more than answering them. As these poems drowned their writers and myself in questions, so they might drown you, not only in questions, but also in pain. When that happens, don’t look for an escape: rather, understand this pain more deeply, tell others about it. Perhaps then the open wound the genocide left in our souls will be healed.
—Batool Abu Akleen

Back to top.

04.06.25

Mario Benedetti’s El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel's Birthday featured in poet Leo Boix’s Morning Star column,

Letters from Latin America

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

The Tenement publication of Mario Benedetti’s El cumpleaños de El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel's Birthday—the eleventh title in our rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series, translated from the Spanish by Adam Feinstein with a new afterword and annotations from the translator—has been spotlighted in poet Leo Boix’s regular column for the Morning Star. Featured alongside Andres Tacsir’s The Erased Chapter (Equidistancias), translated by Beatriz Luna Gijon; Bruno Dario's Lantana or the Indissoluble Exhalation (Ugly Duckling), translated by Kit Schluter; and Carlos Manuel Alvarez’s False War (Fitzcarraldo Editions), translated by Natasha Wimmer—both in print and online—read Boix's column via the link below.

Set in Montevideo [El cumpleaños de El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel's Birthday] traces the revolutionary discovery of Osvaldo Puente, who becomes the guerrillero Juan Angel. Benedetti’s writing—concise, lyrical, irrepressible—charts ideological and spiritual discovery. Feinstein’s translation preserves the electrifying power of the Spanish original, and his accompanying essay sets the novel’s continuing relevance against the background of political upheaval in 1970s Uruguay. Benedetti reminds us that revolution is not only a historical force but a deeply personal metamorphosis: ‘I’ve turned hard in this sudden half-shadow / of the revolution […] the owl and the flamingo are no longer my omens / nor my jubilation / but no more than my beloved heirlooms.’ A haunting, masterful work—part Bildungsroman, part political lament—and wholly unmissable.
—Leo Boix, The Morning Star

Back to top.

04.05.25

Elida Silvey’s Abstractions : A workshop series

Staffordshire St Gallery
London

(After Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble.)

Abstractions is a series of four, monthly workshops created by Elida Silvey (of Exteriors)—hosted at Word Club / Staffordshire Street, London—that utilise the inherent knowledge found in specific artistic works that act as a point of departure from where methodologies of abstraction can be formed. Through four distinct artists and their work, Abstractions will find new ways to start, construct and abstract our experiential writing to push the boundaries of literature and the act of storytelling.
The opening session will find its anchor in Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble (2022)—the sixth title in Tenement’s rolling ‘Yellowjacket’ series—an experimental collection that was written exclusively using words culled from news articles to create fantastical worlds—to catalyse a journey into abstraction.

*

Elida Silvey is a self-taught Mexican-American writer, editor and artist living in London. Her work is concerned with post-internet visual theory as it relates to the concepts of reality, time and 'the self,’ experienced through (collective) memory. She regularly writes in experimental forms about this topic on her Substack, Through the Eye of a Needle. Silvey is the assistant editor for Montez Press and runs her own writing/visual arts club called Exteriors.

Simone reading McNally Jackson (Seaport),
(New York, NY), September 2022.

Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble is a collection of 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.

Order direct from Tenement here.

Epics are generally in sections or cantos, but there’s also a narrative coherency that supersedes the modular nature of the individual poems. Palace of Rubble is that way, too; there's no single dominant narrative that asserts itself across every story, but there are narrative currents and recurring characters and preoccupations. The sections flow into each other in a way that also feels reminiscent of a certain kind of deconstructed epic. If the linebreak is a technology that creates “units” or slows the pace of the reader’s eye on the page, I would argue that part of the power of the prose in Palace of Rubble has to do with the lack of separation, the lack of breath or space between ideas, and how that density operates on our attention. Each chunk of prose becomes its own edifice.
—Maggie Millner, BOMB

Back to top.

03.05.25

Batool Abu Akleen, Letters from Gaza (Penguin)

see here.

Palenstinian poet Batool Abu Akleen has two works in Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025), including the poem ‘I want a grave,’ as excerpted from Akleen’s forthcoming Tenement title, 48Kg.

I want a grave with a marble tombstone
my loved ones irrigate it
they place roses on it
they weep when longing stings their eyes.
Their tears can’t reach me
so I don’t get sad.

I want a grave for myself alone
so my friends can come & talk to me
so that for the last time
I’ll have the right to be an individual.

I want a grave not adjoining any other grave
so my sweetheart can grow me a paperflower tree
to shelter me from the summer sun
to dress me in a ‏magenta dress in spring
leaves falling on my body like a warm blanket in winter.

[...]

Through poetry, letters, and monologues, thirty Gazans lay bare their fears, grief, and relentless hope amid devastation. As the year 2023 came to an end, and wistfulness filled the air with hopes for the new tidings; the whole world was left startled with the unfolding of the largest humanitarian crisis of this century. While we lamented at the visuals of unimaginable destruction, loss, and unsurmountable pain, there were people living that reality. Collected and compiled by Al-Azaqzooq and Alshaer, two prolific Gazan writers, this collection stands as a testament to unparalleled resilience and unveils the unimaginable emotional scars of war; leaving us overcome with tenderness and compassion.

Back to top.

04.04.25

Steven Zultanski, Help

Order direct from Tenement here.

The eighteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series—a quartet of semi-detached conversations from the poet—out now.

Help is a completely unique and compellingly brilliant work. I was riveted by the strange theatre of discussion, the sociality of speech and the hilarious, macabre themes it naturally leads to. I wish there were more writers like Zultanski, writers playful and secure enough to so simply nudge existence into new terrain. Alas there are very few, so we have to grab rare works like this when they come around.
—Holly Pester

Brilliant, willfully obtuse, indeterminate, and excruciatingly voyeuristic, Help re-orchestrates and dissects the everydayness of our feelings, restaging them around spatulas, a glass of water, a group of friends eating breakfast and talking. Zultanski's proscriptive, quasi-improvised script deregulates our offhand affects and turns them into what they were all along: stage props in the mise en scenery of our lived lives.
—Tan Lin

Back to top.

21.03.25

Edwina Attlee & Ange Mlinko /
The Faber Poetry Podcast

With Jack Underwood
& Rachael Allen

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

21.03.25

Stanley Schtinter & Gareth Evans,
Snow, Always Snow

Order direct from Tenement here.

The first title in Tenement’s ‘Harry Caul’ series, out now.

Schneewittchen (2025) is a feature film by the artist and author Stanley Schtinter. An auditorium only, 35mm presentation of which only one print exists. In this volume, director Stanley Schtinter and producer Gareth Evans consider their co-work on Schneewittchen—discuss the project’s implications and associations—and consider the film a catalyst fit to enable a wide-ranging conversation.
Evans and Schtinter touch on the water damage done by mainstream culture to our contemporary critical faculty; consider sight and storytelling; imagination and image-making; creativity and light; the luminosity of the dark; and riff on the implications borne by an ownership of the means of production in an age of extinction. A feature-length discussion grounded in their collaboration; their exchange is a commons composed of 18181 words.
The Tenement / Harry Caul publication of Snow, Always Snow is curtained by a fleeting portfolio of photographs by Joshua Bonnetta, taken on location during the production of Schneewittchen.

Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2025, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser's titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brother’s Grimm fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film, Branca de Neve / Snow White (2000), which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then.
While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter's film will, according to the artist, ‘only ever show in analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.’ For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike.

[...]

The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries—namely, the autonomy of thought and action.

Morgan Quaintance, Art Monthly
(No. 483, February 2025)

‘The visual is essentially pornographic,’ wrote Fredric Jameson, adding that ‘pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body.’ Turning down the Prince [Toby Jones] and his invitation to watch the passionate lovemaking between the Evil Queen [Julie Christie] and the Hunter [Hanns Zischler], Snow White [Stacy Martin] retorts, ‘Rather than look, I’d rather hear.’
Sound supersedes sight in Stanley Schtinter’s austere anti-fairy tale Schneewittchen, an English-language remake of João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000), made largely of an audio performance of Robert Walser’s titular play set to a black screen, occasionally relieved by shots of passing clouds. In Walser’s radical reworking of the Grimm fable, a resurrected Snow White reconciles with the Evil Queen, denying any foul play and even seeking forgiveness for provoking her jealousy.
A parable for our post-truth times, Schtinter’s film provokes reflection on the ontology of a tale as it travels across languages, mediums, geographies and eras. If Walser’s play breaks the reader’s foundational trust in a benevolent, just world, Schneewittchen breaches the implicit contract with the film spectator, offering a motion picture emptied of both motion and pictures: a work where the visual can only appear as excess.
—Srikanth Srinivasan,
IFFR : International Film Festival Rotterdam (2024)

Back to top.

17.03.25

Wadih Saadeh’s A Horse at the Door /
A Republic of Consciousness Prize
‘Book of the Month’ (March 2025)

Robin Moger’s selected translations of Wadih Saadeh’s poetry, A Horse at the Door—the sixteenth work in Tenement’s ongoing ‘Yellowjacket’ list—has been selected as the March ‘Book of the Month’ for subscribers. The programme both spotlights current small press publications via an eclectic list of titles, and supports the ongoing work of the prize in its efforts to champion the work of independent publishers.

Subscribe to the Republic of Consciousness
‘Book of the Month’ programme here.

