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In O, artist and writer Tammy Nguyen returns to Vietnam to visit the caves of the Phong Nha Karst.
This journey into the Karst’s “wind-carved teeth” resounds with the traditional songs of Nguyen’s guides, whose melodies produce the O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O that echoes through narratives woven together around it as a visual and sonic spine: the story of Nguyen’s Uncle Van, an opportunistic businessman who traded in Vietnamese porcelain vessels; her coming-of-age as a child with missing teeth, and the material and mineral histories of the veneers that eventually completed her “American Smile”; the plastic paradise of the man-made island of Forest City, a simulacrum of natural beauty kept uncannily bright and lush by the flow of global investment capital; and, behind it all, a retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that supplies what the original parable lacked: an understanding of fantasy’s role in the construction of a sublime.
In O’s anti-allegory, the personal and geopolitical sit uncomfortably alongside one another. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. The uncanny naturalism of Nguyen’s zirconium veneers reflect Forest City’s manicured paradise.
What emerges is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the play of language across scales: how it rebounds between our stories of self and the semantic regimes of global capital alike.
Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. In 2008, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014 and a NYFA Fellowship in painting in 2021. She was included in Greater New York 2021 at MOMA PS1 and has also exhibited at Nichido Contemporary Art in Japan, Smack Mellon, Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.
O
by Tammy Nguyen
Binding:Paperback
Pages:144
Publ.date:9/1/2022
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Product Number:9781946433916
ISBN: 978-1-946433-91-6
Price: $ 30.00
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Poems
No Muse will I invoke; for she is fled!
Lo! where she sits, breathing, yet all but dead.
She loved the heavens of old, she thought them fair;
And dream’d of Gods in Tempe’s golden air.
For her the wind had voice, the sea its cry;
She deem’d heroic Greece could never die.
Breathless was she, to think what nymphs might play
In clear green depths, deep-shaded from the day;
She thought the dim and inarticulate god
Was beautiful, nor knew she man a sod;
But hoped what seem’d might not be all untrue,
And feared to look beyond the eternal blue.
But now the heavens are bared of dreams divine.
Still murmurs she, like Autumn, ´This was mine!’
How should she face the ghastly, jarring Truth,
That questions all, and tramples without ruth?
And still she clings to Ida of her dreams,
And sobs, ´Ah! let the world be what it seems!’
Then the shy nymph shall softly come again;
The world, once more, make music for her pain.
For, sitting in the dim and ghostly night,
She fain would stay the strong approach of light;
While later bards cleave to her, and believe
That in her sorrow she can still conceive!
Oh, let her dream; still lovely is her sigh;
Oh, rouse her not, or she shall surely die.
Stephen Phillips
(1864 – 1915)
Poems
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Travel
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892 – 1950)
Travel
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The Italian Soldier
Shook My Hand
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sounds of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing that I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand
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Taken from ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, published by New Road, 1943. Poem written 1939
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In a landscape scarred by conflict, two women begin a quest for a lost child and a lost world of peace.
Bound together by love and acceptance, their story and path interweave with fellow outcasts — people like the ever-suave Dame Blanche, Sister Asunta, martial artist and magician, Master Wu Wu, and the lost soul, Tulip — but whether peace is simply the end of war or something deeper is something they must discover for themselves.
A haunting tale, told in a series of visionary prose poems, The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue interweaves memory and yearning to ask questions that reflect on our past and, disturbingly, on our futures.
Maria Jastrzębska is a Polish-born poet, editor and translator. Her most recent collection was At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013) and her selected poems, The Cedars of Walpole Park, have been translated into Polish by Anna Błasiak, Paweł Gawroński and Wioletta Grzegorzewska and published bilingually (Stowarzyszenie ŻŻwych Poetów 2015). Old Knives is a selection of her work translated into Romanian by Lidia Vianu and published bilingually by Integral Contemporary Literature Press (2017). She was co-editor with Anthony Luvera of Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014). She co-translated Iztok Osojnik’s selected poems Elsewhere with Ana Jelnikar and her translations of Justyna Bargielska’s selected poems The Great Plan B are published by Smokestack Press (2017). Her work features in the British Library poetry and translation project Poetry Between Two Worlds. Dementia Diaries, her literary drama, toured nationally with Lewes Live Lit in 2011. Her poems have been much anthologized from The Virago Book of Wicked Verse (1992) to This Line Is Not For Turning — An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press 2011) and Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe 2015). Maria lives in Brighton and you can discover more about her work on her website. (https://mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com/)
The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue
Maria Jastrzębska
Prose-poetry
Language: English
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
2018
Paperback
70 pages
ISBN-10: 1911540033
ISBN-13: 978-1911540038
Price: 14,27 euro
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At Melville’s Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
Hart Crane
(1889 – 1932)
At Melville’s Tomb
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Michael Rosen was dangerously ill from COVID at the beginning of 2020 and as doctors told him, if he hadn’t received treatment, he would have ‘gone’.
