Publications

The Mandorla Letters : for the hopeful

Published 2022

Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers towards an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers that have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that is integral to the collective survival of our planet. 

The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is an astonishing literary accomplishment by one of our contemporary jazz greats. Through experimental jazz thought, Mitchell Gantt brightens the possibilities for who we, as humans, might become.” —Dawn Lundy Martin, Toi Derricotte Chair in English, Director, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, University of Pittsburgh

“Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s soulfully inventive guidebook for bold, positive futures is alive with the songs of ancestors, the courage of self-creation. Part memoir, part spectral-cosmic jazz and blues tale, epistolary and remarkably candid, free, this wildly original work offers fresh layers of meaning no matter from when and where you enter.” —Sheree Renée Thomas, Author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future

“Nicole Mitchell Gantt has penned an Afrofuturist masterwork, unearthing her musical lens and process through a multi-voiced narrative that invokes cosmic identity. A nonlinear weaving, she maps her imagination through the prism of critical thought, experience, and ancestral inspirations that brings her music to life. This is a must-read for those seeking to understand the star seeds through which Black Experimental Music and creativity at large is born.” —Ytasha L. Womack, Author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture

“Epistolary speculation as memoir; performance document as romance; theory of collaborative composition as extended koan; notebook of a return to native land as otherworldly exit visa—The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is unfathomably rich in praise and mourning and morning and impossible arising in devoted grounding and emphatic sounding.” —Fred Moten, Author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

About the Author: Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flautist, conceptualist, and composer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh as the Williams S. Dietrich II Chair and Director of Jazz Studies. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and Founder of the Black Earth Ensemble. The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is her first book.

Writing with Caca

Published 2021

“There goes the poet Salvador Novo aboard a sleepless taxi. Did you notice his lips? The intense red of his closed lips? Pray he doesn’t open them. People say he has a sharp, poisonous tongue. They say he’s a snake. They say he’s a bitch. They say he’s a whore. I don’t know him personally. I’ve only read his poems, the ones he has written, the ones he’ll write soon.”

Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. Translated with verve by JD Pluecker, the book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan’s HD Book, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon’s Rimbaud the Son, Fabre’s Writing with Caca is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer.

Praise for the book:

A page-turner biography of the poet and writer Salvador Novo whose queer shoulder pushed every wall open. In here is Novo’s deviant knowledge of what the shit and anus reveal of life, yet “resists is sublimation.” This book is not for the timid, or maybe it is precisely for them! —CAConrad

Luis Felipe Fabre, one of the most exciting and virtuosic Mexican poets of his generation, knows a lot of good shit. He knows a lot about Salvador Novo, the scatalogical Mexican poet of the early 20th century who, according to Octavio Paz, wrote “not with blood but with caca.” This terrific book (translated with acrobatic brilliance by John Pluecker), is a work of literary history, literary criticism, poetry, and excretory theory that travels from the Aztecs to Sor Juana to the Mexican Revolution and to contemporary times. Fabre makes a compelling argument for the importance of Novo’s writing with caca, and for the importance of celebrating writers who are driven by the “urge to take a crap on all universal literature.”  —Daniel Borzutzky

 

Humanoid

Published 2021

Humanoid is Joel Craig’s second book, after 2012’s The White House. For this new book, Craig challenged himself to jettison all his old tricks and come up with a new way of writing. Humanoid presents the result of his experiments: an expanded lyric form that drifts across the page, moving between direct discourse and the outer limits of hipster cosmology.

Praise for the book:

These marvelous, intently dialogic poems believe in that presence (and that absence) that we call “the reader.” In Humanoid, each sharply measured poem staggers down the page in its self-interrupting performance, tilting and darting toward an elusive social possibility—that we, whatever “we“ are, might actually come to somehow dwell together. These poems do so in their own fleet idiom of admonishment—self-admonishment and admonishment directed toward others, reader included. It all combines in the rushing substance full of sting, care and delight that is this poetry’s movement. Alertly observant of its own cognition, and the foibles of cognition at the interior of its historical moment, this is harsh and tender, often funny and always deeply urgent work that Joel Craig has given us. Despite all the forces pushing against the possibility of such a thing, there is much love in it. —Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff and Father of Noise

The speaker of the poems of Joel Craig’s Humanoid floats and careens in the interstices between tract housing, breaking news, love, and existential questions regarding time in the Anthropocene, so called. The difference between what we want to hear and the alternative is terrifying, but it is also where life is now. This book says such things.—Lucy Ives

Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect

Published 2021

$30 / or $10 courtesy of the Field Foundation via inquiry

The Wall of Respect, a work of public art created in 1967 at the corner of Forty-third Street and Langley Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, depicted Black leaders in music,  literature, politics, theater, and sports. The Wall sparked a nationwide mural movement, provided a platform for community engagement, and was a foundational work of the Black Arts Movement. There is no longer any physical indication of its existence, but it still needs to be remembered. Romi Crawford proposes the concept of “fleeting monuments,” asking a range of artists and writers to realize antiheroic, non static, and impermanent strategies for commemoration. Featuring contributions from Miguel Aguilar, Abdul Akalimat and the Amus Mor Project, Wisdom Baty, Lauren Berlant, Mark Blanchard, Bethany Collins, Darryl Cowherd, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Julio Finn, Maria Gaspar, Theaster Gates, Wills Glasspiegel, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Stephanie Koch, Kelly Lloyd, Damon Locks, Haki Madhubuti, Faheem Majeed, Nicole Mitchell Gantt, Naeem Mohaiemen, K. Kofi Moyo, Robert E. Paige, Kamau Patton, Jefferson Pinder, Cauleen Smith, Rohan Ayinde, solYchaski, Norman Teague, Jan Tichy, Visiting Val Gray Ward, Mechtild Widrich, and Bernard Williams. Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press.

