Catalogue





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CATALOGUE

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Candles and Water

by Timothy Thornton


Candles and Water is a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival. 

This collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost; and when they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.

Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. His work was in Volume 2 of the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has published eleven books of poetry with small presses. He organised two series of reading and performance nights in Brighton: 'evenly and perversely' and 'WHAT YOU NEED'. He has composed and performed scores for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre.

'These radical, scattered shards of life and sensation. . . come to a whole, coalescing like bioluminescence. . . witty, dark, profound, devastating. One long séance with a fellow human soul.' 

— Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

'Timothy Thornton's Candles and Water is a rare and transformational book, haunting, beautiful and watchful. Writing that follows its brush like Sei Shōnagon.' 

— David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On

Paperback
332pp
ISBN: 9781739364991

Candles and Water will be published 16 May 2024

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Disquiet Drive 

by Hesse K. 


One night a satellite falls out of the sky and splits a girl in half.

Disquiet Drive is a book scraped together from the shorn parts of a person who may no longer exist. Beginning with an admission that language and embodiment seem indistinguishable, yet refusing to claim a singular voice, the texts in this collection lurch between the fiery crucible of a transition and the weird jaggedness of our own continuity; between inverted memoir and prose-poetry; the raw, irrepressible lyric and the essay as an exercise in the art of digging-one’s-heels-in. 

Disquiet Drive is about undoing the words we’re handed so that language can survive, and undoing the body so that it can find a way to live 

Hesse K. is a writer. She writes about having a body, its slippages, about class and work; friends, clothing, sometimes art. Her criticism and poetry has appeared in MAP magazine and Montez Radio, and in anthologies by Sticky Fingers Publishing, Toothgrinder, Worms and Pilot Press, among others. She lives in London.

Disquiet Drive will be published in July 2024.

ISBN: 9781739364984

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ANTHOLOGIES
Responses to "Forbidden Colors" (1988) 
by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

For the seventh volume in the series, responses were sought to the artwork "Forbidden Colors" (1988) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres 

Contributors

Ashleigh A. Allen
Dylan Angell
William Butler
jimmy cooper
Matthew Kinlin & Neil Davies
Ellen Dillon
Ben Estes
Katherine Franco
Richard James Hall
Philip Hoare
Chris Jones
Hesse K.
Elektra KB
Robert Kiely
Cyrus Larcombe-Moore
Ruby Lawrence
Daniel W.K. Lee
Paul Lee
Nate Lippens
Len Lukowski
Christopher Madden
Mary Manning
Georgia Mannion-Krase
Douglas A. Martin
So Mayer
Alistair McCartney
Mark Armijo McKnight
Davide Meneghello
Sam Moore
D Mortimer
Eileen Myles
Daniel Napsha
Cecila Pavón
Kathy Pendrill
Richard Porter
AM Ringwalt
Sophie Robinson
Jack Sagar
Prem Sahib
Kashif Sharma-Patel
Lucy Swan
Abdellah Taïa
Anne Tallentire
M. Ty
Eley Williams

Softcover
14x19cm
ISBN: 978-1-7393649-4-6
Printed on 100% recycled paper

All proceeds to Medical Aid for Palestinians

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Responses to Untitled (eye with comet) 
(c.1985) by Paul Thek

For this volume, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988. 

Contributors

E.R. De Siqueira
Ben Estes
João Motta Guedes
Lucy Swan
Jon Rainford
Louis Shankar
Amy Evans Bauer
Hattie Morrison
Sammy Paloma
AN Grace
James Horton
Nick Wood
Sophie Paul
Jae Vail
Elizabeth Zvonar
Lars Meijer
Clay AD
Michel Kessler
Pablo Miguel Martínez
Emma Harris
Dylan McNulty-Holmes
Kitya Mark
Katherine Franco
Ainslie Templeton
Alistair McCartney
John Brooks
Jesse Howarth
jimmy cooper
Felix Pilgrim
Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
Murphy O’Neir
Rachel Cattle
Isabel Nolan
Susan Finlay
Ted Simonds
Brooke Palmieri
Kate Morgan
Ashleigh A. Allen
Diogo Gama
JP Seabright
Hugo Hagger
Amanda Kraley
Brendan Cook
Matt Bailey
Charlotte Flint
Rodney Schreiner
Lucy Price
Morgan Melhuish
Jordan Weitzman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Alex Fiorentino
Harald Smart
Marguerite Carson
loll jung
Richard Porter
Nicholas Kalinoski
Hedi El Kholti
Edmund Francis English
Ted Bonin

Softcover
14x19cm
196pp
Printed on 100% recycled paper

ISBN: 978-1-7397029-9-1

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Responses to Pale Blue Dot (1990) by Voyager 1


Responses to Pale Blue Dot by Voyager 1 is the fifth anthology in a series from Pilot Press that seeks responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis. In this fifth iteration, responses were sought to the 1990 photograph Pale Blue Dot by Voyager 1.

Themes range from grief to masturbation; alien abduction to David Wojnarwoicz;  whale song to combination therapy, and late night cruising to the Oracles of Perception.