Reading Wadih Saadeh, in this inspiring translation by Robin Moger, one finds oneself entering the aftershocks of an imagination devastated by war and the deep internal and external exiles that follow such destruction. His poetry, loose and open—attentive and philosophical—lives in the remnants of what is left, of what survives to tell its tales, in both short-form, slightly surreal parables, and longer autobiographic tracings. It speaks of dust, of being dust, of stones talking to stones, of separated limbs and shadows walking their own way, clinging to shapes, of being water, of being rubble, new languages learnt, friendships, and tobacco at the source of a breath. Of travelling without arrival. Of moving without settling. As though one is forever seeking to settle but one doesn’t know how, or into what form. In the end, the poet settles on passing, and finds aliveness in its slightest movements. Like passing one’s hand through one’s hair, as he does it in the closing sequence of his ground-breaking poem from the Lebanese civil war. An extraordinary and painfully timely collection.
—Caroline Bergvall

Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

09.03.25

Randy Kennedy on Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan
in Ursula (No.12 / Spring 2025)

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Lucy Sante has been one of my favourite writers ever since I picked up Low Life, her classic history of the New York demimonde, published in 1991, the year I moved to the city. Little did I know that in the ensuing years, as she was turning out other great books, Sante was also a secret copywriter for Bob Dylan, taking on assignments as varied as speeches, press kits & a Buick commercial. (A Buick commercial!)
Then in 2016 she received a truly Dylanesque request: a series of sermons to accompany a film focused on Dylan’s gospel years, 1979 and 1980, during his brief conversion to born-again Christianity. Sante, no churchgoer she, gulped. But she signed on & we’re all sanctified as a result. Inspired by sermons recorded in Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty. On the topic of prudence, she evangelises with holy sight: ‘[…] sometimes fools succeed. They go over the falls and come back alive. When that happens, we forget that they are fools and call them heroes.’
—Randy Kennedy

Back to top.

02.03.25

Rupert Loydell on Chris McCabe’s ‘Yellowjacket,’ Dreamt by Ghosts: Notes on Dreams, Coincidence & Weird Culture in Tears in the Fence

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Subtitled Notes on Dreams, Coincidences, & Weird Culture, Chris McCabe’s hefty book is a compendium of journal entries, concrete typewriter poems, critical observations and dream diary. Gradually, over 346 pages, a web of associative meaning and links evolves (as indeed it would with such a large grouping of anything [that’s not a criticism] ).
I’m not good at being told other people’s dreams, in fact it’s one of those situations I hate, I am just not interested in what anyone’s subconscious throws up. Breakfast with those who insist on telling me about their imaginary nocturnal adventures is my idea of hell. However, I will make an exception for McCabe as this book is as outward looking as inward looking, his dreams as literary and as mediated as his poems and prose.
In a similar way to his dreams being put to purpose, McCabe’s discourses are too. He doesn’t simply present examples of absences and hauntings, he ponders and contextualises them, discusses them in the light of his reading and listening: Ballard, Poe, Hideo Nakata, Plath, Kafka, Borges, Ginsberg, Stephen King, Barry McSweeney and John Cale are all here, animating otherwise frozen moments and experiences.
Really, this is a book about time and memory, about the slow-motion experiences of lockdown, of acquaintances, friends, relatives, about death and absence, about language and poetry. Although the book is populated by ghosts they are mostly not literal: ‘a ghost is a bruise mark waiting to heal.’ The bruise is grief and loss, McCabe is fascinated by them: ‘I’ve often wondered what it must be like to face death and come back: the body as transcendent matter, a kind of collop of spirit, pulling itself towards the light.’
Even without this experience, McCabe (and his friend James) are ‘alert to the mysteries of this moment of accelerating time.’ The opposite, too, of course: moments of stasis and boredom. Dreamt by Ghosts is a book of experiential time, of Mark Fisher’s ‘Hauntology’ (which is specifically referenced in a postscript), where the present is infused by the historical past, possible or imagined pasts, and the unknown future, all mis/informed by the deluge of mis/information now available to us.
Throw in the likes of Simon Reynold’s idea of ‘Retromania’ with its suggestion of shorter and shorter loops of nostalgic revisiting and appropriation, and the idea of paying attention to the present as a form of cultural resistance, a way of persisting in being alive, and you may arrive at the bricolage of life in a similar manner to McCabe.
Yet even as he re-presents his chosen texts, he is aware that ‘There is no getting back to the past, even if the present seeks it out like a reversed telescope,’ because even as I write the present becomes both what was the future and the past. Thus, we all live in ‘the city of imagination’ that McCabe writes about, a city inhabited by what and who we once knew and what we hope for, a city produced by ‘the rhizomatic nature of our minds,’ just as Dreamt by Ghosts only becomes a coherent book when allowed to be incoherent fragments willed into a temporary whole by both editor and reader.
McCabe’s work is new to me and is intriguing in its complexity, its associative impositions and authorial assumptions. It is both playful and rich in meaning, using the confessional and private to evidence the public, perhaps even a communal, subconscious not always evident in our individual, digitised world.
—Rupert Loydell

Back to top.

28.02.25

Milo Thesiger-Meacham, Audible Heat

Order direct from Tenement here.

The seventeenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series—a manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize—out now.

‘Each mortal thing,’ writes Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘does one thing and the same’ ...

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

But in Audible Heat, Milo Thesiger-Meacham elegantly and categorically refutes this idea and, in a text both singular and pluralistic, uncovers for us a creature which seems to speak of everything but itself. This mind-boggling encyclopaedic essay ranges across continents and cultural histories to offer us quietly radical termite art of a kind that Manny Farber would approve, nibbling omnidirectionally at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies.
In this synthesis of electric intellectual impulses and nimbly novel insights, sound looms large: like a latterday Langland the author ‘wente wide in this world wondres to here’ only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance.
Armchair amateurs, we expect a traveller’s tales to feature monsters or larger than life extensions of their own id (giant sloths, Blemmyes, overwhelming flocks of wild geese) but this is a more modest affair, pitched at a scale where the human is not just always discernible but gently and incisively illuminated. It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act.
—Ed Baxter

Back to top.

24.01.25

Alex Tan, ‘No Place to Be: On Wadih Saadeh’s A Horse at the Door,’ The Markaz Review

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Given Saadeh’s eminence in the Arabophone world, Tenement Press’s publication of A Horse at the Door is long overdue. Ranged in this collection—or ‘chronology,’ as the cover would have it—are intricately curated selections from Saadeh’s three-decade-long oeuvre. Translated with exquisite attention by Robin Moger, whose grasp of a writer’s idiom is always exceptionally attuned, the poems offer us glimpses into a mind whose preoccupations dwell in the evanescent and the gestural. They are a mix of brief, orphic riddles and protracted, meditative meanderings; through them Saadeh elaborates an iconographic universe all his own. The book is beautiful, too, as an object; several of the longer poems—including the famed ‘Seat of a Passenger Who Left the Bus,’ which Youssef Rakha compares to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’—are typeset vertically, the words rising like smoke from the ground to the sky. The reader must rotate the book 90 degrees, effecting a shift in orientation for the lines to be legible, almost as if floating through a dream.
—Alex Tan

Back to top.

16.01.25

Miranda France, ‘Middle Class to Militant: The Making of a Revolutionary Poet,’ The Times Literary Supplement

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

On Adam Feinstein’s translation of Mario Benedetti’s El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel’s Birthday.

Benedetti’s rhythms are intensely local, whether replicating bar-room chat or Argentine tangos. He incorporates anglicisms, words from lunfardo (a dialect originating among the working class of early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires) and his own amusing neologisms. In this translation Adam Feinstein, the biographer of Pablo Neruda, captures both the humour and the humility of the original, and finds neat counterparts for the wordplay. [...] The leftist insurgency movements of Latin America in the 1970s, and their brutal repression by secret state forces, have given rise to many accounts, both factual (Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, 1981) and fictional (Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, 1990). None that I have read comes closer than El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel to conveying the transformation, which took place in thousands of households, from middle-class to militant. Mario Benedetti’s poem has long had a following in South America—the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos even took his name from the guerrilla character. It’s a pleasure to see it reprinted alongside this sympathetic translation.
—Miranda France

Back to top.

15.01.25

Tim Abbondelo’s ‘Reading Roundup’ / On works by Lucy Sante, Rachel Kushner, & Amitava Kumar, Style Weekly

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

In 2016, Dylan hired Lucy Sante to write six sermons to be performed by an actor and cut together with previously unreleased footage from his gospel era, as supplemental material for the deluxe edition of his Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13, 1979-1981. Sante’s sermons on hypocrisy, virtue, gluttony, temperance, justice and prudence were written and later performed by [actor] Michael Shannon. And that’s a wrap. Now, thank heavens, Tenement Press saw fit to print Sante’s unabridged text. In an insightful introduction, she shares her approach to the commission and the eventual inspiration she found in the recordings of Black preachers from the 1920s and ‘30s. She cites Rev J.M. Gates in particular, who released over 200 sides for labels like Bluebird, Okeh and Victor, including the memorable sermon, ‘Death Might Be Your Santa Claus.’ With original source material to guide her, Sante pivoted away from the fire and brimstone that marked Dylan’s onstage spiels—the tone Shannon later ran with, distorting what’s on the page in his performance (a mismatch of casting as much as direction; Shannon exudes hellfire at an atomic level). By contrast, Sante’s sermons are joyful and generous—a treatment we could all benefit from in our current condition. It wouldn’t be a Sante book without a generous helping of exceptional photographic images and ephemera; a beautiful bookend to this unlikely project, in a banner year for the author, whose memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, topped many-a-year-end list.
—Tim Abbondelo

Back to top.