Advance Praise: Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect is stunning, revelatory, and moving—a magical accomplishment. It is history, art, witnessing come alive through all the senses. It is deeply important. Read it, read it again, gift it, consult it, quote it, and remember.” —Yo-Yo Ma

“These ‘Fleeting Monuments’ are rich, generous gifts grounded in this Black nationalist geography that continues to offer reflection, hope, and joy.” —Dr. Kymberly Pinder

“The Wall of Respect is in all of us, and this book is an ideally heartwarming story of how Chicago has created a culture of resistance, resilience, and revolution. A must-read.” —Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

“This book is a clarion call for us all to reimagine how we remember both the dreams deferred and the joys of history. Once you step into its pages, you realize it is also a portal to a dazzling world away from the dreariness of debates about monuments and memorials to a free world where our radical imaginations are unleashed to create something truly beautiful and new.” —Dr. Lisa Yun Lee

This project is partially supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through the foundation’s initiative Art Design Chicago. Additional support comes from the Field Foundation of Illinois and the Graham Foundation or Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

 

Candida Alvarez / HERE: A Visual Reader

Published 2019

$30 (available for purchase through our distributor SPD)

Featuring contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Dawoud Bey, Coco Fusco, Kellie Jones, Elizabeth Murray, Terry R. Myers, Daniel R. Quiles, Kay Rosen, Daniel Schulman, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Rebecca Walker. Introduction by editors Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard; book design by Sonnenzimmer.

Candida Alvarez. Here was the artist’s first major institutional exhibition, taking place at the Chicago Cultural Center and reflecting forty years of her painting. Embracing and further contextualizing her work, Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader features full-color reproductions of individual artworks and views of the exhibition as well as images from her Fall/Winter 2017 menswear collaboration with Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. Edited by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard, this book presents a selection of articles from 1983 to the present; conversations between Alvarez and Dawoud Bey, Kay Rosen, Daniel Schulman, and Rebecca Walker; and newly commissioned texts including a prose response by Elizabeth Alexander as well as essays by the exhibition’s curator, Terry R. Myers, and art historians Kellie Jones and Daniel R. Quiles. Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader thus captures Alvarez’s work in print to spark further conversations about her legacy.

About the artist: Candida Alvarez is an artist who responds through intuition and imagination to intimate moments in life. Her paintings, drawings, and collages blur the boundaries between the conceptual, the intuitive and the abstract. Alvarez received a MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking in 1997. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1981 and received her BA from Fordham University, Lincoln Center, in 1977. Her work is currently in the public collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Alvarez holds the distinguished F. H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During 2010–12, she was interim Graduate Dean at SAIC. She is represented by Gavlak, Los Angeles/Palm Beach, and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Alvarez is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation 2019 Painters & Sculptors Grant.

Holy Shit / Novo en el Mictlán

Published 2019

Luis Felipe Fabre
Translated by John Pluecker

$15 (Summer 2020)

Mexico City poet, Luis Felipe Fabre’s new book about Salvador Novo (1904-1974), Escribir con caca  was originally published by Sexto Piso in 2017. Novo is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures of contemporary Mexican literature, garnering critical attention from the likes of Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, and Guillermo Sheridan. However, due to the broad spectrum of genres and registers that Novo embraced, his own suspicion of his poetry (or poetry in general), his extroverted homosexuality in an openly intolerant era, or his controversial political positions, Novo remains peripheral to mainstream literature. Fabre’s provocative poetic essay attends to those questions and the resulting book is sure to occupy a prominent place in Novo’s bibliography.

Luis Felipe Fabre was born in Mexico City in 1974. He has been awarded grants from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in the category of Young Artists in the periods 2004–5 and 2007–8, and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. He has published a volume of essays, Leyendo agujeros. Ensayos sobre (des)escritura, antiescritura y no escritura (2005), and the poetry collections  Cabaret Provenza (2007) and La sodomía en la Nueva España (2010), and is the editor of the anthology Divino Tesoro. Muestra de nueva poesía mexicana (2008).

On Civil Disobedience: Pamphlet Series

Published 2019

Anonymous, Ravi Agarwal, Dakota Brown, Rashayla Marie Brown, Robin Blaser, Romi Crawford,T Clutch Fleischmann, Stephen Lapthisophon, Nathaniel Mackey, Abhishek Narula, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and Mika Yamamoto.

$6 ea. / $75.00 for 12

On Civil Disobedience was a year-long pamphlet series featuring writers from a range of professional backgrounds to contribute essays addressing the title topic. The series recalls historical precedents set by Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Arendt, and others while considering the pamphlet’s important role in American revolutionary history. Filtering civic responsibility through the combined awareness of histories and disciplines, we hope these essays will ask how citizenship and resistance intersect within the pledge of democratic ideals. Designed by Dakota Brown, contributors include Anonymous (Civil Disobedience at Work), Ravi Agarwal (Environmental Activism), Dakota Brown (Design), Rashayla Marie Brown (Essay), Robin Blaser (Poetry), Romi Crawford (Race and Affect Theory), T Clutch Fleischmann (Essay), Stephen Lapthisophon (Art and Theory), Nathaniel Mackey (Poetry), Abhishek Narula (Data Rights), Jennif(f)er Tamayo (Immigration), and Mika Yamamoto (Horror).

This project was produced with support from a Chicago Community Grant. Each essay was commissioned for the occasion, except for Blaser’s text which was reproduced with support from UC Berkeley Press.