Contributors

In order of appearance

John Wieners
Philip Hoare
Nate Lippens
Jon Rainford
Sig Olson
Nick Blackburn
Robert Hampson
Art Allen
Chris Jones
Benedict Welch
Paul Coombs
Todd Meyers
Matthew Kinlin
Zsuzsanna Ihar
Brenna O
Roelof Bakker
Donna Marcus
Tim Knights
Sam Buchan-Watts
Aodán McCardle
Donald Butler
Brooke Palmieri
Antony John
Obe Alkema
David Leal
Lucy Swan
Ella Duffy
Mary Manning
David Lawrie
Richard Porter
Troy Fielder
Anne Tallentire
Ruby Lawrence

Softcover
100pp
15 x 19 cm
ISBN: 978-1-7397029-3-9

Printed on 100% recycled paper 

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Responses to Love's Work (1995) by Gillian Rose


Responses to Love's Work by Gillian Rose is the fourth publication in a series of anthologies that seek responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.
 
In this fourth iteration, responses were sought to the 1995 philosophical memoir Love's Work by Gillian Rose.


Contributors

In order of appearance

Cookie Mueller
Ian Patterson
Dodie Bellamy
Katherine Franco
James McDermott
Lotte Crawford
Moss Pepe
James Main
Nick Blackburn
Thea Petrou
Josiah Moktar 
Roelof Bakker
Christopher Madden
Kashif Sharma-Patel
Madeleine Pulman-Jones
Lucy Swan
Lou Collins
Ted Simonds
Molly Gough
Edward Thomasson
Richard Porter
Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe
Cecilia Pavón
Kate Morgan
Olivia Laing
Ashleigh A. Allen
Reverend Joyce McDonald

Softcover
100pp
15 x 19 cm
ISBN 978-1-7397029-5-3

Printed on 100% recycled paper 

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Responses to Derek Jarman's Blue (1993)

Responses to Derek Jarman's Blue is the third publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.
 
In this third iteration, responses were sought to the 1993 film Blue by the multidisciplinary artist Derek Jarman.  


Contributors

In order of appearance 

Roelof Bakker
Jared Davis
Becca Albee
Linda Kemp 
Ashleigh A. Allen
David Nash
Sam Moore
Anton Stuebner
Gonçalo Lamas
Olivia Laing
Nate Lippens
Jason Lipeles 
JP Seabright
Andrew Cummings
Sig Olson
Maria Sledmere
Cleo Henry
Jessie McClaughlin
Lars Meijer
Scott Treleaven 
Declan Wiffen
Caitlin Merrett King
Harry Agius
António Manso Preto
Adriana Lazarova
Brooke Palmieri 
D Mortimer
Mary Manning
Aaron James Murphy

Softcover
15 x 19 cm
128 pp
Printed on 100% recycled paper 

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Now I Know, Daylight
Responses to Untitled No 1 (1981) by Agnes Martin 

Now I Know, Daylight is the second in a new series of anthologies from London-based publisher Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.

In this second iteration, responses were sought to the 1981 painting 'Untitled No 1' (gesso, acrylic and pencil on canvas) by Agnes Martin. 


Contributors 

In order of appearance

Sig Olson
Jean Chung
Natalie Stypa
Eduardo Viveiros
Katherine Franco
Kitti Klaudia Harmati
Kate Morgan
Declan Wiffen and Betsy Porritt
Ryan Skelton
Huw Lemmey
Kyle Griesmeyer
Alton Melvar M Dapanas
D Mortimer
Jack Bigglestone
Carlos Kong
Donna Marcus
Wilder Alison
Vanessa Walters


Softcover
15 x 19 cm
56 pp

Printed on 100% recycled paper 


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The Moon and The Echoresponses to The Moon and The Melodies (1986) by Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins 

The Moon and The Echo is the first in a new series of anthologies from London-based publisher Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.

In the first iteration, responses were sought to the 1986 collaborative studio album The Moon and The Melodies by the late composer Harold Budd (1936-2020) and the Scottish dream pop band Cocteau Twins. 


Contributors 

In order of appearance

Michelle Hannah
David Nash
Ellen Dillon
Gabriel Ross
Maria Sledmere
Jack Jacques
Nick Blackburn
Harry Agius
Lauren de Sá Naylor
Femke Zwiep
Ondo Fudd
Richard Porter
Freya Johnson Ross
Paul Lee
Nina Ines Ward
James Dearlove
James Rance
Fred Carter
Jane Cope
Tom Benford
Mary Manning
Simon Moretti
Rosa Jones
Ishika Ball
Oliver Ridings
Nat Raha
Kevin McAleese


Softcover
15 x 19 cm
76 pp

Printed on 100% recycled paper 

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The complete set of anthologies responding to artworks by Harold Budd & Cocteau Twins, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Gillian Rose, Voyager 1, Paul Thek and 
Felix Gonzalez-Torres

All seven titles in a series that gathered responses from artists, writers, poets and literary estates to works of art made during a period of the ongoing AIDS Crisis, from the identification of the virus in 1981 to the introduction of life-saving drugs in 1996. 

Contributors to the series include Dodie Bellamy, Olivia Laing, Hedi El Kholti, Nate Lippens, Eileen Myles, Mary Manning, Huw Lemmey, Cookie Mueller, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Cecilia Pavòn, Nick Blackburn, Kate Morgan, Anne Tallentire, Paul Lee, D Mortimer, Mark Armijo McKnight, Hesse K, Donna Marcus, Ellen Dillon, Linda Kemp and Nat Raha.  