10.01.25

Tom Branfoot on Edwina Attlee’s A great shaking,
The Poetry Review

For the Poetry Society’s quarterly, Branfoot’s review sits Attlee’s Tenement title, A great shaking, alongside Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (Corsair / Nightboat, 2024).

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

A triptych of work, Attlee recontextualises calendars and folk culture, illuminating the relations between labour, motherhood, and daily life in a medieval-contemporary continuum framed by her sparse, expressionist poetics.

[...]

An uncanny, Gothic note peals through this book, speaking through exhumed serfs, mothers, and silenced figures.
—Tom Branfoot

Back to top.

31.12.24

Edwina Attlee’s ‘Book of Days’ /
Resonance Extra, London.

SEE HERE. / Order direct from Tenement here.

A weathervane of a work for New Year’s Day, a reading of the opening chapter from Edwina Attlee’s debut collection—A great shaking (Tenement Press, 2024)—as read by the poet; a suite of twelve poems written to (and from) the months of a year.
Recorded and produced for radio by Tenement’s Dominic J. Jaeckle and Resonance’s Milo Thesiger-Meacham.

Back to top.

23.12.24

Greil Marcus, Letter in the Ether :
Regarding Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

Roll on to Marcus’s SubstacK here.

Recently Tenement Press in the UK collected the full and original texts of the sermons Lucy Sante was asked to write for Michael Shannon to perform for the DVD element in Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More, 1979–1981, the 2017 set covering his gospel years. I was privileged to be asked to write an afterword. Lucy is an old comrade. In the early 1980s, when I was still finding my way in the dark into the catacombs of what turned into my book Lipstick Traces, she sent me a rare collection of lettrist film treatments and scripts she’d found in a used bookstore; it turned out to be a lynchpin for what followed, showing me where to look.
—Greil Marcus

Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

20.12.24

Pasolini’s Anger /
Resonance Extra, London

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Tenement & Resonance Extra present a radio work for the Winter solstice; an unabridged reading of the 2022 Tenement publication of Pier Paolo Pasolini's La rabbia / Anger in a new translation by frequent collaborator, Cristina Viti; the seventh title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series. Featuring readings by Viti [the sea] and Martin Esposito [the anchor], music by Jon Auman and Thomas Bush [via their outfit, catholic Churgh], Pasolini’s Anger was produced and recorded for radio by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham.

A still from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
La rabbia / Anger (1963).

‘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

Back to top.

16.12.24

What’s New in Translation? / Asymptote

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

On Robin Moger’s selected translations
of Wadih Saadeh, A Horse at the Door.

Through the poems of A Horse at the Door, taken from works published between 1985 and 2012, the Lebanese-Australian poet Wadih Saadeh allows himself to be known. Recounting his memories, his fears, and his attempts to assuage them, Saadeh treats the reader as a welcome companion with whom one can exchange dark jokes over arak and cigarettes. He addresses connection and its absence, continually applying permutations of friendship to both familiar and unexpected subjects, from the possibility of befriending passers-by to the clouds and their shadows, limbs and feet, and ourselves. As Youssef Rakha writes in the collection’s afterward, ‘The intensity and the intimacy is such that it feels like Saadeh is telling your life story, not his …’
Covering the many phases of Saadeh’s life, these poems return consistently to the liminal act of departure: his father’s departure in a tragic and painful death when Saadeh was fourteen; his own departure from various European cities as a young man yearning for arrival; the departure of contemporaries and families migrating away from war; and the departure of limbs from bodies on the battlefield. Saadeh does not only witness departure, but also what it leaves behind: ‘On the surface of the lake is a leaf. It was an eye. On the bank is a branch that was a rib. / I am trying to gather up the leaves and the branches. / I am trying to gather together someone whom I loved.’ He considers how one may live with the traces of the departed—and perhaps what it feels like to be such a trace, left behind in the wake of loss and flight.
This departure, too, becomes a friend, something familiar and beautiful. It becomes a kindness—permission to leave behind the horrors of being present in the world, with each other. ‘Is this why it is more important to befriend departing / than settling? / Is this why our lives must be no more than a rehearsal of / the beauty of departure?’ Stunningly wrought in English by Robin Moger, Saadeh’s poems are not satisfied with certainty, nor do they ask rhetorical questions. They ask for your dreams, your losses, your questions—as a friend might do.
—Liliana Torpey

Back to top.

13.12.24

Wadih Saadeh, A Horse at the Door

A chronology of poems selected
& translated by Robin Moger

With an afterword
by Youssef Rakha

Order direct from Tenement here.

The sixteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

Wadih Saadeh was fated to wander. He moved between exiles, from Beirut to Europe, until the earth entire became an exile. And his poem migrated with him, roaming through the city streets where the finest and cruelest scenes life has to offer may be seen, then into and through his own body, from where he contemplates himself in order to contemplate the world: two illusions, in opposition and insoluble. Poetry may be this perpetual voyage through senses and memories, but it is like the travelling of dreamers, it has no road. And like most wandering poets whose childhood waits for them in their future, Wadih Saadeh constructed a house out of his: a home for his soul with his mind stood on the threshold, on guard like a figure in a fairy tale. His poem is an open house, to which he hosts he invites the animals of Mount Lebanon, its flowers and insects, the mad and homeless and gypsies, departed relatives and fellow poets, both dead and alive, the whole world. The poet set up home in this house until he disappeared into it, and here, from his concealment, he brings language back to the simplicity of the first questions… only that his gaze is that of someone who knows that nothing he sees will he ever see again. Return is another illusion. Everything that is written is a beautiful gift, offered to the absence of those he loved. He is recovering, in that vast invisibility, some part of what once was then disappeared. The moment of its loss is complex, an entanglement of weightlessness, joy, and grief: grief, because the end is forever at the point of arrival and the process of departure is never-ending; joy, that the end has come at last to relieve him of the burdens of his past, his fears and fury and pleasures; and weightlessness, because the poet owns nothing, not even the word they write. His word belongs first and foremost to the dead, his father among them:

During the war, my father went searching the wilderness for a bone, that he might crush it with a stone and sate his hunger. From the lineage of that crushed bone came children, of which I was one. I was the son of a crushed bone.

—Golan Haji

Back to top.

02.12.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
at the InLaguna Film Festival (4th Ed.)

see here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

An ongoing twenty-four hour programme in the windows of the Panorama, 04.12 through 08.12.

Back to top.

27.11.24

Tenement Press x Plastic Language / NTS
Will René & Dominic J. Jaeckle

see here.

Hosted by Will René—librarian at the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library—Plastic Language is a bi-monthly show on London’s NTS exploring spoken word across recorded media, with selections informed by—but not limited to—the collection of LPs held at the Library. Previous instalments in the series have included collaborations, readings and new work from Roger Robinson, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Moor Mother, Phil Elverum, and an array of others.
Gathered here are the fruits of a collaborative open call from Plastic Language and Tenement Press—an assembly of select, submitted materials sent in over the course of the Summer’s simmer—and that first aired in the early morning hours of November 27th 2024, the final edition of René’s show as would broadcast this calendar year.

A parrot on Canal Street,
Shanzhai Lyric © 2024.

Featuring works by ...

Joan Brossa, translated from the Catalan
by Cameron Griffiths, ‘Preludi’ / ‘Prelude’
0m00.
Klara du Plessis, ‘Dead Air’
3m54.
James Lowne, ‘Small Rooms / Rough Crush’
5m50.
Night Tapes, ‘anti~time’
10m36.
Taylor Beidler & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes,
‘Shadows are Just Shapes’
13m18.
Paul Sims & Seth Guy, ‘Baby Steps to Enlightenment’
20m40.
Annelyse Gelman & Eli Winter, ‘Vexations’
22m21.
Pablo’s Eye, featuring Noor-e-Sehar Ali,
‘The Dog Days are Long Gone’
27m37.
Aidan Baker,
‘Where Noone Could Possibly Be (The Sound of Voices)’
31m18.
Middex, ‘Lived I’
32m19.
Sally O’Reilly & Kit Downes,
‘Estée Lauder Factory’
37m06.
Paul Beaudoin & Jon Rollins,
‘would it make you feel better if we talked about it?’
40m36.
Maria Howard, ‘Siting / Citing’
44m57.
Shanzhai Lyric, ‘Incomplete Poem’
47m21.
& Michael O’Mahony, ‘Memorial Chase’
54m44.

Back to top.

22.11.24

Lucy Sante, Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

With an afterword
by Greil Marcus

Order direct from Tenement here.

The fifteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

Sante, as photographed
by Jem Cohen, © 2024.

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

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

Back to top.

04.11.24

The aquarium drunkard book club / Ch.31 /
Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

Order direct from Tenement here.

Aquarium Drunkard regular Scott Bunn reviews Sante’s forthcoming Tenement title for the November instalment of the AD Book Club, alongside Laura Davis-Chanin & Liz Lamere’s Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Globe Pequot Press, 2024), James Tate’s Hell, I Love Everybody: Poems (Ecco, 2024), and Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki and Ben Edmonds' MC5 : An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band (Hachette, 2024).