While he was in hospital, 42% of the patients on his intensive care ward died. He spent three months in hospital, of which nearly seven weeks were in an induced coma, followed by several weeks recovering in an ordinary ward and then in a Rehabilitation Hospital.
He couldn’t walk and his memory was damaged. Three years later his hearing and eyesight are still badly affected (‘I can’t hear with my left eye, I can’t see with my left ear and I get muddled’).
Following his best-selling COVID memoirs Many Different Kinds of Love: a story of life, death and the NHS and Sticky McStickstick: the friend who helped me walk again, his new collection for grown-ups records his bewilderment with what’s happened, and shares his thoughts about the politics of the pandemic – the ‘crazed incompetence’ of the Tory government and the war against the ‘Oldies’ that led to over 200,000 dead in the UK.
Unforgiving, whimsical, grim, warm, philosophical and comical, The Advantages of Nearly Dying is a book about hospital appointments, waiting-rooms, blood-tests, brain-scans, eye-tests – and a song of praise for the NHS.
Michael Rosen, an English poet, scriptwriter, broadcaster, and performer, has been writing for children since 1970. He lives in London with his wife and five children.
The Advantages of Nearly Dying
Poems by Michael Rosen
Published: 1s Paperback edition , t March 2023
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
Paperback: 220 pages
ISBN-10:1739772296
ISBN-13:978-1739772291
£8.99
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Même féerie
La lune mince verse une lueur sacrée,
Comme une jupe d’un tissu d’argent léger,
Sur les masses de marbre où marche et croit songer
Quelque vierge de perle et de gaze nacrée.
Pour les cygnes soyeux qui frôlent les roseaux
De carènes de plume à demi lumineuse,
Sa main cueille et dispense une rose neigeuse
Dont les pétales font des cercles sur les eaux.
Délicieux désert, solitude pâmée,
Quand le remous de l’eau par la lune lamée
Compte éternellement ses échos de cristal,
Quel cœur pourrait souffrir l’inexorable charme
De la nuit éclatante au firmament fatal,
Sans tirer de soi-même un cri pur comme une arme ?
Paul Valéry
(1871-1945)
Même féerie
Poème
Album de vers anciens
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Orestes
Me in far lands did Justice call, cold queen
Among the dead, who after heat and haste
At length have leisure for her steadfast voice,
That gathers peace from the great deeps of hell.
She call’d me, saying: ‘I heard a cry by night!
Go thou, and question not; within thy halls
My will awaits fulfilment. Lo, the dead
Cries out before me in the under-world.
Seek not to justify thyself: in me
Be strong, and I will show thee wise in time;
For, though my face be dark, yet unto those
Who truly follow me through storm or shine,
For these the veil shall fall, and they shall see
They walked with Wisdom, though they knew her not.’
So sped I home; and from the under-world
Forever came a wind that fill’d my sails,
Cold, like a spirit! and ever her still voice
Spoke over shoreless seas and fathomless deeps,
And in great calms, as from a colder world;
Nor slack’d I sail by day, nor yet when night
Fell on my running keel, and now would burn,
With all her eyes, my errand into me.
So sped I on, fill’d with a voice divine:
And hardly wist I whom I was to slay,
My mother! but a vague, heroic dream
Possess’d me; fired to do the will of gods,
I lost the man in minister of Heaven;
Nor took I note of sandbank, nor of storm,
Nor of the ocean’s thunders, when the shores
All round had faded, leaving me alone:
I knew I could not die, till I had slain!
But, when I came once more upon the land
That rear’d me, all the sweetness of old days
Came back on me: I stood, as from a dream
Waked to a sudden, sad reality.