Elevated Threat Level

Published 2018

New lyric poetry by Rachel Galvin explores an ethical response to American comfort and its ties to war and exploitation. The poems in this collection reflect on news reporting, natural disasters, journalist safety, and the act of observing war from a distance as a civilian. Written in a variety of forms and registers—from elegies to faits divers to sonnets—Elevated Threat Level thinks about violence and the rhetoric used to convey it. The book is also a tribute to the print form of the newspaper.

From Elevated Threat Level: 
In Wartime There Are No Civilians
But you weren’t there when the house was bombed, what could you tell them?
You hadn’t seen the girl chain herself down either.
And if you had, you wouldn’t remember it now.
Their badges weren’t written in your language.
High-octane fuel, they said.
A dog crouched nearby, they said.
The referent eludes you, keeps eluding you.
Damn the cages, damn the metal works, this place
is a hinterland of bulldozers and people
whose chests crack open in their path.

Praise for the book:
Perhaps every poem is a riddle for which the answer is the poem itself. Perhaps each of these adroit lyrics by the poet, critic, translator, and activist Rachel Galvin is a riddle for which the answer is the entire world in all its sad, brutal, and delightful contradiction. For surely every brief lyric in this book feels simultaneously triaged amidst a world of active damage and precisely poised, resourceful, nimble as a needle, quick as a stitch.  For surely every brief lyric in this book has the dazzle and dismay of a candle, just as it goes out. –Joyelle McSweeney

These ingenious, funny-sad, empathic poems are woundingly precise in their exposure of a pattern of world-damage, of power misused “in our name.” The recent history spotlighted in Galvin’s poems is nauseating, but it’s rendered with such pleasurably incisive phrasing and sonic swerve that I look up from the book awake, clarified, galvanized to face again the music and the news. –Catherine Wagner

About the author:
Rachel Galvin is the author of News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor, with Bonnie Costello, of Auden at Work (2015) and a poetry collection titled Pulleys & Locomotion (2009). She is translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (2013) and co-translator, with Harris Feinsod, of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo (Open Letter Books, 2018). Poems and translations appear in The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, MAKE, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, PN Review, and Poetry. Her criticism appears in Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket 2, MLN, and Modernism/modernity. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective. Galvin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.

SHADOWED!

Published 2018

Mark Booth, Alexandria Eregbu, Simone Forti, Becky Grajeda, Hannah B Higgins, Terri Kapsalis, Tim Kinsella, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Dao Nguyen, Caroline Picard, Jeffrey Skoller, and Shawn Michelle Smith

$30.00

Shadowed! confronts the slippage of time and action within Ellen Rothenberg’s exhibition elsetime. Sweeping through the studio of Bertolt Brecht, Woodstock in the sixties, Berlin in the nineties, and the Syrian protests of today, Shadowed! projects a dispersive, unfolding temporality. Beginning with a suite of elsetime photographs, the book continues with reflections on the show by Hannah B Higgins, Jeffrey Skoller, Caroline Picard, and Shawn Michelle Smith—spreading out from there into an artist’s archive that includes scanned fragments of writings by Stefan Brecht,  Allen Ginsberg, Angela Davis, and  transcribed contributions from  Simone Forti. A subsequent section includes documentation of performances produced in response to elsetime by artists, activists, and musicians. Shadowed! ends with the transcript of a public conversation that took place within the original exhibit, capturing a discussion that incorporates an active audience. By layering these performative, photographic, and written encounters, Shadowed! allows the afterimage of an exhibition to unfurl beyond the gallery, beyond this book, and into its own elsetime.

“Ellen Rothenberg’s multimodal installation elsetime interlaced performance actions, installation, objects, public invitations to fellow artists, and visual essays. In this beautiful and thoughtfully designed book, you’ll find each of these aspects explored anew as though readied for further action. New pieces by collaborators enter the scene and become enmeshed in photographic echoes from ‘60s collective rallying, music documentary, contemporary migrancy, material icons, and the live events generated during the exhibition. The great exclamation mark of the title brings all these absents squarely into view, while posing the pressing question: how does one avoid reenacting shadows from the past!” —Caroline Bergvall, artist, writer, performer, and author of Drift.

“The four essays ground readers in specific moments in the vast expanse of history that Rothenberg’s work engages from the 1930s to the present. Together, these essays help unpack the labyrinth of meanings and allusions that each of Rothenberg’s objects offers. The writers reveal what Rothenberg initiates in ‘elsetime’: that histories change as different objects consume divergent subjectivities and as bodies come together to interact with them and their surrounding architectures.” —Newcity

 

 

 

Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening

Published 2016

Giovanni Aloi, Kristina Chew, Every house has a door, Brooke Holmes, Karen Houle, Joela Jacobs, Ronald Johnson, Devin King, Eben Kirksey, Deanna Ledezma, Renan Laru-an, Michael Marder, Nathanaël, Chantal Neveu, Mark Payne, Caroline Picard, Catriona Sandilands, Steven Shaviro, Eleni Sikelianos, Monica Westin, & Leila Wilson

$30.00

Vegetal life forms are banal in their ubiquity. Undeniably alive, yet silent, they creep upwards, their roots submerged and out of human sight. Like anarchists protesting order, weeds break through concrete. Plants challenge theoretical logic as well; they can be both one and many: Aspen trees growing on a hillside share a single root system. Plants have occupations and desires: engaged in constant growth, they spread out with a will to consume and occupy space. Studies confirm that plants communicate and activate built-in chemical defense mechanisms to ward off predators. Some even move visibly: Mimosa plants close in on themselves when touched by a human finger. This would suggest some kind of sentience, but what would the character of that sentience be? How do we quantify it? Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening highlights the inaccessible subjectivity that plants possess. In this volume, artists and writers reflect upon plant life as it troubles both physical and ideological human spaces. Featuring artists Sebastian Alvarez, Katherine Behar, Srijon Chowdhury, Katy Cowan, Zoe Crosher, Lindsey French, Essi Kausalainen, Joshua Kent, Deanna Ledezma, A. Laurie Palmer, Wilfredo Prieto, Steve Ruiz, John Steck Jr., Linda Tegg, & Andrew Yang.