‘When you invite the rich man to take the best seat and tell the poor man to go stand in the corner, are you doing God’s work, or the devil’s?’ So asks Lucy Sante in one of the six sermons commissioned by Bob Dylan for a movie focused on his gospel period of 1979-1980. Dylan asked for the sermons to address specific topics—hypocrisy, virtue, gluttony, temperance, justice, prudence—not unlike a few of Dylan’s own songs which also feel like writing assignments such as ‘Dignity’ or ‘Foot of Pride.’ Dylan didn’t want Sante’s text to be written in the style of his own sermons from the stage during that period, so she took inspiration from early 20th century recordings of preachers that have been collected in the Anthology of American Folk Music, Revenant Records’ American Primitive Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel and Dust-to-Digital’s Goodbye, Babylon. Sante’s sermons have now been published by Tenement Press in their customary distinct and striking yellow cover design, which fits the jolting judgments found in Sante’s words. She uses scripture for the basis of each sermon, but also takes the opportunity to utilize her particular knowledge and command of historic slang as also evidenced in her books Low Life and The Other Paris. ‘Jake leg drinkers and the hurdy-gurdy players on Fifth Street’ is one example of the intoxicating language that Sante employs throughout. To augment the text, Sante includes a selection of black-and-white photographs that recalls Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music & Photography 1890-1950, her own Dust-to-Digital project. All of this and a Greil Marcus afterword too. This beautiful book will appeal to sinners and the saved alike.
—Scot Bunn

Back to top.

31.10.24

Chris McCabe, Dreamt by Ghosts:
Notes on Dreams, Coincidence & Weird Culture

Order direct from Tenement here.

The fourteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

Radically exciting, this text has Beckett and Shakespeare, and all of Poe’s possibilities. As would Derrida, Dreamt by Ghosts leads you toward more and more... In no way can I sum up how remarkable is this ghostly manuscript, and how delighted and in fact privileged I am to have been able to read it, with all its illuminated pauses and twists.
—Mary Ann Caws

Back to top.

26.10.24

Edwina Attlee on BBC Upload
with Tom Branfoot

In advance of her reading on the bill for Tom Branfoot’s ‘More Song’ series at Bradford’s 1-in-12 Club and library—07.11.24—Attlee was featured on BBC Upload to discuss her writing and the Tenement publication of a great shaking. A programe simultaneously broadcast on BBC Radio Sheffield, BBC Radio York, BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Humberside.

Back to top.

02.10.24

NTS / Will René’s Plastic Language
Mark Lanegan reads from Jaeckle’s 36 Exposures

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Will René’s monthly ‘Plastic Language’ is a show exploring spoken word across a variety of genres and recorded media drawing from, but not limited to, the archives held at the National Poetry Library, London. The October installment of the show features a field reading from Jen Calleja—recorded on location on Hastings pier—and an excerpt from Dominic J. Jaeckle & Hoagy Houghton’s 36 Exposures / A Bastardised Roll of Film, ‘March 3rd (Mercè Rodoreda),’ as read by the late, great Mark Lanegan; a home recording circa 2021.

Back to top.

30.09.24

Maria Sledmere, Midsummer Song / Hypercritique

Order direct from Tenement here.

The second title in Tenement’s ‘No University Press’ series, out now.

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

Back to top.

23.08.24

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica /
Traces of Georealism

Order direct from Tenement here.

The thirteenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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

Back to top.

09.08.24

Edwina Attlee, ‘Poetry Corner’ /
BBC Radio London

Order direct from Tenement here.

Tune in to BBC Radio London—Friday 9th August, 3:10pm / BST—to hear Edwina Attlee on Jumoké Fashola‘s Afternoon Show. Attlee will be in conversation with Fashola, and will read a slither of her work thereafter, as a contribution to Fashola‘s regular ‘Poetry Corner’ feature following the recent Tenement publication of Attlee’s debut collection, A great shaking.

Back to top.

07.09.24

‘Best Recent Poetry’ Roundup /
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian

Edwina Attlee, A great shaking

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

This profoundly exciting debut explores the complicated embodiments, politics and emotions of domestic life through the prism of the turning year. Attlee draws subtly luminous images from mundane, ordinary life—‘I pat her gloves with apricot foam / blow bubbles in the dusk / with liquid from the pound shop’—allowing us to see the vivid, electric power of moments to which familiarity usually blinds us. At the same time, she is always aware of the vexed inequalities of family, time, class and gender—‘joy unfurls from coupledom and a shared bank account / watch out or the big horse trudges on your head.’ Her writing about childrearing is painfully tender yet radical: ‘they pack him differently at the nursery … am I letting them snuff it out / the little yellow flame.’ In this beautiful, funny and innovative book, an important new poetic voice has emerged.
—Rebecca Tamás

Back to top.

31.07.24

John Cassavetes 1

Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Hoagy Houghton
36 Exposures / A Bastardised Roll of Film

With an afterword
by Chris McCabe

John Cassavetes 2

Dominic J. Jaeckle
Magnolia or Redbud /
Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs

With an afterword
by David Keenan
& collage-works
by Lucy Sante

Order direct from Tenement here. / & Here.

Inaugurating a new imprint from the Tenement wheelhouse, named John Cassavetes, and a new series of interrelated and experimental spines—entitled Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, and River Phoenix—two new, collaborative titles from Dominic J. Jaeckle.

A compelling, propulsive essay poetry to accompany a year-long suite of pictures, this twitterverse feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. [...] 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. & 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,
on 36 Exposures

Magnolia or Redbud is a beguiling, intoxicating mystery garden. In its hothouse alcoves, groves and bosquets, figures and figurations merge into shadowy projections that flit between domestic and psychic scenes. Like cut flowers, Jaeckle’s poems sit in a medium that both nurtures and traps them, formally thwarting their speaker’s quest for secrets and centres. What to do with the floral impulse to locate a centre, when the centre is understood to be a trojan horse filled with market forces, and the alienated variegations of desire? Jaeckle demonstrates how the cut-up’s disruption is also its irrigation, suspending these poems in quiet menace and beauty.
—Daisy Lafarge,
on Magnolia or Redbud

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
on Magnolia or Redbud

Back to top.

01.07.24

Edwina Attlee, A great shaking

Order direct from Tenement here.

The twelfth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

A great shaking is such a rich gathering: endlessly surprising, bold and inventive. ‘Book of Days’ offers a fascinating riddle and rhyme of the seasons; the ‘Nursery Songs’ are full of secrets and vibrant flashes; while the ‘Archive Songs’ are curiously alluring. All together, they show undoubtable imagination and skill.
—Lavinia Singer

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

Back to top.

01.07.24

Plastic Language x Tenement Press :
OPEN CALL

Via London’s NTS, and ℅ host Will René—librarian at the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library—Plastic Language is a bi-monthly show exploring spoken word across recorded media (spanning dub, jazz, ASMR, sound poetry and a myriad more), and wherein René’s selections are informed by—but not limited to—the collection of poetry LPs held at the National Poetry Library. Previous episodes in René’s ongoing series have included collaborations, readings and new work from Roger Robinson, Moor Mother and Phil Elverum. Following a Summer-long open call, René and Tenement’s Dominic Jaeckle will be sifting through submitted materials on the hunt for works to feature in the final instalment of Plastic Language for this calendar year; a broadcast that’ll air during the early-bird, twilight hours of November 27th, and that will then be archived for posterity on the NTS website thereafter.

Submissions Now Closed.

Back to top.

06.06.24

An Evening with Stanley Schtinter

Filmhaus, Cologne
21:00 / 15.06.24

See here.

German Language Interview /
English Language Transcript.

Back to top.

08.05.24

Adam Thirlwell, ‘Writing Practice : La rabbia’
ArtReview

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

‘What aesthetic strategies can make sense of an unstable present?’

Adam Thirlwell looks to forms of art with a strong theoretical component’ [sic] and—by way of John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2019), Johanne Løgstrup, and Pankaj Mishra—ends on the Tenement Press publication of Cristina Viti’s translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger.

Back to top.

05.05.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies (2)
Batalha Centro de Cinema, Porto

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

The radical, surprising and perhaps macabre programme that presents a selection of films seen by icons of the 20th century moments before their deaths, is returning to Batalha. Announcing a fresh cast-list in this second chapter, we screen the last films seen by F.W. Murnau, Agatha Christie Murnau, Agatha Christie, John F. Kennedy, Princess Diana and Jean-Luc Godard, among others.
After the success of the first edition—in which of the 131 participants who entered the cinema, 101 held out until the morning of the following day—Last Movies (2) will once again be presented as a durational moving image experience. Proposing an endurance trial throughout the night and ending the following morning, this 18-hour continuous programme will have a single ticket, and awards for persevering audience members.

Back to top.

22.04.24

Mario Benedetti, El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel /
Juan Ángel’s Birthday

Translated from the Spanish
by Adam Feinstein

Order direct from Tenement here.

It’s extremely difficult to find a poem which fulfils the condition of a novel and a lyrical text without betraying both. 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

Back to top.

18.04.24

Jess Chandler & Dominic Jaeckle
in conversation with Micaela Brinsley
& Eponine Howarth / La Piccioletta Barca

(On Seven Rooms.)

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

15.04.24

Nasim Luczaj, ‘A Wider Circle: Skimming Ibn Arabi’
Nothing Personal (No.3)

(On Agitated Air.)

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi is the fruit of a back and forth exchange between two Arabic-English translators, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, who are distinguished by their initials, YS and RM, both in the text and this review.
The project grew organically: the authors sent each other a few of their own translations from Tarjuman al-Ashwaq / The Interpreter of Desires or The Translator of Desires, a 13th century 61-poem cycle by the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, and then replied to each poem with a new ‘response’ translation. This process was repeated a few times for each piece, pushing the translators to convey the poems in new ways not only in relation to one another, but to their own previous attempts. Agitated Air is a compilation of fifteen exchanges, providing the reader with the original text and up to seven translations with alternating authors. The book, then, is not a translation of the text per se. In a frolic of splinters, the poems reincarnate from email to email, refracting as they hit another shore. We, readers, float with. Like a sea, the opportunity to reiterate allows us to let go.
—Nasim Luczaj

Back to top.