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FICTION 

My Dead Book: A Novel

by Nate Lippens

Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize 

My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.


My Dead Book by Nate Lippens is the most electrifying thing I’ve read in a long time, a poetic, compressed novella about queer loss and addiction that reminded me of Gary Indiana and William Burroughs.”

 — Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?”

— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”

— Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

“This book by Nate Lippens is really moving and beautifully written. Not one superfluous sentence. It’s razor tight. The phantom limbs of what has been excised remains. But still there is so much love and sadness and all the randomness of what makes a life, and who you meet along the way. My ghosts are summoned by his ghosts.” 

— Hedi El Kholti, editor at Semiotext(e)


Cover image by Jimmy DeSana, courtesy Jimmy DeSana Trust

Softcover
12 x 19cm 
143pp
ISBN: 978-1-7397029-0-8


About the author

Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). My Dead Book is his first novel. 

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POETRY

Argento Series
Kevin Killian

Reprinted for the first time in over twenty years, Kevin Killian’s first book of poetry is an audacious, operatic dive into the darkest recesses of the AIDS crisis. 

In 1991, Killian reported he was “frozen, unable to think of a way to write about AIDS crisis”. A year later, his friend Kathy Acker suggested the “films of Dario Argento as a prism through which to take apart horror of living and dying in AIDS era”. The result is Argento Series, framing Killian’s real-life experience of losing his friends and lovers to the disease through the camera lens of Italian horror filmmaker, Dario Argento. Here, AIDS is cast as the horror film monster, wreaking cold, unfeeling chaos and destruction wherever it finds itself. 

Blending a chilling, impersonal observation of death with Killian's typical high camp, tenderness and O'Hara-like wit, the poems use unflinching honesty and gallows humour to devastating effect. In Argento Series, Killian finds expression for a crisis, and moment in history, that changed everything, forever.


Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Fascination: Memoirs and the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019. 


'Here is Kevin Killian, pounding with bloodied fists on Poetry’s door. My heart swells with pride as I claim his masterpiece for our beleaguered city. Argento Series is Kevin’s Lament for the Makers, a monument reaching half-way to the stars for our fallen stars and every big dream of the world lost to AIDS.’ 

— Robert Glück, author of Margery Kempe

‘Lush, tossed off and incisive, there's no other American poet who lived more vividly on the page of his time and its culture—center, edges all of it. Kevin's Argento Series is a treat and a complete fact. Grab this volume, fast.’

— Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

‘High weirdness, thorny beauty, cruel loss – it's all here, in Kevin's voice, and always will be. We will never stop needing this book.’

— Anne Boyer, author of The Undying

'At once tender and terrifying, Argento Series is a dispatch from the end of the world. Moving through Italian horror, memories of lost friends, and the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, Killian finds a language for the impossible. This collection is as urgent and vital as ever, seeing the light of day after being unobtainable for far too long.'

— Sam Moore, author of All My Teachers Died of AIDS 


'What Jackson Pollock said of himself, I will say of Kevin Killian: he is nature. Argento Series takes its title and frame from the Italian horror film maker Dario Argento but the effect is 100% Killian. Which is nature itself. Argento Series was written out of the carnage of the AIDS crisis. The poems are haunting, somnambulant, aggressive, plaintive, uncompromising, sullen, hilarious, brilliant, and outraged, creating a dynamic theatre of true horror. Argento Series now takes its place alongside the other queer masterworks of San Francisco poetry, including: Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, John Wiener’s The Hotel Wentley Poems, and Jack Spicer’s Language. It’s important we have this title available again for new readers.'

— Peter Gizzi, author of Sky Burial


Foreword by Derek McCormack
Cover artwork by Hedi El Kholti

Softcover
15x21cm
104pp
Printed on 100% recycled paper 




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Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera of John Wieners


Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha.

John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist. 


‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’

— Nat Raha, from the introduction


'Any "selected poems" is going to reveal the tastes of its editor, especially when those poems are selected from among an extensive body of work like the one John Wieners left us. Richard Porter's taste is exquisite, and his selection covers great ground, from the torch song poems of Wieners' early career to the rich, tessellated works of his beautiful and anguished late-sixties period. If I wanted a friend to fall in love with John Wieners, I'd give them this book.'

— Michael Seth Stewart, editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (City Lights)


'This book is a great love held on paper, groaning out of Black Mountain and Boston. You are hit accurately by the poet flying around you as a reincarnated bow and arrow cherub. John Wieners is a fever dream where the poems forever maintain their mystery, releasing a flood of spontaneity in the reader's imagination. Let's get in the magic with both feet; let's do it now!'

— CAConrad, author of Amanda Paradise and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books)


'Solitary Pleasure is a selected collection of Wieners’ poems, appended with letters and journal entries. An introduction, written by contemporary poet Nat Raha, makes a powerful case for reading Wieners’ work as art born from “the heart of struggle”. The poems themselves are offhand and diaristic. Sometimes, they deploy childlike rhymes that purposely steer close to nonsense, successfully generating a sense of wonder (“If I had a canoe / I’d fill it with you / Then what would you do”). The Wieners of Solitary Pleasure is a poet eager to vocalise queer desire. “The beauty of men never disappears,” he writes, later portraying desire as something that must be “choked” out of him. Occupying nearly a third of Solitary Pleasure are his “Asylum Poems”, which Wieners wrote in 1969 – the summer of the Stonewall riots – while in a psychiatric institution. These poems spotlight the connection between art and affliction, but challenge us to consider creative expression as a very real mode of survival and salvation, and not merely, as current wellness discourses suggest, a potential curative or preventive to mental ill-health.'