“The absolute pillar of modern philosophy is the notion that human thought is something ontologically different in kind from everything else. The gap between chunks of iron on one side and chimps and dolphins on the other is supposedly nothing compared to the perilous leap from ‘sentient’ chimps and dolphins to ‘sapient’ humans. The present anthology reminds us of just how much may be going on with intelligence outside of humans. This makes it another important contribution to the non-modern philosophy of the future.” — Graham Harman

“As with most Green Lantern Press publications, Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening unfolds in intricate evolutions, which in the context of biology and human thought (two ever-adaptable branching systems) is no less discerning on the delicate nature between the nearly imperceptible progressions that constitute viewing, seeing, and experiencing the anthropocene.” —Stephanie Cristello

“Reading this collection of works about plants is akin to venturing out on a hike through unfamiliar woods.  The environment feels familiar and inviting and yet, things are different, unexpected, and sometimes thrilling.  The works appear with their own organic logic and cadence.  Most importantly, what you receive from them depends to a great deal on what you brought with you to the woods and on how closely and patiently you are willing to look, how open you are to escaping your own expectations or preoccupations.  And you’ll certainly find spots that you’d hope to return to again some day to seek that fleeting inspiration it offered the first time around.” — Chuck Cannon

Zenith

Published 2016

Patrick Durgin

$10.00

Zenith (2015-2016) is the third in a series of printed objects or “artist’s books” by Patrick Durgin, each with the dimensions of a 7” vinyl record. Zenith is a set of seven scratch off cards with the revelatory promise of pre-loaded Macintosh desktop wallpaper images, e.g. of a pinkish Mt. Fuji, or prairie grasses dangling in the breeze. Zenith cites a history of broadcast technology, addiction as a faultless economic engine, and gaming as a way to withhold suspense.

Durgin began the series in 2013 with Daughter. Daughter is a set of offset prints, photographic details of preliterate “writing” alongside the iconic imagery of early childhood educational materials—especially sticker books that introduce and enforce monstrous race, class, and gender norms as platforms for developing fine motor skills. Next was Singles (2014): a set of 3-D acrylic prints, unplayable records whose faux center labels feature minimalist couplets concerning skeuomorphic nostalgia and contemporary artisanal capitalism. (For more on Singles, read “Witness My Own” at Jacket2.)

Notes On

Published 2016

Magalie Guérin

$20.00

NOTES ON is an a-chronological studio diary that artist Magalie Guérin’s re-transcribed twice by hand and now in print. Through that active facsimile, Guérin documents her painting process, mapping at once her creative history and the way that history consistently transforms. Personal, professional, and creative spheres intersect like simultaneous layers in a painting as accumulated entries capture the shifting gray area between self-doubt, self-awareness, and creative breakthrough. A recurring and parallel “character” in this journal is a hat shape—an abstract form that Guérin paints over and over again. Whether anatomical or abstract, the hat shape becomes an anthropomorphic companion as witness/lover/nemesis to Guérin’s artistic endeavors. Guérin shows us not only that a room of one‘s own is useful, but what can happen when it is utilized.

“How does one become an artist? By turns earnest, exasperated, and exhilarated, Magalie Guérin’s NOTES ON provides a fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of one painter’s progress. Transcripts of grad school crits, studio visits, and Guérin’s own diaries and notebooks are combined to demonstrate how—between an individual’s defeats and triumphs—a language of visual art is devised.” — Chris Kraus

“The success of Guérin’s studio diary lies in her willingness to bare all. Rather than cleaning things up for posterity’s sake, she gives the reader an unexpurgated look at the chaotic mix of reflection, insecurity, gossip, exuberance, and doubt that constitute the inner life of the artist at work. A fun, rich book that feels absolutely true to its time and place.” — Roger White

culebra

Published 2016

Roberto Harrison

$15.00

A new collection of poetry by Roberto Harrison. Printed in an edition of 500 with layout and design by Sonnenzimmer; special edition of 100 with silkscreen dust jackets also by Sonnenzimmer.

“Roberto Harrison is a minimalist, but his poems transmit consciousness through association and fragmentation. culebra ‘knows to be the one another time within/ as it dissolves/ in mountains’ and evokes the important paradox of inconstancy and stillness that underlies the eco-spiritual life of the Americas. In poems that slither in spiritual migration towards unity, Harrison becomes the visionary poet of the Anthropocene, the poet we need for the other side of our age.” — Carmen Giménez Smith

“In these strange, open-eyed, open-hearted, beautiful poems, there is nowhere to stand, or there is everywhere specific. I feel as if I am looking at Borges’ aleph: sacred mutating representatives of every category — weather animals language pain geographies software — announce themselves, declare connectednesses I’d never have predicted. This journey, this snake moves through lived experience like breath from the underside of time.” — Catherine Wagner

“In Roberto Harrison’s culebra, world-creation is inseparable from local encounter: both are parts of purposive wandering. All the commas bear down, tractions of the advancing bellyplate; every entity or phenomena met along the way is added to the charter. What’s involved is ’a picture, removed from empire,’ an urgent communiqué, a chronicle as long as the longest serpent. Bound by the intricate rather than held captive by the atomized, these pages propose an ongoing social cosmology, ‘to make what you believe is a link.’” — George Albon

Didactics

Published 2015

Sonnenzimmer

$30.00

Pairing Warp and Weft: Poster Construction by Sonnenzimmer (2012) and Formal Additive Programs (2010), we hope to open a window into our creative process, while expanding the canon of compositional practice related to both art and design. With this new iteration, we continue to contend with the duality of improvisation and formulated outcomes, while striving for the poetic and pragmatic in our approach to the visual field. While the first part of the book focuses on past poster work with a pragmatic and in-depth project break down (clients include the National, the Books, Mouse on Mars, etc), the second, Formal Additive Programs, aims to make a case for composing images through concise programs that embrace conscious flow.