15.03.24

Translating the French Revolution

The History Workshop Podcast /
An Anarchist Playbook

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Following the publication of An Anarchist Playbook, an anthology of translations pertaining to the ongoing work of the Radical Translations group—a collective that looks to the French Revolution to recover the vitality of Europe’s shared radical past via an ongoing experiment in collaborative translation and collectivity—the History Workshop podcast series hosted a publication with the group.
Chaired by Marybeth Hamilton, History Workshop invited Laura Mason, author of The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals, Dominic Jaeckle of Tenement Press, and Sanja Perovic and Cristina Viti of the Radical Translations Workshop, ‘whose new book An Anarchist Playbook (published by Tenement) compiles vibrant and politically engaged translations of long-forgotten documents from the final years of the French Revolution, marked by virulent schisms over the meaning of private property, social justice, and the practice of radical equality.’

Back to top.

03.03.24

A Suite for Seven Rooms / Seven Hundred Horses
14:30 Resonance Extra, London

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Hannah Regel
Nicolette Polek
Iain Sinclair
David Grubbs
Lucy Sante
Imogen Cassels
Jess Cotton
Joan Brossa
Stanley Schtinter
Edwina Attlee
& Wayne Koestenbaum

A new entry in the occasional broadcast series from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, Railroad Flat Radio, Seven Hundred Horses is a suite of readings by eleven poets and makers to mark the publication of Seven Rooms, an anthology of works from across the Hotel series, 2016 to 2023, co-published by Tenement and Prototype, and edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Jess Chandler. Seven Hundred Horses assembles a select thread of live recordings and materials from the London launch of Seven Rooms at Presse Books / FormaHQ (Regel, Sante, Cassels, Cotton, Attlee and Koestenbaum) alongside choice cuts from the Hotel Archive (Polek, Sinclair, Grubbs, Brossa, and Schtinter).

‘A hotel is defined by its inhabitants,’ runs Hotel’s tagline. If Hotel itself were a concrete edifice, it would be more like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’s Circus-Circus than the Grand Budapest, despite its tasteful, clean exterior. Its commitment to ‘new approaches to fiction, non-fiction and poetry’ promises all manner of havoc. It is not the only journal committed to literary innovation, but it is among the best.
—Camille Ralphs,
The Times Literary Supplement

& in which ...

Hannah Regel reads Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,’ Nicolette Polek reads a short story called ‘The Rope Barrier,’ Iain Sinclair reads ‘Animal Drums,’ a cut-up impromptu to SJ Fowler’s motion-picture-poem of the same name (at the Whitechapel Gallery, 2019), David Grubbs reads a slice of his feature-length poem, ‘Good night the pleasure was ours,’ Lucy Sante reads a poem called ‘Call My Baby,’ Imogen Cassels reads a poem called ‘Two Types of the Same Return’ and ‘Moss’ (as in Kate), Jess Cotton reads a poem called ‘States of Bewilderment’ and a poem called ‘Aloof,’ Stanley Schtinter reads Joan Brossa’s ‘Astral Summary’ (Parts I and II of III), Edwina Attlee reads a poem called ‘Refrigeration’ and a poem called ‘Australia Day,’ and Wayne Koestenbaum reads a poem called ‘Stigma Pudding.’

Back to top.

29.02.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

Stanley Schtinter & Christ Petit, after the show, a transcript of a conversation at London’s ICA as published via Screen Slate, and following a screening, 12.12.23.

See here. / Order direct from Tenement here.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (d.1982)
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

John Dillinger (d.1934)
Manhattan Melodrama (Van Dyke & Cukor, 1934)

Back to top.

19.02.24

Derek Jarman’s Billboard / (Unabridged.)

See here.

An unabridged, archival recording—as read by the author—to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Jarman’s death, and following the 2022 Prototype / House Sparrow Press publication of Jarman’s sole work of narrative fiction, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping. (With thanks to Gareth Evans, Declan Wiffen, So Mayer and the London Review Bookshop.)

First Ears—
19.02.24 12:00 Resonance Extra
19.02.24 20:00 Resonance 104.4FM

Repeats—
20.02.24 10:00 Resonance 104.4FM
21.02.24 10:00 Resonance Extra
23.02.24 18:00 Resonance Extra
25.02.24 22:00 Resonance Extra

Back to top.

14.02.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

10:00 Resonance Extra
10:00 Resonance 104.4FM

Stanley Schtinter & Gareth Evans
In conversation.

Back to top.

01.02.24

Micheal Caines, ‘NB.: Cultured Wars’
The Times Literary Supplement

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Trouble at the Royal Society,
Experiments at the Hotel.

Literary diversity was always on show in Hotel.
—Michael Caines

Back to top.

29.01.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies /
Schtinter in conversation
with Agnès Houghton-Boyle
Fetch Magazine

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

According to Schtinter, we get the films we deserve.
—Agnès Houghton-Boyle

Back to top.

27.01.24

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies /
Schtinter reads Schtinter

13:00 (EST) Montez Press Radio

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

18.12.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
[Excerpt.] Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies on LitHub /
John F. Kennedy and From Russia with Love (1963)

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

‘Kennedy proclaimed his love for Bond wherever he could.’

Back to top.

16.12.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
[Excerpt.]

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Pasolini’s ‘Algeria’ poems, as exerpted from Cristina Viti’s translation of La rabbia / Anger, published in Critical Muslim (No.48).

Back to top.

09.12.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
Plaster Magazine

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Clive Martin on Schtinter’s ‘Book of Endings,’ Last Movies, ‘A highbrow Wikipedia hole full of fascinating coincidences.’

Back to top.

06.12.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
The Film Comment Podcast

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Following the recent Tenement publication of Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies, Film Comment hosted a conversation between Schtinter, Erika Balsom, and editors, Clinton Krute and Devika Girish on and around the project’s authorship and Schtinter’s roving parallel screening programme.

Back to top.

28.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Last Movies shakes up the orthodoxy in its own way. ‘I think it’s important to abandon the criteria by which we organise history,’ Schtinter says. ‘As it stands, it’s not working. What we end up with is this biased history leaning heavily toward James Bond: chauvinism, expensive food, the killing of foreigners. It’s kind of how JFK got to power in a weird way. He wanted to position himself as a serious literary guy but he also needed this strongman element on the side.’
The likelihood is that Kennedy’s last movie was From Russia With Love, but he isn’t the only Bond fan in the book. Elvis Presley hired out a Memphis cinema to screen The Spy Who Loved Me in the weeks before the end credits rolled in his own life. From this starting point, the Presley chapter spirals off into a survey of the King’s eating habits, from the squirrels he devoured as a youth to the hamburgers, Pepsi-soaked Sweet Tarts and deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches that hastened his exit. That leads on to a playlist of food-related songs in the singer’s discography, including It’s Carnival Time, taken from Presley’s 1964 film Roustabout, which featured a small role for Richard Kiel, who went on to play the metal-toothed baddie in… yes, The Spy Who Loved Me. Wade more than a dozen pages into Last Movies and these connections start to reveal themselves like constellations on a cloudless night.
—Ryan Gilbey

Back to top.

27.11.23

Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
Catalonia Today

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Micheal Eaude on Peter Bush’s translation of Miquel’s collection in Catalonia Today.

The thirty-six intense, fierce poems about death, grief, and beauty are connected. In her prologue, a prose-poem in itself, Miquel tells how the death of others close to her left her ‘a flower without roots’ [p.17]. She dwelt in ‘the belly of death’ herself. Then she started to cry. ‘Weeping rents the air. To weep is to come out of the bier’ [p. 17]. Death and decay, and the fight for life, pervade the book. […] Death dominates with humour (the Psychiatrist for the Dead; a collection service for corpses), enquiry (poems on rubbing and scrubbing and kissing the dead), lyricism (a crow with a worm in its mouth), but most of all with rage. Miquel moves out from her own fight to survive to a poem listing animals made extinct or another recalling the massacres of Cathars and at Nagasaki. […] Miquel loves distorting language, finding double meanings. This makes translation a tough task, but Peter Bush succeeds by translating loosely where necessary, prioritising rhythm and word-play over literal meaning.It's a challenging book, but worth the effort.
—Micheal Eaude

Back to top.

23.11.23

Stanley Schinter’s Last Movies /
Juliet Jacques, ArtReview

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Cinema, the quintessential twentieth-century artform, which became integral to the era’s politics and culture soon after its first demonstration in 1895, has an inherently haunting quality. The obvious reason for this—surely apparent to the Lumière brothers as they captured workers leaving the factory—is its ability to preserve not just the features but also movements and eventually the voices of people for posterity, with more accuracy and less sense of separation from the subject than the earlier method of photography or portrait painting. (Nearly a 100 years since the advent of ‘talkies,' silent film has this eerie property in extremis: long-since deceased actors express and gesticulate in antiquated fashions; different frame-per-minute rates sometimes render their movement strange; and the decay of its stock produces a ghostly effect, making it of interest to contemporary archive-filmmakers such as Karel Doing and Bill Morrison.)
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

Back to top.