— Ralf Webb for The Guardian


Cover photograph: John Wieners by Leni Sinclair 

Softcover
15x21cm
136pp
Printed on 100% recycled paper 

ISBN 978-1-7397029-7-7


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A Book of Music (1958)
Jack Spicer

A new edition of the posthumously published collection 'A Book of Music' by the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965).

While little known outside a circle of friends and poets in his lifetime, Spicer is widely considered one of the major figures of twentieth century American poetry. 

After being removed from a teaching position at Berkeley in 1950 for refusing to pledge allegiance to the United States, he became a founder of the radical and counter-cultural San Francisco Renaissance movement of poets in an age when homosexuality was illegal. 

He believed that the poet was a “radio” able to collect transmissions from an “invisible world,” as opposed to the idea that poetry was driven by a poet’s voice and will. In this sense he believed that his poems were dictated from a spirit world and saw poetry as a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. 

He died at the age of 40 in the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital, from acute alcohol poisoning. One of his last coherent sentences was, “My vocabulary did this to me.”

This new edition of A Book of Music, published 65 years after its original was composed, is risograph printed on Munken Lynx paper and saddle-stitched by Earthbound Press. 

Softcover
11x16cm
28pp

ISBN 978-1-7393649-0-8



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Displays 
Katherine Franco 

Displays has theoretical commitments, even if only to a “birdlike, brained” logic. Katherine Franco’s debut collection attends to sibilants, the system of signs, and sainthood in a kind of half-joke. Displays features a subject who wants to be “good” and for desire to be delivered through a well-formed critique. She likes explication. Then, she doesn’t.
 
Deriving its terrain from the classroom and the open road, Displays demonstrates how poetics is a source of knowledge and flight. The collection is dogged for a thesis, but instead finds itself amidst practicums, biopolytechnicaltechniques, and acts of renunciation. “Likeness is like / flying,” Franco writes in one of the book's final poems. Flight need not mean an abandonment of politics, pain, or one’s daily life – the collection suggests – but instead the generation of a landscape where play and poetic experimentation reign. There, we can discover the restless epistemology distinct to Displays.

Katherine Franco is a writer and artist. Her work appears in Prelude, Jacket2, and Juked, among others. She is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Berkeley. 

‘There certainly is no synonym for the recurrent "striations" Franco has created in her Displays—digging deep into the surfaces she's built up, a surface rhythm appears in her work like bars of music. For reasons I can't quite explain, I hear a sacred exuberance reminiscent of Adélia Prado or even Theodore Roethke's charge: I'll make a broken music, or I'll die.’ — Aaron Fagan


Softcover
130mm x 200 mm
64pp
Printed on 100% recycled paper 

ISBN 978-1-7393649-3-9



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Pretty Soon
Aaron Fagan

‘Aaron Fagan's colloquial voice--by turns mordant, enlightening, despairing, but always witty--not only describes a deeply compelling, interior emotional atmosphere, but a world we've made together, and how best to live in it. An astonishing collection.’

— Hilton Als

‘Tight, heady, and beautiful: Aaron Fagan’s sonnets obey an invisible procedure that lends his lines a sculptural, haunted equilibrium. Reading these finely wrought poems, I felt like I was being massaged inside a hall of mirrors, and the masseurs, many-handed, were legendary poets of the past. Pretty Soon is wisdom literature, comfort food, night school, Socratic candy, and high-wire elegance.’
 
— Wayne Koestenbaum 

‘What most distinguishes Aaron Fagan's poetry is its range and capacity for surprise, as well as its velocity. From careening, free-form meditations, to homage, to Algren-esque realism, sometimes a blending of all of the above, it makes for invigorating reading. A highly individual American voice.’

— August Kleinzahler

‘The sonnets in Pretty Soon dance in beauty like the light: compression, abstraction, impossible ideas lucidly expressed, political and personal truths lucidly slipped out as if in somebody else’s dream, woven through the even-seeming but subliminally jagged surface of the words. Reflections reflect metamorphic awareness, words slide into different words, phrases arouse recollections of other voices. All gathered in, turned to ethical account. Measured and forceful, ‘casual but final’, these poems stand by their words, and in them.’

— Ian Patterson


Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973, and is the author of Garage (Salt, 2007), Echo Train (Salt, 2010), and A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020).

Cover artwork: ‘Fieldnote 2’ (gouache and pencil on paper, 2021) by Richard Porter

Softcover
14x18cm
60pp

ISBN: 978-1-7397029-8-4

Printed on 100% recycled paper


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Holy Bodies

by Clay AD

Holy Bodies is a collection of writing and drawings by the artist Clay AD which together work as a series of small proposals that exalt the freedoms of body, mind and spirit through care, sex, jokes, destruction and transformation. 