And when, far off, I saw those ancient towers,
The palaces and places of my youth,
I long’d to fall into my mother’s arms,
And tell a thousand tales of near escapes.
And lo! the nurse, that fondled me of yore,
Fell with glad tears upon my neck, and told
How she, and how my mother, all this while
Had dream’d of all I was to do, and said
How dear I should be to my mother’s eyes.
Her words shook me, but shook not my resolve.
For even then there came that sterner voice,
Echoing to what was highest in the soul.
Then, like to those who have a work on earth,
And put far from them lips of wife or child,
And gird them to the accomplishment; so I
Strode in, nor saw at all mine ancient halls;
And struck my father’s murderess, not my mother.
And, when I had smitten, lo, the strength of gods
Pass’d from me, and the old, familiar halls
Reel’d back on me; dim statues, that of old
Holding my mother’s hand I marvell’d at,
And questioned her of each. And she lies there,
My mother! ay, my mother now; O hair
That once I play’d with in these halls! O eyes
That for a moment knew me as I came,
And lighten’d up, and trembled into love;
The next were darkened by my hand! Ah me!
Ye will not look upon me in that world.
Yet thou, perchance, art happier, if thou go’st
Into some land of wind and drifting leaves,
To sleep without a star; but as for me,
Hell hungers, and the restless Furies wait.
Then the dark Curse, that sits upon the towers,
Bow’d down her awful head, thus satisfied,
And I fled forth, a murderer, through the world.
Stephen Phillips
(1864 – 1915)
Orestes
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Das Wort
Lebendgem Worte bin ich gut:
Das springt heran so wohlgemut,
das grüßt mit artigem Geschick,
hat Blut in sich, kann herzhaft schnauben,
kriecht dann zum Ohre selbst dem Tauben
und ringelt sich und flattert jetzt
und was es tut, das Wort ergötzt.
Doch bleibt das Wort ein zartes Wesen,
bald krank und aber bald genesen.
Willst ihm sein kleines Leben lassen,
mußt du es leicht und zierlich fassen,
nicht plump betasten und bedrücken,
es stirbt oft schon an bösen Blicken –
und liegt dann da, so ungestalt,
so seelenlos, so arm und kalt,
sein kleiner Leichnam arg verwandelt,
von Tod und Sterben mißgehandelt.
Ein totes Wort – ein häßlich Ding,
ein klapperdürres Kling-Kling-Kling.
Pfui allen häßlichen Gewerben,
an denen Wort und Wörter sterben.
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844 – 1900)
Das Wort
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Du vitriol, du sucre, du vice et de la vertu déversés dans un cocktail explosif tracé de mon stylographe corrosif.
Vous trouverez dans cet ouvrage des réactions à l’intolérable, des rédemptions aimables et le récit d’angoisses et de poisse.
Un verre de prose légère et particulière, qui je l’espère, ne saura vous déplaire. A consommer sans modération.
Gabrielle Ratcliffe, née à Munich, manie le langage avec passion dans toute sa richesse. Aussi, les mots qu’elle dresse et adresse finissent par rendre ses écrits simples et limpides.
Elle noircit sans cesse le papier où qu’elle soit et quelle que soit son humeur. Singulière parce que plurielle !
Benoît Bertouy, dessinateur au cœur de génie, illustre avec parcimonie et rigueur, de son crayon, magique, sa prose, telles deux âmes sœurs.
MES VANITÉS
La passion selon Satan.
Poésie
Gabrielle Ratcliffe
Illustrations de Benoit Bertouy
Les Impliqués
Editions L’HARMATTAN
Date de publication: 13 décembre 2022
Langue: Français
Broché format: 13,5 x 21,5 cm
174 pages
ISBN : 978-2-38417-707-3
EAN13 : 9782384177073
Livre papier:
€ 17,5
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Marieke Lucas Rijneveld komt met een nieuwe roman.
In de fictiebrochure van Atlas Contact staat een vooraankondiging van de nieuwe roman van Rijneveld.
Het verdriet van Sigi F. is de titel. Wanneer deze roman precies verschijnt is nog niet duidelijk (voorjaar, zomer, najaar?). Over de inhoud is verder ook nog niets bekend.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Het verdriet van Sigi F.
Roman
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