22.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies /
A screening series

The ICA
The Mall
London
SW1Y 5AH

Last Movies remaps the first century of cinema according to what a selection of its key cultural icons saw just before dying. Conceived and created by Stanley Schtinter to enable an audience ‘to see what those who see no longer saw last,’ the ICA hosts a five-piece programme to coincide with the publication of his book of the same title, described by Alan Moore as ‘Profound and riveting ... a remarkable achievement,’ and by Laura Mulvey as ‘deeply thought-provoking.’

SEE HERE.

12.03.24

Last Movies V
Mozart Brothers
(Suzanne Osten, 1986)
& Alamut: A Journey into Iran (1986)

* with CM von Hausswolf.

See here.

14.02.24

Last Movies IV
The Piano
(Jane Campion, 1994)

* with Elena Gorfinkel.

See here.

30.01.24

Last Movies III
Secrets & Lies
(Mike Leigh, 1996)
& Carlito’s Way [Excerpt]
(Brian de Palma, 1994)

* with Adrian Dannatt.

See here.

12.12.23

Last Movies II
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
(Michael Curtiz, 1934)
& Manhattan Melodrama
(W.S. Van Dyke & George Cukor, 1934)

* with Chris Petit.

See here.

22.11.23
Last Movies / Programme & Book Launch
War is Hell [Excerpt]
(Burt Topper, 1961)
& From Russia With Love
(Terrence Young, 1963)

* with Erika Balsom.

See here.

Back to top.

10.11.23

A Launch for Seven Rooms /
Tenement Press & Prototype Publishing

Presse Books & Forma HQ
140 Great Dover Street
London
SE1 4GW

16:00 (& Onwards) / 18.11.23

SEE HERE. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

16:30-17:15
Paul Buck
Sophie Seita
Hannah Regel

17:45-18:15
Stanley Schtinter,
Seven Rooms at the Hotel Bardo
A screening.

19:00-20:00
Imogen Cassels
Jess Cotton
Edwina Attlee
Will Eaves

20:20-20:40
Helen Cammock,
They Call it Idlewild
A screening (courtesy of the artist
& Kate Mcgarry Gallery, London).

21:00 (to close.)
Cristina Viti
Wayne Koestenbaum
(Pre-recorded.)
Nicolette Polek
(Pre-recorded.)
Lucy Sante
(Pre-recorded.)
Stephen Watts, ‘I AM A FILM’ (Huw Wahl, 2022)
A screening (courtesy of the poet / care of the filmmaker).

Hosted by Gareth Evans /
Exit Music, ℅ Will René
(Plastic Language, NTS).

Back to top.

05.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The tenth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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

Very strange, and deeply thought-provoking.
—Laura Mulvey

A special edition ‘glow-in-the-dark’ hardback, co published in a limited run of 101 by Tenement Press and purge.xxx, is available here.

Back to top.

05.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

A multi-venue day and night
in New York, Ny.

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Light Industry, the Nitehawk Cinema, and the Spectacle Theater are co-host a day-long suite of screenings: films bound together by a single, shared characteristic: they are Last Movies. The phrase is evocative, rhyming with those familiar designations so often pinned to auteurs and their work (’first films,’ ‘late style,’ et cetera), but here we refer to something else entirely. From morning to midnight, we will be presenting the last movies of Franz Kafka, John Dillinger, Charlie Parker, Boris Vian, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sergio Leone, Bette Davis, and Stanley Kubrick—that is, the last film they saw before they died.

See here.

Back to top.

01.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

Iain Sinclair, ‘The Laughing Policeman,’
Sight & Sound

See Here. / Order Direct from Tenement 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

19.10.23

Seven Rooms / Assorted Materials from a Paper Hotel
(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Hotel was a magazine and multiform publication project for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Seven years following the publication of Hotel #1 (2016)—and in tribute to the cessation of the ‘Paper hotel’ with the publication of Hotel #7 (2021)—Seven Rooms, a collaborative publication from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, is a document of the project’s unerring commitment to pioneering creativity, literature’s idiosyncrasies, and shared space.

An anthology publication,
featuring contributions from—

Mario Dondero;
Erica Baum;
Jess Cotton;
Rebecca Tamás;
Stephen Watts;
Helen Cammock;
Salvador Espriu;
Lucy Mercer;
Lucy Sante;
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa;
Ryan Choi;
John Yau;
Nicolette Polek;
Chris Petit;
Sascha Macht;
Amanda DeMarco;
Mark Lanegan;
Vala Thorodds;
Richard Scott;
Joshua Cohen;
Hannah Regel;
Nick Cave;
Daisy Lafarge;
Holly Pester;
Matthew Gregory;
Olivier Castel;
Emmanuel Iduma;
Joan Brossa;
Cameron Griffiths;
Imogen Cassels;
Hisham Bustani;
Maia Tabet;
Raúl Guerrero;
Velimir Khlebnikov;
Natasha Randall;
Edwina Attlee;
Matthew Shaw;
Aidan Moffat;
Lesley Harrison;
Oliver Bancroft;
Lauren de Sá Naylor;
Will Eaves;
Sandro Miller;
Jim Hugunin;
Levina van Winden;
Aram Saroyan;
Glykeria Patramani;
Will Oldham;
Antonio Tabucchi;
Yasmine Seale;
Elizabeth Harris;
Nina Mingya Powles;
Isabel Galleymore;
Jason Shulman;
Jeffrey Vallance;
Preti Taneja;
Stanley Schtinter;
Wayne Koestenbaum;
Sophie Seita;
Ralf Webb;
Jonathan Chandler;
Iain Sinclair;
SJ Fowler;
Cass McCombs;
David Grubbs;
Agustín Fernández Mallo;
Pere Joan;
Thomas Bunstead;
Adrian Bridget;
John Divola;
& Gareth Evans.

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

[Hotel] is a part of the renaissance of UK literary journals.
—Nicholas Royle, The Guardian

Back to top.

04.10.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies /
Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘Last Sights’
Prospect

See Here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

The more details Schtinter’s Last Movies uncovers the more mysterious his project becomes. What are we meant to understand from learning that Franz Kafka’s last movie was The Kid (1921) by Charlie Chaplin? Or that Chaplin started casting it just one week after the death of his son Norman? Or that Norman’s tombstone read only ‘The Little Mouse’? Or that, after Chaplin himself died in 1977 (his last movie was Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon), his coffin was dug up from a Lausanne cemetery by two refugees and held to ransom? Perhaps it’s the freedom to speculate, the unanswerability of those questions, that is its own reward. Boldface names, lurid details, strange connection. Schtinter, always eager to deflate pomposity, likens his project to an ‘occult version of OK! magazine.’ I myself can’t help wondering: what if we were to watch every movie as if it were our last?’
—Sukhdev Sandhu

Back to top.

21.09.23

Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa

A Pink Plastic Glove Arrives
Montez Press Radio
London & New York, NY

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Back to top.

21.07.23

Dolors Miquel, El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove

Translated from the Catalan
by Peter Bush

Order Direct from Tenement 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

Erotic, caustic, uncompromising, alive...
Dolors Miquel's poems are a pulsating delight.
—Nadia de Vries

Back to top.

12.07.23

Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble /
Temporary Palaces

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Excerpts from Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces—an unabridged serialisation of Simone’s Tenement title, Palace of Rubble—were featured on Will René’s monthly radio programme, Plastic Language (NTS), alongside works by Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, Tod Barton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eugene B. Redmond, Mike Ratelage, and a myriad more.

Back to top.

08.07.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

Reviewed by Alistair Findlay
in The Morning Star

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Pasolini's comments on the montage of setbacks suffered by Western imperialism during the height of the 1950s to early ’60s cold war reflect both the extent and diversity of its defeats in Korea, Suez, Algeria, Cuba, Congo and Africa as well as in Vietnam and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement which brought civil war to the streets and campuses of the US itself, and death to its citizens—King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers—all viewed by capitalist US elites as ‘enemies within.’

[...]

He described La rabbia 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.‘ La rabbia, Pasolini’s anger, penetrates the untruths still beating in Western capitalism’s dark imperial neoliberal heart.
—Alistair Findlay

Back to top.

04.07.23

Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove [Excerpt.] Granta

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

The title poem from the forthcoming Tenement Press publication of Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove has been published online by Granta, alongside works by Marta Orriols, Irene Solà and Montserrat Roig as a part of a Catalan special issue.

Back to top.

19.06.23

Tenement Press x Prototype Publishing /
Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical)

See here. / Order Direct from Prototype here.

An unabridged four-part serialisation of Palmer’s debut novel, Pleasure Beach, to mark the book’s publication with Prototype, recorded in Resonance’s ‘Chapel’ studios (Bermondsey, London).

A book as mind-bending as Blackpool itself.
—Jeremy Deller

Pleasure Beach does for neon lycra cycling shorts, Nik Naks, and acid trips what Ulysses did for lemon soap: it kaleidoscopes the everyday in a way that remakes the world by recording the bits of it that all too often slip out of view of the literary. 1999 is right before your eyes reading this novel, and Helen Palmer is Blackpool’s incomparable archivist. A social history of fun’s commodification and excess, an intellectual ride, a real queer pleasure.
—H. Gareth Gavin

Palmer, photographed during
the Pleasure Beach sessions.

Palmer’s Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions. Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for broadcast on Resonance Extra, and recorded on location in Resonance’s Bermondsey ‘chapel’ studios, London, accross four days in late April, 2023.

1:00 (BST) / 13.06.23
Chapters I through III.