“Over the course of the last eight years, Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnezimmer have quietly led the charge of reintroducing the necessity of the abstract in an ever-expanding body of artistically rigorous work. Drawing from a diverse set of influences—from the process-driven experiments of the action painters to the exacting compositions of modern commercial designers—their paintings, posters, textiles, sound pieces, and installations present a whole new set of didactic possibilities that in almost any other context would be destined to fail: challenging yet approachable, bold yet understated, both intellectually-adventurous yet aesthetically-sophisticated. Each new work feels more and more like something drawn from the future; each new piece offers the participant endless opportunities to think and imagine.” — Joe Meno, winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and novelist of the bestseller Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails.

“Sonnenzimmer’s work gives me the inner upward swelling of an inspired emotional funnel cloud, a swirling together of many ingredients. One is of just being punched in the face by the sublime, another is a twinge of jealousy because I wish I’d thought of that, or was that good, or was that free. It’s partly inspiration to be better, and it’s partly just gratefulness that something this beautiful and unlikely can exist in the world. Sonnenzimmer has taken the feather-line cracks between art and commerce and expanded them into a ridiculously appealing, endless patchwork landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s a place I would very much like to build a house. Looking at Sonnenzimmer’s posters you get the feeling that, on the one hand they are smarter than you, and yet on the other that everything they do is as simple and effortless as breathing. In explaining their process, Warp and Weft appears to confirm both impressions. I wouldn’t have thought I could like their work more than I already did, but apparently I was wrong.” — Anders Nilsen, cartoonist and Ignatz Award Winner for Big Questions

“Sonnenzimmer is expansive but takes up little space, accessible but so hard to pin down that the best way to describe the work of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi is this way: They make stuff. Distinctive stuff. Fine art. Wearable art. Screen-print posters. Improvisational music. Gallery catalogs. CD packaging for Swiss record labels. Poetry magazine covers. Abstracted stuff that somehow finds a way to be practical and decorative but smart.” —Chicago Tribune.

The New [New] Corpse

Published 2015

Antibody Corporation, Rebecca Beachy, Érik Bullot, Judith Goldman, Julia Drescher, Every house has a door (Matthew Goulish & Lin Hixson), Christy LeMaster, Valeria Luiselli, Jesse Malmed, CJ Martin, Nathanaël, Caroline Picard, Martine Syms, John Tipton, Zoe Todd, & Fo Wilson

$30.00

The New [New] Corpse explores current representations of the body in which the human figure appears fragmented, distorted, or emphatically absent in a carefully curated selection of poetry, translation, essays, and exhibition documentation. With a mission statement provided by an artist’s corporation, to a poem about corpses, and an essay about how Billy the Kid changed American mythology, these works emphasize the strange and residual power of material bodies, distorted and skewed through representation. It is produced in conjunction with a group exhibition of the same name.

Featuring artists Benjamin L. Aman & Marion Auburtin, Amelia Charter, Joseph Grigley, Jane Jerardi, Young Joon Kwak, Jason Lazarus, Jesse Malmed, Carlos Martiel, Heather Mekkelson, Jefferson Pinder, Aay Preston-Myint, Rachel Niffenegger, Xaviera Simmons, Shane Ward, & Shoshanna Weinberger.

“This stunning new artist’s book from The Green Lantern Press engages with questions of the self and the body, through art, literature and performance. Caroline Picard’s opening essay takes the image of bodies left on Mt Everest as a way into our sense (or refusal) of a collective body—composed, as it must be of new (new) corpses. Martine Syms’ car is stolen, leading her toward an elegant examination of the how our stuff is not just part of who we are, it is who we are; Valeria Luiselli channels Benjamin (& other literary ghosts) for a 21st century bibliophile, ordering her own bookshelves in a meditation on what it means, for instance, to be a person who cuts a photo of Duras from the newspaper, and tucks it into a notebook as a souvenir. The book attests to the link between such otherwise banal human activity: that of losing and saving and losing again. Each contribution becomes a moment for art-making, a chance (as is climbing past the corpse named Green Boots) to mark our own finitude in the very moment of striving. Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson and Fo Wilson consider the relationship between the human and the non-human, the body in performance as the anti-Idea, or, indeed, encumbrance— here the new corpse becomes a way to break out of a crisis in representation. The emergent self is as unfixed as its body. The New [New] Corpse is a beautiful collection of text and image, and I’ll return to it for inspiration again and again.” — Suzanne Scanlon, Author of Her 37th Year: An Index (Noemi Press) and Promising Young Women (Dorothy).

 “As curators in the most expansive sense, The Green Lantern Press relentlessly aims to refine the bump and tangle of interdisciplinary space, the constant bursts beyond what any given representation can hold. It is an incredibly generous gift to anyone open to receiving it, this space in which rigorous poetic logic prevails. Whether it’s by troubling my assumed understandings of something, or drawing connections I hadn’t previously recognized, the immersive engagement they consistently bring to their projects makes my mind quicken and my spirit deepen. Disciplines cohabit, objects and events, each thing remaining itself while simultaneously transformed by its proximity to others. And now this continuous rolling act of transformation has become an archive in The New [New] Corpse. Poems, essays, lists and images together aim to show us how to live in a world of objects and how to describe living in a world of objects, how the material and the spirit inform and warp each other.” — Tim KinsellaLet Go and Go On (Curbside Splendor) and The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense (Featherproof).

