MATERIALS # 4: ECONOMIC OPHELIA

…contains 126pp of work from Lucy Beynon, Elana Chavez, Corina Copp, Kathryn Griffiths, Rob Halpern, Jeremy Hardingham, Lisa Jeschke, Camille Kame trans. Rosa Van Hensbergen, Evan Kennedy, Kevin Killian, Isolde Mayer, Nina Power, Hannah Proctor, Nat Raha, Connie Scozzaro, Verity Spott, Will Stuart, Marina Vishmidt, Cathy Wagner, Alli Warren, Naomi Weber and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

“Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

“So why assume she is a woman.” “A house was on fire” – “I rip apart the instruments of my imprisonment”. “Sickos continue to disparage / our abolition of a gendered body but” we continue to be interested in “gender as a critical praxis”, in those who are “more than [their] line of work”. “Electric Blinker on / I profess Jobless” – “because I couldn’t find the words,” “you sit there and write”, whether “allegori[es] of bodies at the hands of power” or breaths decapitated “to activate | in flashes […] this breath we have located and endowed with locations”, in “societal abjection”, in the beating of a “constitutively economic” heart-machine, in “depressed precacarity becom[ing] a threat capable of effective disruption”. “Angry with homophobic and cowardly bullies”, “I’m hysterical today” – “I have become an alcoholic drink / On which you feast / Your hogs”. To “suffer the tough meat”, “they barely conceive / of me as a person […] so reliable”.

“Would Love / rescue me”, “screaming at my enemies to be beautiful”, “the total fuckups we all are” – “I thought about tenderness and when you’re inside it […] what an astonishing atonement that is” – I thought about “signs of deteriorating”, about where it is “possible for the pain caused by walls that limit our possibilities to be overcome without breaking the walls that keep us intact” – “a material action”, “its own unproductive labour”, “a vortex of instruction”, “with permission and with violence”.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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SARA LARSEN – MERRY HELL

Sara Larsen is a poet based in Oakland, CA.

Her previous publications include NOVUS, A,a,a,a,a, The Hallucinated, After Sappho and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous.

With David Brazil, she produced over sixty issues of the Bay Area zine Try!

She is involved in the organizing committee for the Bay Area Public School, an autonomous free school at the Omni Commons in Oakland.

MERRY HELLL is dedicated to Helen of Troy, to the women of the Paris Commune, and “to my friends, now.” Commons and communes past and present come up against patriarchal law, capitalism, military and police violence, logics of cash and sacrifice, in lines that spread out, that elongate in notated waves of sight and breath. The poem is urgent, witty and this only an excerpt – the full book will appear from Atelos Press in 2015.

24pp, card covers, side-stapled.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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TOM ALLEN – WATCH FIRES

38pp, card covers, side-stapled

This is Tom Allen’s first book: a long poem with a Coda for Diane Di Prima. Inside, stones, clocks, fires, rivers, screaming pigs, the singing dead, ein guter mensch, Hell approached across a series of lines and pages in various potential or actual manifestations and angles. At times the poem’s lines seem to approach or gesture towards the quality of aphorism, but also to place that quality in a different and more fraught, tautly-held suspense, chiselled and “slow. slow”, yet far from decorous: fully freighted and fully forceful.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 ROW

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ROSA VAN HENSBERGEN – LIGHTS OUT TO LOVE IN HD

My transmissions have been hacked. Upfront as I am.

Lights out to Love in HD is a 126-page work in prose. Split figures are figured by an unnamed narrator; watched and watching, on the screen, in the room: there are eyes on me, not only my own, but all eyes in the gloom; shadowy forces drag into shadow and bright night-lit glare, at home, in the supermarket, on the computer screen which holds out indifferently, levers hierarchy of emotion.

It is in this way, not sure what corpse or shade I sit in, that I walk the aisle…Searching back to source, the narrator sets out to trace the core anguish, scout the worm – we flash back, faces on the screen watch and are watched, language sinuous insinuates in rhyme and polyglot ease an ease of style belying surveilled unease. In other words, address the problem areas around knowing / not knowing. Guzzle in their origin. Meat and flesh, sex or death, taut or taught, in control or out, imposed in infantile pose, react, controlled or abject, the skin stretched as paper over the head, the grass false or real, virtual, organic, socially made, evolve, dissolve, revolve, go glitch; in the stifling courtyard enclosed, in the city a cell, with infinite free drinks, the packs of produce, a body in a bed, the weight of stone rocked to nuclear, collapsing into pollen, minute detail of the body gesture danced or forced, reeling, unsure in fact of where was back and where was home, and of where located their relation to one another…To know your place, where that placement is uncertain and hidden, rifled over and shot through in machine and in social code: Held distended in distance that home dissociates, pixel display.

This is a book in which reformulative technique, a melting and rewelding of the associative structures of language lies at the heard and fold of my detective strategies.

My transmissions have been HACKED.

120pp, covers, side-stapled.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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ALSO in existence is:

A COMRADESHIP OF HEROES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Photocopied / stapled zine to coincide with the RIVET XMAS reading in London given by Connie Scozzaro, Danny Hayward, Jack Frost and Christina Chalmers on Saturday 20th December 2014. Poetry by Scozzaro, Hayward, Frost, Chalmers, David Grundy, Toby Huttner, Lisa Jeschke, Ed Luker, Richard Owens, Nat Raha, Verity Spott, Sam Wilder. 40 pp. Christmas tree made of skulls.

FREE with any other order.

More at the Materials site.