21:00 (BST) / 14.06.23
Chapters IV through VIII.

22:30 (BST) / 15.06.23
Chapters IX through XI.

21:00 (BST) / 16.06.23
Chapters XII through XVIII.

Back to top.

18.06.23

Jeffrey Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes

A ‘four star’ review
in The Fortean Times

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Fortean Times first featured the work of Jeffrey Vallance back in 1989, when it reported the story of ‘Blinky the Friendly Hen,’ a supermarket chicken that he had buried in the Los Angeles pet cemetery back in 1978 [see FT53:23]—‘dedicated to the billions of hens sacrificed each year forour consumption.’ Blinky’s remains had bled onto a paper towel, creating the Shroud of Blinky. (The funeral service landed Vallance on Letterman and MTV.) This fat yellow tome is a treasure-packed bran pie that will delight those who have been diverted by the many pieces Vallance has contributed to FT over the last three decades, exhibiting his characteristic wit and erudition.
—Edward Young

Back to top.

13.06.23

Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble

On Constraint / Romance /
& Dissolving Worlds

A conversation between Simone
& Maggie Millner / Bomb Magazine

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

John Divola, as excerpted from
his ‘Zuma’ series, 1977 / 1978.

Epics are generally in sections or cantos, but there’s also a narrative coherency that supersedes the modular nature of the individual poems. Palace of Rubble is that way, too; there's no single dominant narrative that asserts itself across every story, but there are narrative currents and recurring characters and preoccupations. The sections flow into each other in a way that also feels reminiscent of a certain kind of deconstructed epic. If the linebreak is a technology that creates “units” or slows the pace of the reader’s eye on the page, I would argue that part of the power of the prose in Palace of Rubble has to do with the lack of separation, the lack of breath or space between ideas, and how that density operates on our attention. Each chunk of prose becomes its own edifice.
—Millner (on Simone).

Back to top.

09.06.23

Reza Baraheni, Lilith

Anonymously translated from
the French / from the Persian.

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The eighth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

[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

Back to top.

25.05.23

Dominic J. Jaeckle / On Craquelure :
Publication as Philosophical Project

IFILNOVA / CULTURELAB
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Lisbon

(Chaired by Ana Falcato.)

Amazon appropriated our books.
We will appropriate Amazon’s logic.
—Jorge Carrión

See here.

‘Craquelure’ is a term for the network of fine cracks that appear in the varnish of an oil painting over time. The morphology of these cracks displays the dynamics of history on the surface of a canvas, effecting an image with a new set of desire lines, with distortions—a kind of pictorial ‘crow’s feet’ that delineate a painting’s age and antiquity—and these fissures or fault lines explicitly show (to quote novelist Chloe Aridjis) how every surface ‘gives way to tension,’ in end. To fixate on this equation—an image or idea over time—provides a perfect metaphor with which to think through a publisher’s impulses and the mechanics of publication as a form of production or creative expression. Factoring in the work of Jules Verne, Jorge Carrión,and Ingeborg Bachman—the varied currents of a contemporary literary mainstream and the deep rivers of a ‘minor’ literature (by way of the anti-institutionalism of Adorno’s ‘Valéry Proust Museum,’ with thanks to Aridjis)—Jaeckle’s presentation will explore ‘craquelure’ as a means of discussing the work of the small press publisher today via a fragmentary set of notes excerpted from a forthcoming anthology project, Seven Rooms (Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, 2023).
The presentation will conclude with a short showcase of works from Tenement’s catalogue (featuring readings of translations from titles by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Joan Brossa, Reza Baraheni and Dolors Miquel, amongst others).

Back to top

05.05.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
Mark Glanville, ‘Masters & Slaves,’
The Times Literary Supplement

See Here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

La rabbia is a sequence of poems and commentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1963, made to accompany a documentary of the same name—a departure from the fictionalised studies of Roman poverty that defined his earlier work. Trawling through some 90,000 metres of archive footage, the director gathered a collection of images and footage portraying recent events, including the Hungarian Revolution, the Algerian War, the Korean War and the Suez Crisis. Much of the text of La rabbia / Anger didn’t make the final cut; even so, with music and narration overlaid on frenetic and disturbing scenes, the film sometimes tips into overload. The words are better appreciated on their own and Cristina Viti’s fresh translation captures their grim vitality.
—Mark Glanville

Back to top

24.10.23

Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
Sant Jordi USA

Order Direct from Tenement here.

(An 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 (with contributions from Dolors Miquel and Amsterdam based poet, Nadia de Vries).

Back to top

27.04.23

Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove

The Bristol Poetry Institute /
University of Bristol

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations, of four Catalan poets, with the special collaboration of Dominic Jaeckle, writer and editor of Tenement Press.

With Eduard Escoffet;
Míriam Cano;
Jaume C. Pons Alorda;
Xavier Mas Craviotto
Dominic J. Jaeckle;
& Peter Bush.

Back to top

22.04.23

Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble / Temporary Palaces

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

A three-part serialisation of Simone’s collection that presents a rehanging of the author’s debut, Palace of Rubble, as in a tidal pool of drones and appropriated noises. Temporary Palaces was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham, and recorded on location in Resonance’s South London ‘Chapel’ studios.

I Tarzan the Apeman
Resonance Extra
13:00 (BST) / 22.04.23

In which the author reads ...
‘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.’

II The Wild One
Resonance Extra
13:00 (BST) / 27.05.23

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.’

III The Stranger
Resonance Extra
13:00 (BST) / 01.07.23

In which the author reads...
‘Au Black’
‘Away on Business’
‘The Clouds that Pass’
‘The Avalanche’
‘Swept Up in the Wave’
‘The Bag Lady & La Fleurs du Mal’
‘The Winged’
‘The Oneironaut & La Novillera’
‘The Thing in the Road’
‘The Land is Dark’
‘The Last Man to Qualify’
‘Thank You, Bye’
‘A Walk By the River’
‘The People in the Hotel’
& ‘The Palace at Midnight.’

Back to top

17.03.23

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Fowler’s debut novella shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, 2022 / 23.

*

(The 2022/2023 edition of the prize was judged by Isabel Waidner, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Lamorna Ash.)

Shortlist

Missouri Williams,
The Doloriad (Dead Ink);
SJ Fowler,
MUEUM (Tenement Press);
Nate Lippens,
My Dead Book (Pilot Press);
Sheena Patel,
I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books);
Thuân, translated from the Vietnamese
by Nguyėn An Lý,
Chinatown (Tilted Axis Press)

*

Daniel Davis Wood
& Dominic J. Jaeckle
in conversation
for 3AM Magazine—

3:AM: Look at the opening lines of MUEUM and it seems like something familiar enough, with its gestures towards a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But very quickly it turns into something less familiar, more difficult to pin down: abstract, often theoretical, an intellectual exercise, but not a cold one—an exercise in morbid self-deprecation and deadpan humour, as much as anything else. How did you encounter MUEUM as something you felt compelled to publish?

DJ: From the editorship of Hotel on through to the advent of Tenement’s activities back in 2021, I was drawn to the spike of SJ Fowler’s anarchic wit, and I’ve been fortunate enough to count on Fowler as a friend and frequent collaborator. With either the page or stage in mind, our collaborations have always leaned on conversation, and the candour of our exchanges always proved coloured by a free circulation of ideas. Be it a consideration of creativity, fresh enthusiasms, works-in-progress, or projects-in-percolation—all was ever fair game—and (in the best sense of the word) it seemed inevitable that, once the Press had found its feet, we’d begin thinking on the prospect of our working on a publication together.
The idea of publishing MUEUM emerged organically from the critical palette of such a kinship, from such a free market of mind. Fowler sent on MUEUM as a fully formed manuscript, and I was struck by the ways in which his first draft compounded an array of entrapments via his acute, curt prose. In MUEUM, we’ve the biographical; the bibliographical; the philosophical; the personal; the institutional; the intellectual; and a dedication to the psychic ironies and chemical truths that compete for attention in any circumnavigation of the notion of hourly pay. Of the valueof time. All heady nodes in a constellation of concerns that butt heads over a short distance, like livestock suddenly all too aware of the farm’s fence line, in sum—and as a manuscript—MUEUM seemed to write itself down as a prism of prisons.

[...]

See here.

Back to top

09.12.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

Two Evenings at the Italian Cultural Institute

39 Belgrave Square
London
SW1X 8NX

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. The exhibition at the institute includes 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, reveal 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.

*

A launch for La rabbia
18:30 / 16.01.23

A bilingual reading at the Italian Cultural Institute to mark the publication of the Tenement edition of Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger, with translator Cristina Viti and Tenement editors, Dominic J. Jaeckle and Gareth Evans.