The New [New] Corpse is more than a catalogue; it’s a catalyst for both breaking down the work it represents and building it up again, with a new set of mouths and eyes and skin, allowing it to live a second life. I grabbed a firm hold on a bright thread running through these pieces: that we are composed of what we will ultimately leave behind and this gorgeous object is a perfect example of just that.” — Jac JemcMy Only Wife, and A Different Bed Every Time from Dzanc Books.

Diagrams

Published 2015

Kuras & MacKenzie

with an introduction by Matthew Scott

$30.00

Diagrams is a book that collects 49 diagram drawings made between 2009 and 2014, and includes a conversation-based essay between the artists and the Canadian math scholar, Matthew Scott. These diagrams are an attempt at using the objective visual language of mathematical diagraming to illustrate some of the most important concepts we use to underpin our subjective understanding of the world. In what seems like a hopeless task, the central concern is not how these must inevitably fail to communicate in a truly objective way, but how they might actually succeed.

“But then you have this problem that if you want to prove something general about shapes and then you draw a particular shape on a piece of paper, how do you know that what you’re demonstrating isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of the drawing?” — Matthew Scott (Introduction: On The Diagram)

Ghost Nature

Published 2014

Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Laurie Palmer, João Florêncio, Nettrice Gaskins, Jamila Wood, and Caroline Picard

$20.00

Mice grow human ears on their backs in laboratories and rabbits glow in the dark. In this new age of ecological awareness, “Nature” as a Romantic ideal—a pristine mountainside beyond the scope of human influence—is but a dithering spirit. Rather than succumbing to the pang of this loss, GHOST NATURE exposes the limits of human perspective in the emergent landscape that remains: a slippery network of sometimes monstrous creatures, plants, and technological advances. Published in French and English.  Sebastian Alvarez, Art Orienté objet, Jeremy Bolen, Irina Botea, Robert Burnier, Marcus Coates, Every house has a door, Assaf Evron, Carrie Gundersdorf, Institute of Critical Zoologists, Jenny Kendler, Devin King, Stephen Lapthisophon, Milan Metthey, Rebecca Mir, Heidi Norton, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Tessa Siddle, and Xaviera Simmons. Edited by Caroline Picard.

“Our increasing knowledge of climate change ends all kinds of ideas, but it begins other ones. The essence of these new ideas is the notion of coexistence — that is after all what ecology profoundly means,” – Timothy Morton, “Transmissions from the Uncanny Valley,” p. 20

Mothernism

Published 2014

Lise Haller Baggesen

$19.79

At the intersection of feminism, science fiction, and disco, Mothernism aims to locate the mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse. If the proverbial Mother is perhaps perceived as a persona non grata in the art world, because her nurturing nature is at odds with the hyperbolic ideal of the singular artistic genius, Mothernism amplifies her presence, channeling her energy, complexity, and sublime creative potential in a series of intimate and critical reflections. The resulting collection of letters—dedicated with love from one mother to her dear daughter, sister, mother, and reader—fuse biography, music, art, and history into an auto-theoretical testimony that recalls and redefines the future imperfect. Layout and design (in all its glitter) by Sonnenzimmer.

“Being a mother, that most universal yet personal experience, has always been a creative act, albeit rarely acknowledged as such. In Mothernism, Lise Haller Baggesen calls it for what it is: generative, radical, bodily, intense, staggering, connective, and then some.”—Lori Waxman

“From cleavage to cobras to cherry popping, Mothernism is both a contemplation and call to action vis-á-vis the position and shape of the MOTHER in contemporary art and culture. This smart and often hilarious series of letters and observations address the direct MOTHERing experience as a kind of radical personal economy. For Lise Haller Baggesen, the MOTHER is the agency. Baggesen is from the generation of female art makers whose only option is everything and all at once. Mothernism is spry and accessible, sometimes a battle cry, and sometimes a lullaby. Fourth Wave Feminism has a new manifesto.”—Jennifer Reeder

The Pedway of Today

Published 2013

Hui-min Tsen

$15.00

In 2010, Chicago-based artist Hui-min Tsen led a series of free, guided tours through the Chicago Pedway—a circuitous and ever-changing route of indoor passageways throughout Chicago’s downtown. Using the Pedway one need never step outside; it links train stations, skyscrapers, civic departments and department stores, containing enough pedestrian traffic to host small, underground businesses as well. Unique for its ad hoc nature, Tsen used the Pedway system to speculate on the various and changing Utopic visions that have shaped not only Chicago’s city development, but also American culture. This book is the culminating synopsis of that artistic tour. With this 2-color, accordion fold artist book, one can—for the very first time—follow the same journey independently on foot, or while seated before a fire, in a comfortable living room chair.

