Last Movies

Arts & Photography

Balsom, Erika

Brenez, Nicole

Schtinter, Stanley

Photography & Video

Tenement Press

Hotel #6

Literature & Fiction

Artists, Various

Literary

This first-time English translation of The Tumbler (El saltamartí)—a collection of poems written in 1963 and first published in Catalan in 1969—presents a convergence of Joan Brossa’s critical and cultural concerns. Charting his growing sense of social commitment and support of Catalan independence, freedom stands as both Brossa’s primary subject and conceptual framework throughout this collection. The Tumbler is an anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian work that brings together verse vignettes and visual poems to revivify the proverbial, often with comic and subversive effect. Brossa plays with image, iconography and intimation as both verbal and visual elements vie for our attentions across these pages as—always the innovator—Brossa evinces a manifestly accessible and archly political poetry that demands our critical and creative participation. The Tumbler stands as a critical study of freedom; as "a bird that moves its wings."

Joan Brossa, El saltamartí / The Tumbler

Brossa, Joan

The Liberated Film Club is a collection of transcriptions, special commissions and texts anchored in a series of screenings held at London’s Close-Up Film Centre, 2016 to 2020, and curated by Stanley Schtinter. From its onset to its end, the Club guaranteed a wide wingspan for critical conversation. Screening liberated film (titles drawn from Schtinter’s expansive archive of ‘lost, suppressed and impossible’ motion picture), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be a disruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what would be shown, and this anonymised arrangement would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film; on the act(s) of showing, sharing, and seeing. Playing with the ways we reproach the institutions built around all our cultures of making, and the manners and methods of an elsewhere dominant culture of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself. This collection—an unabridged collation of works pertaining to this series—is a unique proposition. It is urgent, exciting, and sincere in its silliness; challenging received notions of critical exchange, and abandoning entirely the dogma of atomised, predictable viewing. It is a profound celebration of community and conversation, and a timely paean to free, shared space.

The Liberated Film Club

ROGERS, JOHN

PETIT, Chris

ROBERTS, ADAM

Evans, Gareth

FOWLER, William

Dawood, Shezad

Luka Zimmerman, Andrea

Rivers, Ben

Koppel, Gideon

Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific Muslim philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse. Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins. Translated and retranslated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry.

Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi

Seale, Yasmine

Moger, Robin

Poetry

Collecting published and unpublished essays, articles and fragments ranging from 1990 to 2022, A Voyage to Extremes offers an illustrated survey of the seemingly limitless breadth of Jeffrey Vallance’s esoteric writings. For fans of ghosts and other paranormal phenomena; Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers; (fabulous) Vegas casinos; the pedagogical value of Lapland; Charlie Manson’s father; (the glory of) Ronald McDonald; Martin Luther; Blinky (the friendly hen); Thomas Kinkade; dream sequences; Jägermeister; a raunchy affair (at an ice hotel); hot tubs; shamans; Dürer; Biblical etymology; base gratification; enlightened asides; a wedding ceremony; his Majesty, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga; the summoned ghosts of Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Frida Kahlo; the living specter of David Byrne; Liberace (in space); Big Foot (in Texas); Arctic glamour; Judas; St. Luke; a reliable recipe for a rump roast; ravens; crows; clowns; the Ozone layer; demilitarised zones; duty free zones; the weeping virgin of Las Vegas; a bar called a fale kava; a restaurant called Matsuhisa; Houdini artifacts; Santa Claus; Charles Fort; Mikhail Gorbachev (carved out of Ice Cream); Mike Kelley; artificial insemination (cow), and more.

A Voyage to Extremes: Selected Spiritual Writings

Vallance, Jeffrey

History & Criticism

A novella of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, SJ Fowler’s MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions. Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion. Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety. Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit? Following the tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (“one who dirties their own nest,” vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), in Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.

MUEUM

Fowler, SJ

Palace of Rubble

Simone, Kyra

La rabbia / Anger (Italian Edition)

BERGER, JOHN

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

Chiesi, Roberto

Lilith

Baraheni, Reza

Watts, Stephen

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