'Clay AD knows at an ancient and prescient level that, to quote from their book, 'shit is all life', but also that life is the shit, and the sunset, and the endgame. One for our immuno-suppressed comrades, shit theorists, pink salt throwers, and their lovers and friends, that is, I hope, everyone.' 

— Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold

'Clay AD’s poetry is for arseholes… & kneecaps, for belly buttons and sweaty crotches, for perforated ear drums and rubbish immune systems. This book is a vessel with feelings for vessels with feelings, transcribed into a trans crip language that I have been waiting for.'

— D Mortimer, author of Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life
 

Clay AD is a somatic bodyworker, artist and writer living in Glasgow.

Cover artwork and original drawings by Clay AD

Softcover
15x19cm 


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Skin of Nocturnal Apple

by Misha Honcharenko

‘Love, longing, desire, and death. Misha Honcharenko wraps these eternal subjects around a raw nerve, delivering poems so visceral, anguished, honest, and imaginatively rich, each work possesses its own atmosphere. Although these poems were written before the invasion of Ukraine, they rush into the blank spaces in our minds between front-line updates and casualty reports. Rarely is a poetry collection so hungry for life.’ 

— Christopher Bollen

‘The worlds that unfold in Misha Honcharenko's poems are at once tender and brutal, precise and capacious, exquisitely sensual even in the face of desolation. Such tonal shifts signal the book's pre-eminent quality, which is an insistence on freedom—freedom of thought, of image, of movement. This is a collection of uncommon urgency and beauty.’

— Jason McBride

‘There is an ecstasy in these poems, a turning toward the sublime even when they grow dark, a beautiful pulsing. Reading them, I felt like I was walking in a garden, the plants shining in the moonlight.’  

— Amina Cain

‘As the days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine continue, which at the time of this writing is ongoing, Misha Honcharenko has mindfully and meaningfully arranged a span of years preceding the war that are struck like tinder: elegiac odes to lusts of everyday beauty in its transience. I feel fortunate for the witness he has been.’ 

— Douglas A. Martin


Skin of Nocturnal Apple is the debut collection of Ukrainian artist and poet Misha Honcharenko. 

Written in the years prior to Russia's invasion in 2022, Skin of Nocturnal Apple offers a window into the life of a young queer man living and working in the future war-ravaged country. 

The collection is accompanied with an afterword by psychoanalyst and writer Nick Blackburn (The Reactor, Faber 2022)

Cover artwork by the author

Softcover
15x21cm
124pp

ISBN 978-1-7397029-2-2

Printed on 100% recycled paper 

For U.K. postage £15.50 (£12 + £3.50 p&p)



For international postage £18.50 (£12 + £6.50 p&p)




Last Night A Beef Jerk Saved My Life

by D Mortimer


'Mortimer is one of the most talented writers of our generation and their debut collection proves this. Part essay, part poem, part memoir and part SOS, Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life navigates its thematic scope—ranging from transness, queerness and naming to loving and losing—with sensitivity, insight, humour and bravado. Best thing I read this year.' 

- Isabel Waidner


'Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life is a wonderful and thoughtful reflection on love and beauty and bodies and music and memories, and on the constellations of small things that make up modern queer life.' 

- Huw Lemmey


D Mortimer is a writer from London focussed on trans crip narratives. Their work (essays, poetry, prose, creative-criticism) has appeared in Granta and been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (Queers Read This, The Kathy Acker Reading Group). Their short story ‘Supermarket Revelations’ was published in Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction (ed. Waidner, Dostoyevsky Wannabe: 2018) and a poem-essay, 'How To Draw Hands', was published by Warm Yourself by My Trash Fire in 2020. 


Softcover
15 x 20 cm

Printed on 100% recycled paper 

For U.K. postage £15.50 (£12 + £3.50 p&p)



For international postage £18.50 (£12 + £6.50 p&p)



Diametric Fist Tender

by Joshua Jones

Diametric Fist Tender is a collection of linked but distinct lyric poems exploring themes such as ghosts, gender, desire, hope, despair, time, tenderness and riots.

'I feel like, more successfully than I could ever hope to achieve, Diametric Fist Tender expresses and configures the contradictions between an abstract hope which is somewhere else, somebody else, in the future, and the constraint of messy embodied life.' 

— Laurel Uziell

Joshua Jones studies and teaches literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They currently live in Portland. 


Cover artwork by Johann Lester

Softcover
205 x 145mm


For U.K. postage £9.50 (£6 + £3.50 p&p)



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Prayers Manifestos Bravery
by Verity Spott

First published in 2018, Prayers Manifestos Bravery is a collection of Verity Spott’s “Trans* Manifestos”. Written from 2011 and originally published on her blog, the book’s content ranges from concrete poetry to long-form dispatches, confessions and manifestos touching on questions of identity, gender, justice and society. 