“An endearing exploration of the Chicago Loop’s pedestrian pedway paths, with various excursions into urban history, lore, theories of urban functionality and postulations on the mindset of its people. Tours as they should  be – thought provoking strangeness, tying together the physical and intellectual impact of space.” —EF

Service Media

Published 2013

Carol Becker, Juliana Driever, Allison Peters Quinn, Bad at Sports’ interview with Ted Purves, Michelle Grabner, Joyce Fernandes, Shannon Stratton, Jen Delos Reyes, Romi Crawford, Stephanie Smith, Paul Durica, Susan Schuppli, Shawn Micallef, inCUBATE and Oda Projesi

$15.00

Over the course of the 20th century artists have sought to engage aesthetic and social potential latent in traditionally non-artistic sites. Such endeavors seek to activate both artistic and non-artistic communities while privileging the often ephemeral and social interactions that arise, rather than a singular art object or exhibition gallery practice. Service Media contains a collection of 16 essays, artist projects, an interview, and a syllabus around and about socially engaged art practice. Each contribution independently defines, critiques and celebrates art’s action beyond and outside the white cube, “creating community within a community.” Edited by Toronto-based artist practitioner, Stuart Keeler.

“Service Media is a more engaging and collaborative form of art in public space. It assumes a porousness between audience and landscape, between personal and private, even raising questions centered on what is and what is not art. Service Media artists create work through which the landscape of the city becomes a studio and viewers chooser their level of engagement.” —Stuart Keeler, p.3

Palm Trees

Published 2012

Nick Twemlow

$15.00

Winner of the 2013 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. “Like us, palm trees are imports, and seem to come from everywhere but here,” writes a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in an article lamenting the dying days of the once-ubiquitous palm trees of L.A. Named for those iconic imported exotics that flank the boulevards of America’s strangest city, PALM TREES is a collection of poems characterized by a revved-up, ruminative musicality, and it issues its swan song in a voice that channels the restless globalism of America in the new century. The poems shuttle from airport to boardroom, boardroom to living room, making the kind of foreboding observations that might issue from a drug-addled and paranoid Delphic Oracle.

Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD in 2013

“I immediately noticed that Twemlow writes his poems in a continuous stream of consciousness. And I mean the most random of random thoughts and transitions. Perhaps dreamlike, maybe drug-induced; I don’t really know, and it doesn’t even matter. What matters the most is that I really like Twemlow’s style, no hiding behind carefully chosen prose for this man — his poems are completely exposed. Twemlow writes of Chicago, Kansas, karate, confetti, wanting to keep someone locked up behind a Richter (as in, Gerhard), and he writes of sterile offices.” – Bookslut

“‘At once lasting and ephemeral, like the sting of a wasp or a solid punch in the stomach, the poems in this collection distinguish themselves by their immediacy as well as their violence.” Denise Jarrott

“The bright, pulsing heart steeps through The White House in the way starlings flit through Palm Trees, the effect being to transcend a world that is out of synch, full of holes, absent of poetry.” – HTMLGIANT

“I found that within my own work I often think of the poem as a third dream-state just in the sense that I’m entering, when I’m enjoying the writing, into a place where virtually anything can happen. So I suppose that accounts for some of the psychological texture of some of the works.” – Interview with The Austinist

The Brightest Thing In The World

Published 2012

Matthew Goulish

$15.00

The Brightest Thing in The World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion. Layout and design by Sonnenzimmer. 2012 IndieFab Award Finalist

“A few possible answers gleaned from this book include: how to mourn a blur, analyze ‘an accident shaped like an umbrella,’ or create a lecture that thinks like a poem. This book sets itself up to fail, calling itself ‘The Brightest Thing in the World.’ And then suddenly, it is.” — Jen Bervin,The Drunken Boat

“Goulish — using text (and image) to investigate the potential failure of text (among other failures) — resolves to “treat the page as specifically, as a form of direct address, as the lecture treated its moment” and so make each page an act in the service of creative thought. At stake is not the boundary of genre, in other words, but the possibility of the imagination to contain everything at once — from catalogs of ships, to disquisitions on whaling, to a poem, to photographs of a walking tour of Suffolk — and to allow each thing, the real and the unreal, to contribute to imagination’s ability to, as [Ali] Smith puts it.. “know us inside and out.” Writing of this kind contains the magnificent suggestion that there are not two kinds of things in the world — that each is part of one system of thought. It reaches for whatever materials will best serve it, and in doing so, enlarges its scope beyond the present of the page.” — Jenny Hendrix, LA Review of Books.

The White House

Published 2012

Joel Craig

$10.00

Joel Craig’s poems first reach out with quiet Midwestern sincerity–precise craft mixed with personal invention–but quickly thicken: “Let me try to lay out what I think I understand” leads to “Las Vegas / and the end of Western history.” Ethical without being political, popular without being pop, personal without being sentimental, Craig sings of how we are “stuck near a river / [we] can feel the evidence of / but can’t imagine.” Filled with elegies to aging rock ‘n’ rollers, explorations of skipping romance, and studied frustration with the world as it appears (and a sincere belief that quiet hands, by themselves, can change it), Craig’s book doesn’t so much demand as much as call out to the reader, in sequence like an all-night deejay party, with time to dance, time to rest, time to go to the bar and get a refill, or outside for a quick cigarette, hitting on someone on the way back in, hoping to strut, step and swing with them.

“One key experience shaping my poetics is that I’ve spent years DJ-ing records, many different styles of music. I’ve learned not only how to put together an arrangement, but how to bring a room along with it.” – Joel Craig with Andy Fitch, The Conversant

“What plays out in The White House is a poetics in flux, far less concerned with convincing the reader of methodical and theoretical maturity—the speaker ever doomed to be “the I who thought I knew who I was” (“Thin Red Line”)—than it is with measuring the effects of various modes of responsive reading [of poetry, places, histories, humans].” – Phantom Limb

“For Craig, time is awry before the book even “begins,” starting with a “pause”; this same “pause” recurs again, further down the page, at the book’s mid-point; a final “pause” completes the text, at the page’s bottom line.” – HTMLGIANT