Back to top

15.01.23

Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger’s Agitated Air

Janani Ambikapathy, ‘A Known Gazelle’
mPT: Modern Poetry in Translation

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

In the year 1214, Mohieddin Ibn Arabi, a revered Islamic poet and philosopher, compiled an extraordinary cycle of 61 poems called Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (The interpreter of Desires), a complex meditation on the nature of love. In Agitated Air / Poems After Ibn Arabi, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger each translate the same poem from the cycle, send it to the other, and write another version in response to the poem received. This process continues until they are exhausted, and they begin to circle a new poem.
In the first iteration of the ninth poem by Seale, a gazelle ‘masked in red’ beckons with ‘finger raised and moving lids,’ and ‘her pastureland the zone from collarbone to gut.’ In the second iteration by Moger, the gazelle grows wild, acquires a fevered pitch: ‘wild gazelle / Whose face is all a blaze and gesturing, / grape-red fingertip flicking, flickering lids, at pasture / between the breastbone and the meat.’ In the third iteration by Seale, the gazelle disappears. What remains is a memory of the gazelle trying to materialise around words that can contain her form: a lonely ‘eye’ in the middle of a stanza, followed by a meadow a few lines later. In the fourth iteration by Moger, the gazelle returns as a deer, feverish still, but with a muted fervour ‘in its crooking fingertip / lids shuttering / (it is amazing / between breastbone and gut grazes’…). The book lays out a coded garden of spectacles at the limits of translation: Ibn Arabi emerges from a John Donne erasure surrounded by greyed out lines that mark the unsayable, to say ‘How little… is.’ Inasmuch as you can pin a fleeing gazelle to the page, the poems change as quickly as you change your mind about them.
The perils of translating ancient poetry from the East into English (say Arabic, Persian or Tamil) are many: the rich images and archaic language often trigger a fawning orientalism that dilutes the complexity of the material. The text risks slipping into the abyss of easily accessible platitudes. As the poems flip back and forth between Seale and Moger, they accrue a kind of poetic difficulty that is hard to reduce to cliches. The translations are approximations of a source poem—in some instances there is a flash of clarity, in others a profusion of ambiguity. They defy the expectation that a translation must decipher or explicate—the poems flicker in the margin between the known and unknowable.
For all that the book conceals, the process reveals itself fully—the translator’s hand is plainly visible, their calibrations conspicuous. Nearly half a decade earlier, AK Ramanujan published translations of four Kannada poet-saints, contemporaries (circa 10th/12th centuries) of Ibn Arabi, in a collection titled Speaking of Siva. He notes in the introduction that he has allowed the source poems to ‘speak to his biases’ and that translation is a ‘betrayal of what answers to one’s needs, one’s envies.’ If Seale and Moger were any less self-aware, the book could have turned into a gimmick. But their attention to the intricacies of the source, and a loyalty towards their own proclivities, brings us a book that is a wonder to behold.
—Janani Ambikapathy

Back to top

16.12.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
[Excerpt.] Two Poems / LitHub.

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

‘Anticommunist Youth Marches in Rome’
& ‘Series of Atomic Explosions’

Back to top

15.12.23

Jeffrey Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes
Doug Harvey, ‘A Few of Vallance’s Favourite Things’
Artillery Magazine

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement 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!
—Doug Harvey

Back to top

14.12.23

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

Translated from the Italian
by Cristina Viti

With a foreword
by Roberto Chiesi,
& an afterword
by John Berger

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The seventh title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, a lighthouse for Pasolini’s centenary, out now.

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

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 saw what was coming, and saw the poet’s mission as an excoriation of this world to come, that has now arrived. His tremendous energy was not negative. It came from an abounding love of the world. Picturing himself like a hero from ancient days, he struggled mightily, in and against the powers arrayed against life. What he called neocapitalism already came with its own brands of neofascism. Good comrade that he was, he knew the mark of our enemies, and where to direct his rage. Here we find him in a moment when he thought the good fight might still be won. A book to give us courage.
—McKenzie Wark

Back to top

01.12.22

Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger’s Agitated Air

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

A White Review ‘Book of the Year’ 2022.

The most beautiful poems, rewriting each other and the world.
—Charlotte Geater

Back to top

28.10.22

Tenement Press /
The Small Publishers Fair 2022

(Three Readers.)

In Which ... Kyra Simone reads from Palace of Rubble, SJ Fowler reads from MUEUM and Cristina Viti reads from her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger. The readings were recorded for posterity by Vilde Valerie Bjerke Torset.

Back to top

24.10.22

Jeffrey Vallance, A Voyage to Extremes:
Selected Spiritual Writings

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The fifth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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

Back to top

04.10.22

Kyra Simone, Palace of Rubble

With photographs
by John Divola

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The sixth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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 colour,’ 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 at McNally Jackson
(New York City, NY), 29.09.22.

Back to top

01.10.22

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

A four-part serialisation of Fowler’s novella, as read by the author, and recorded on location in Resonance’s South London ‘Chapel’ studios. Fowler’s MUEUM was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham.

Fowler, photographed in the midsts
of the MUEUM sessions, Spring 2022.

A mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation.
—Luke Kennard

The four instalments in this series were first broadcast on Resonance Extra on the following dates ...

I October 1st 2022
Chapters I through IV.

II November 5th 2022
Chapters V through VII.

III December 3rd 2022
Chapters VIII through XI.

IV January 7th 2023
Chapters XII through
to the (bitter) end.

A conversation between Fowler on (and around) MUEUM
with Gareth Evans; recorded in the Resonance studios by
Therese Henningsen.

Back to top

16.09.22

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

Order Direct from Tenement here.

Big Doom Above Me /
45m in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

Montez Press Radio
13:55 (BST) 22.09.22

An unabridged iteration of a conversation
between Fowler and Williams, as recorded
for Montez Press Radio.

Back to top

28.06.22

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The fourth title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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.
—Chris McCabe

Back to top

16.03.22

Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger’s Agitated Air

M. Lynx Qualey, ‘Translation’s Agitated Mirror’
ArabLit Quarterly

See here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

A translation is sometimes called a mirror of its original, although critics will often salt on a disclaimer, such as fun-house or magic, strange or distorted. Some dislike the mirror metaphor for its passivity, saying it fails to acknowledge the agency of the translator. A mirror, after all, is a flat unthinking thing: hung on a wall, or sitting quietly at the bottom of a purse.
And yet the mirror metaphor persists, and not only among those outside translation. In an interview with Dima Ayoub, maia tabet said of translation, ‘You’re transforming something which was in one state into something that is sort of parallel or a mirror image,’ while author Rabai al-Madhoun told me, ‘When I read the final manuscript [of The Lady of Tel Aviv] in English, I felt as though I were watching a new look of mine in the neighbor’s mirror.’ In 2019, Hend Saeed asked the poet Dunya Mikhail why she didn’t publish her Arabic and English poems in a single collection. The poet said that ‘having only one side of the mirror is poetical, like those half heart necklaces in search of the other half.’ And the late Humphrey Davies said, in a video interview with AUC Press, ‘I like the idea of mirrors and reflecting. But you see, a mirror [image] is not identical. It’s subtly changed.’
For me, it is not mirroring’s lack of agency that nettles. But there is something about the singularity of a mirror image that doesn’t fit. It is as though, when standing a text in front of the glass, there is one possible output, one ideal reflection.
In their new collection of Ibn Arabi translations, Agitated Air, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger give us, instead, multiple reflected/refracted iterations of Ibn Arabi. They borrow fifteen of the sixty-one works from Ibn Arabi’s The Interpreter of Desires, a much-beloved work of nasib poetry by the philosopher-poet who was born in Murcia in 1165 and died in Damascus in 1240. The poems, they write in their introduction, are works of ‘distance and approach, of communion and the impossibility of union, of completion and the impossibility of completion’—a bit like the act of translation itself.

[...]

—M. Lynx Qualey

Back to top

28.02.22

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

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The third title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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

Back to top

23.10.21

Stanley Schtinter, et al.
The Liberated Film Club

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The second title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now; a catalogue anthology documenting the first and second seasons of Stanley Schtinter’s Liberated Film Club, featuring multiform contributions from (in order of appearance) ...

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.

Back to top

13.10.21

Stanley Schtinter’s Liberated Film Club /
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Screen Slate

See Here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

I’m a sucker for genre-defying ‘What is it?‘ books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged inside might consist of.
—Jonathan Rosenbaum

Back to top

01.07.21

Stanley Schtinter’s Liberated Film Club /
Matilda Munro, ‘A Void of Discovery’
Sight & Sound

See Here. / Order Direct from Tenement here.

When’s the last time you had no idea what you were getting yourself into? For a time before the pandemic, you could slink off Brick Lane in East London and step in under a low black ceiling for just such a flirtation with the unknown. The Liberated Film Club ran as an irregular night at Close-Up Film Centre for a month in 2016 and then again from 2019 into 2020. Orchestrated by the artist Stanley Schtinter, it offered a unique proposition: a speaker was invited to introduce a film neither they nor the audience knew beforehand—an intensification of the original promise of going to the cinema.
A cast of underground stalwarts provided the introductions. The London-based Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis told an alternative history of the world; the writer Juliet Jacques held a quiz. The writer Stewart Home spoke about the post-Bruce Lee Bruceploitation genre while in a handstand. John Akomfrah spoke about rebirth. Ben Rivers read from the French surrealist René Daumal. The screenwriter Tony Grisoni spoke about the late British fil producer Tony Garnett and the avoidance of writing as a creative act in itself. [Et cetera, & on, Endless.]

[...]

Schtinter answered what he saw as a need for a void that audiences could jump into. The format parodied the quantified known-ness and staid thematicism of most film events.

[...]

Back to top

15.04.21

Joan Brossa, El saltamartí / The Tumbler

Translated from the Catalan
by Cameron Griffiths

Order Direct from Tenement here.

The first title in Tenement’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series, out now.

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

Playful, sharp, unbelievably fresh, ironic and free, Brossa’s poetry
translates wonderfully into English as an ode to irreverence, a work of art and a magician’s trick. As the curtain rises the words appear, the wordsmith is here, the wizard is here.
Hold tight. Abracadabra.
—Irene Solá

Back to top

01.04.21 Open Sesame.