“This is a collection of attempted manifestos whose composition began in 2011. It does not pretend to be completed and any life it has is in its capacity for change, movement and instability. These manifestos are described as such because at the time of their composition they felt like attempts of preservation; of life and of the capacity to struggle against life. They are all improvisations. They have not been heavily edited, and they are untidy. We're unsure what we are." — preface by the author

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England. She is the author of the books Gideon, Click Away Close Door Say, We Will Bury You, The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity, Prayers Manifestos Bravery, Poems of Sappho (in translation), Hopelessness, Coronelles Set 1 and 70 Sonnets. Verity's poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

148x210mm
48 pp
Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-7393649-5-3
Printed on 100% recycled paper


For U.K. postage: £11.50 (£8.00 + £3.50 p&p)



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Modern Queer Poets

Modern Queer Poets is an anthology of contemporary poetry by queer writers assembled by Richard Porter

With contributions by:

Alexander Anderson
Harry Burgess 
Sam Conlon 
CA Conrad
Genie Dallaway
DasBilder
Bonnie Hancell 
Art Haxhijakupi
Colin Herd
Em König
Wayne Koestenbaum 
Nathan Korn
Gonçalo Lamas
Maria Leonard
John Maybury
Alanna McArdle
Sam Moore
Billy Morgan 
D. Mortimer
Eileen Myles
David Nash
Jon Oak
Yorgos Petrou 
C. Samuel Rees 
Lotte Mitchell Reford
Florence Reynolds 
Sophie Robinson 
Giulia Astesani & 
Roshana Rubin-Mayhew
Guy Rugeroni 
Kirslyn Schell-Smith
Olivia Scott-Berry
Stephen Seabridge
Timothy Thornton
Declan Wiffen
Eley Williams
Nick Wood
Spencer Wood

Edited by Richard Porter
Cover artwork by Matt Connors


Softcover, 96 pages
14x16 cm 






NON-FICTION
Ingress
Kate Morgan

Ingress is an unwieldy body of writing that attends to intimacies between selves and others, objects and sites, considering how a difference of position, pronoun and voice might render these in unique ways. In doing so, Morgan's work speaks to a particular state of being in the world, of materiality, of loss, of gendered experience, of cultivation and of the act of writing itself. An experiment in form as argument, Ingress was written over the course of two years from a tenement flat with a garden in Glasgow.


‘I loved this strange, accomplished book and its account of porosity and seepage on many planes. It’s tender, sexy, sly and dextrous, moving relentlessly along deep channels, emerging unexpectedly into sweet air, alert to language at every step.’

— Olivia Laing, author of Everybody: A Book About Freedom 

‘Kate Morgan’s Ingress is a startling, many-headed meditation on language, art, and the natural world, opening you up to sensations and collapsing interior and exterior. A garden becomes a text becomes a body. The personal and the analytic mingle and slyly astonish. Morgan is one of those magicians who suspends reality through precision and excavation, digging deeper into experience, and also one of those metaphysicians who finds meaning at-hand in the daily and then disperses it all to be gathered again. This result is potent, moving, and mysterious.’

— Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book: A Novel 

‘It doesn't matter what genre this book is (essay, personal diary, notebook), nor what its subject matter is (a garden, a sculpture, the plumbing system underlying a house, love), because in some mysterious way, it manages to transform the material part of the world into poetic intensity and affect whoever holds it in their hands, as if it were a flood, overwhelming and reassuring at the same time. In this sense, the omnipresent water in this truly lyrical exploration of reality seems to take over the words and transform this text into an organism with a life of its own.’

— Cecilia Pavòn, author of Little Joy: Selected Stories 

Ingress is a text that enacts its own name, a shining thing seeping into the reader––which is the same act as the drawing out of relation, the intimacy of attention paid at the shifting edges of things. Morgan’s writing is softly piercing, unpeeling sameness to separate out the difference of different things, but where difference is always just the slight refraction of the other. Ingress is both the container and the fluid contained, the brim and its brimming–– the fact of a boundary makes possible its breach.’
 
— Evelyn Wh-ell, author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole


Kate Morgan is a writer and artist from London, living in Glasgow. Their writing has been published by Sticky Fingers, Nothing Personal, MAP, Worms, and in anthologies by Pilot Press.


Softcover
11x18cm
80pp
ISBN 978-1-7393649-1-5



For U.K. shipping £15.50 (£12 + £3.50 p&p)



For international shipping £20.00 (£12 + £8.00 p&p)


Judy Blame's Obituary
Writings on Fashion and Death

by Derek McCormack

Derek McCormack is the author of fashion-inflected novels that cast luminaries such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Balenciaga as characters. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."

Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young fag in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.


About the author

Derek McCormack is a Canadian writer. His most recent novels are The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle Faggot, both published by Semiotext(e). Of Castle Faggot, Dennis Cooper said: "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written."



Praise for Judy Blame's Obituary:


‘Derek McCormack, Canada's most famous author as yet unsullied by Nobel Prize or television adaptation, hides in plain sight as a fashion journalist. Parallel to his writing incantatory, scatological fiction, he has reviewed collections and interviewed the great and good of “la mode”. His divagations are often darkly hilarious and always exquisitely tailored. The sublime and the ridiculous coexist in his prose, as they do in life. Fashion victims, ignore his insights at your peril.' — William E. Jones


'Derek McCormack is one of my first and most enduring literary heroes. He only writes about what he loves, and has the lover’s rare gift of giving every stray object a proper home. You couldn’t mistake his aesthetic for anyone else’s—even if you were standing as far away as the moon.' — Sheila Heti


'I am charmed, amused and somewhat obsessed by ‘Judy Blame's Obituary’. Derek McCormack observes fashion and art and all its quirks with a sense of factual fabularity and camp mundanity. Stories captured like falling stars and written down like fan facts.’ — Princess Julia


For U.K. postage £18.50 (£15 + £3.50 p&p)



For international postage £25.00 (£15 + £10.00 p&p)


All My Teachers Died of AIDS

Sam Moore


'Sam Moore addresses what it feels like growing up queer and British in the 1990s when most of your teachers are either dead, and-or American. An important and evocative personal essay on archival absences and erasures, and, in Moore's own words, refusing to die of ignorance even though that's what so many wanted.' 

- Isabel Waidner


Moving through time and across oceans, writer Sam Moore takes us on a poetic journey of self-discovery through queer history, pop culture and (auto)biography in this deeply personal encounter with queer identity a generation after the AIDS crisis. 

Examining the violent political legacy of right-wing governments, the search for liberation through art and the endless quest for self-discovery, All My Teachers Died of Aids serves as both eulogy and rallying cry, asking us to mourn the dead while lighting a torch to help guide us through grief towards a brighter queer future. 

44pp 
Softcover
205 x 145mm
Printed on 100% recycled paper


For U.K. postage £9.50 (£6 + £3.50 p&p)



For international postage £12.50 (£6 + £6.50 p&p)



Letters to M.

by Jason Lipeles


'Letters to M. reveals the tender truth that all letters to lovers are written first to ourselves. Lipeles’ elegant and urgent prose brilliantly collapses the space between literary and romantic longing, luxuriating in the knowledge that there is no desire without projection. This imagistic slideshow of a book saturates us with the devouring gaze of youthful passion and maturity’s cool stare—a uniquely compelling double consciousness, and one rarely encountered. Letters to M. is a moving testament to both the eros of influence and the intellect of desire. A poignant reminder that when traversing the forest of others in search of love, we continually and unexpectedly encounter the self.' - Nicholas Muellner 


In Lipeles's Letters to M., the narrator writes letters addressed to an ex-partner, M. The letters begin as a way to process the disintegration of the relationship and grow into a series of lyric essays, poems, and photographs, which bring his love for M. into conversation with writers' and photographers’ work he admires. The narrator slips between his feelings for M. and his love for writers and photographers such as David Wojnarowicz, Renee Gladman, Frank O'Hara and Carrie Mae Weems in order to foreground intimacy and to begin to close the gap between reader and writer, lover and critic.  


Jason Lipeles is a Los-Angeles-based writer and artist. His first chapbook, Letters to M., was a finalist for the inaugural Chautauqua Janus Prize. His work has appeared in the Black Warrior Review Online, Yalobusha Review, and the first issue of The Racial Imaginary Institute. He is an alumnus of the AJU Institute for Jewish Creativity's Inquiry Fellowship and Asylum Arts' Reciprocity Artist Retreat. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Image + Text from Ithaca College in 2018.


92pp 
Softcover
15 x 20 cm
Printed on 100% recycled paper 


ZINES


TRUANT

Edited by Nate Lippens


Truant features writing and art that addresses queer self-exile: the stories of dropouts, throwaways and runaways; how withdrawal can be a matter of survival, refusal and renewal;  what we will not do, allow or accept, personally, politically and artistically; and the power of absence as presence.


Contributors 

jimmy cooper
Neil Davies
Matthew Gallaway
Zach Grear
Jason Haaf
Matthew Kinlin
Katie Kurtz
Lindsay Lerman
Nate Lippens
Fisher Main
Erik Moore
Eileen Myles
Elle Nash
Golnoosh Nour
Matthew Stadler
Ranee Zaporski


Cover image by Erik Moore

Softcover
19x21cm
62pp
ISBN: 9781739702946

About the editor

Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). His debut novel, My Dead Book, was published in 2022.

Title currently out of stock. Reprint coming soon.



Consciousness Energy Grid


A pocket-sized zine containing the CIA's entire 'Gateway Process' document, a report written in 1983, and declassified in 2003, about using a series of exercises to produce states of expanded human consciousness such as astral projection, outer body experiments, and other altered states of mind. 

Softcover
10x15cm
32pp


For U.K. postage £8.50 (£5 + £3.50 p&p)




For international postage £10 (£5 + £5 p&p)



ANTHOLOGY SERIES (2017-2020)

a queer anthology of healing


‘Richard Porter’s Queer Anthology of Healing is a subtle, devastating mix of cuteness and embarrassment, beauty and confession, magic tricks and pain. The artworks and writings in this collection suggest that healing can be achieved through revelation, invocation, observation and disclosure. It’s a much-needed gift right now.’ 

— Chris Kraus (author of I Love Dick / After Kathy Acker


Contributions by 

Clay AD
Harry Agius
Barney Ashton-Bullock
Dodie Bellamy
Jack Bigglestone
Nick Blackburn
Helen Cammock
Charity Coleman
Swithun Cooper
Paul Gabrielli
Evan Garza
Erica Gillingham
Daniel Givens
Pete Hammond
Benedict Hawkins
Georgie Henley
Lubaina Himid
Fanny Howe
Jasmine Johnson
G.B. Jones
Kevin Killian
Wayne Koestenbaum
Nic Lachance
Olivia Laing
Benedict Leader
Paul Lee
Mary Manning
Ben Miller
D. Mortimer
Monique Mouton
Annie Murrells
Chuck Nanney
David Nash
Isobel Neviazsky
Paul P. 
Richard Porter
Peter Scalpello
Hyacinth Schuss
Ryan Skelton
Verity Spott
Edward Thomasson
Timothy Thornton
Declan Wiffen
Ian Wooldridge

Cover artwork by Richard Porter

Softcover, A5


a queer anthology of wilderness 

Contributions by 

Harry Agius
Nick Blackburn
Patrick Carew 
Hamish Chapman
Simon Costin
The Estate of Jimmy DeSana
James St Findlay 
Clare Fisher
Daniel Givens 
Christopher Hartmann
Alex Howe
Eleanor Jenyns 
Princess Julia
Karen Kenst 
Olivia Laing
Zoe Leonard
Siobhan Liddell
Ant M Lobo 
Mary Manning
Jade Mars
Linden Katherine McMahon
Rebekah Morgan 
Julia Morgan 
The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
Eileen Myles
Joseph Noonan-Galley
Richard Porter
Lux Pyre
Guy Rugeroni 
Peter Scalpello
Olivia Scott-Berry
Kelsey Sucena
Timothy Thornton
Urara Tsuchiya
Nathan Walker
Frances Worrall-Campbell

Cover artwork by Tabboo!

Softcover, A5



a queer anthology of sickness

Contributions by

Clay AD
Alex Margo Arden 
Lucy Bird
Nick Blackburn 
Jared Buckheister 
Harry Burgess 
Oisin Byrne 
Stephen Caruthers
Paul Coombs
Lara Alonso Corona 
Charlotte Cullen 
Genie Dallaway
Carl Ferrero 
Liv Fontaine 
Willie Gurner
Bonnie Hancell 
JD Howse 
Deming Huang
Andrew Hubbard
The Estate of Derek Jarman
Paul P. and G.B. Jones
Eliel Jones
Matthew Kinlin
Natasha Lall
Yvonne Litschel
Mary Manning
D. Mortimer 
Luke Nichols 
Kathy Tendril
Richard Porter
Steven Pottle
Daniel Ampulla 
Cornelis Rijneveld
Megan Rose
Guy Rugeroni
Olivia Scott-Berry
Tai Shani 
Andrew Sim
Mimei Thompson 
Tyfoid
Mark Walton
Robert Whitehead
Sam Williams
The Estate of David Wojnarowicz 
Ian Wooldridge

Cover artwork by Richard Porter

Softcover, A5

a queer anthology of rage

Contributions by

Al Anderson
Rees Arnott-Davies
Tinder Ash
Will Ballantyne-Reid
Nick Blackburn
Violet Blonde
AA Bronson
Jennifer Browne
Jared Buckhiester
Harry Burgess
Scott Caruth
Tom Chetwode-Barton
CHRISTEENE
Matthew Collins
Paul Coombs
Beatriz Creel Garza Ríos
Hayley Dawson
Caitlin Doherty
Keith Edwards
Stuart Eggleton 
Gender Fail
Niven Govinden
Craig Green
Roman Greig
Sanja Grozdanic
Rosie Haward
Benedict Hawkins
David Hoyle
Alison Huber
G.B. Jones
Nicholas Kalinoski
Jay Keery
Carl Ferrero 
Chris Kraus
Olivia Laing
Gonçalo Lamas
Paul Lee
Hannah Levene
BUTT Magazine
Andrew Mallinson
Mary Manning
John Maybury
Andrew McDonald
Lucie McLaughlin
Dylan Meade
Fag Mob
Nick Naber
Paul P.
Ames Petrossi
Richard Porter
Rosie Quattromini
Kyle Quinn
David Rattray
Stuart Rawlinson
Holly Revell
Sarah Schulman
Olivia Scott-Berry
Verity Spott
Anika Steppe
Camilla Sterne
Richard Stott
Hannah Isobel Summers
Tom Tyldesley
Romily Alice Walden
Nathan Walker
Martin Wallace
Joseph Winsborrow
Nick Wood
Martin Youth

Cover artwork by Simon Prag

Softcover, A5

Read about this issue in:


Over there, a queer anthology of joy

with contributors including Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, Hilton Als, AA Bronson, Timothy Thornton, Sophie Robinson, Eley Williams and Honey Dijon.

Cover artwork by Richard Porter

Softcover, A5



Not here, a queer anthology of loneliness

Contributions by

Nick Blackburn
Robert Chevara
Philip Cornett
Jez Dolan
Harry Freegard
Alice Goodman
David Hoyle
Paul Hughes
Marc Hundley
La John Joseph
Luke Kelsey
Ash Kotak
Olivia Laing
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Colby Keller / Donald Lynskey
Keguro Macharia
Mary Manning
Bertie Marshall
Neil McNally
Monique Mouton
Charlie Porter
Richard Porter
Heretic Radikal
Holly Revell
Sarah Schulman
Tim Spooner
Verity Spott
Mimei Thompson
Timothy Thornton
Urara Tsuchiya
Toby Upson
Eley Williams

Cover artwork by Anton Johnson 

Softcover, A5

I-D Magazine published an article and interview in December 2017 which can be read here


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