Forgery

Published 2011

Amira Hanafi

$18.00

Collaged from language collected using the obscure keyword “Finkl”—obituaries, case histories, old Chicago legends, gossip columns, political speeches and online posts—Forgery is a lyrical essay on industrial and personal dislocation—a strange choreography of urban conquest and collapse—centered on a 130-year-old Chicago steel forge. Founded in 1879 by German immigrant Anton Finkl, A. Finkl & Sons Co. still operates today on Chicago’s Near North Side. Last vestige of an industrial era, the company produces die forgings noisily and with a good deal of dirty emissions alongside one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, where spas and plastic surgeons, shops for handmade cosmetics and luxury chocolates extend off one of the busiest commercial corridors in Chicago. Starting from this intersection of forces, the narrator embarks on a walk to the seven forgotten homes of the forge’s founder, on the way meeting settlers, Indians, Bob Fosse and Richard Daley, gangsters, workers, a K-pop girl group, and a cast of other peculiar characters whose fused stories recount the multifarious history of an evolving city. Whether tied up at gunpoint in the garage of a basketball player or floating at the bottom of Lake Michigan, Forgery revels in disorientation. Printed in an edition of 500 with silk screen covers by Crosshair.

“Rather than seeking the kind of political intervention prized by Burroughs, recent cut-ups take the technique in new directions. Amira Hanafi’s Forgery is a profound meditation on the architecture and history of Chicago. Burroughs hopes that the cut-ups might be an escape from the limits of time, and Hanafi’s work takes advantage of this by cutting in historical material with her history of A. Finkl, the founder of a forge in the nineteenth-century Chicago that still operates in the midst of a gentrified near north side. The book cuts-up materials about Finkl’s founder and Hanafi’s journey through the city to forge itself and the founder’s five homes. Just as one walks through a city and the buildings bring with them affects and associations of the times in which they were built, Hanafi’s source material makes present the past, reminding the reader of the city’s hidden and enmeshed dimensions. Indeed, one is strongly reminded of Freud’s attempt to explain the mind through an analogy of an impossibly spectral city where anything ever built would remain simultaneously with new construction. Hanafi offers cut-ups that achieve this sense of simultaneity, and are themselves often very lyrical: ‘While Cabrini Green is slated for demolition, I am loyal only the the language. There is one thing, however, of which I am certain. The buildings disappear, and then you see them again.’ Though there are political interventions in Forgery, especially in its reflection on intellectual property and the process of creation, the overall mood of the book is a far more meditative evocation of the past’s disturbing and total persistence in the present.” — American Book Review

“In this case however, the question is not the production of text, but the production of the city. Or rather  the place where these two intersect: in the invisible structure that emerges out of the alliance between  the two. This alliance is the stuff of Forgery.” — Lily Robert-Foley

On Marvellous Things Heard

Published 2011

Gretchen E. Henderson

$10.00

Derived in form from Aristotle’s “Minor Work” of the same title, this variation of On Marvellous Things Heard explores a range of literary appropriations of music, in terms of translation and metamorphosis. Part investigation, part inventory, and part invention (in the musical sense: a composition in simple counterpoint), this poetically-driven essay assays the narrating subject as she assays the subjects of literature, of music, and of silence.

“A beautiful and evocative interweaving of short texts about music and language. The unexpected juxtapositions shed surprising light on this famously tangled relationship.” — Joseph N. Straus, author of Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music

“In awareness of its form, On Marvellous Things Heard possesses a superabundant consciousness: nearly every fragment includes a footnote, which means experiencing the book sensorially, flipping forth and back, from product to originator, from expression to creator—a song-song, lilting effect akin to melody. Space and non-space, sound and silence. In that interlude of assigning a maker to the quotation is the echo of the self dismantling the self, and progressing through the work.” — August Evans, htmlgiant.

The Fiction at Work: Biannual Report

Published 2011

Bim Angst, Anne Brooke, Devin Bustin, Spencer Dew, E.K. Entrada, Kevin Fink, Jennifer Gravely, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc, Steve McPhereson, Lois McShane, Gary Moshimer, Ira S. Murfin, Jenny Ortiz, Hannis Pannis, Ryan Pendell, Michael Ramsburg, Robert Scotellaro, Tom Sheehan, Lehua Taitano, Janet Thorning, Maureen O’Leary Wanket, and Bill West. Edited by Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf

$10.00

It’s a slim volume, this book, with a matte cover you can run your fingers over, pocket-width and actually pocketable, in jeans, khakis, slacks, and trousers, unlike the faux pocket editions, so popular in the 80s, which fit only into the pockets of enormous carnival pants, and on the matte cover are the names of the 24 writers locked within, their bios swollen with awards and laudations, their births in, and travels to, the countries of the world, their stories, word-counted in but the dozens or hundreds, make mince of the joys and sorrows of our lives. This volume—it is not slim. Published in an edition of 250.

““FAW” is also asking for a critical left hook (the reviewer invokes the spirit of Hemingway) by flouting Old School print standards in selecting blindingly small (“hip”?) type on its prefatory page in which the word “intellectual” is misspelled (ouch).” —Ella Christoph, New City Lit

The Mutation of Fortune

Published 2011

Erica Adams

$15.00

The Mutation of Fortune documents the parallel fortunes of one protagonist living multiple lives. As the book’s protagonist navigates her Märchen landscape, she goes through varied transformations, becoming at times a wolf, a thief, an amputee, a hunter, a rabbit and a runaway. She sleeps with swans and suffers a sister that bites the back of her knees. The world of this book is unstable, delicious and carries with it an inexplicit sense of danger. Printed with silk screen covers by Aay Preston-Myint, it also contains a series of color plate collages made by the author.

“The stories collected here swarm with menace and magic; orchestrating this swarming is elegant, considered prose that beats as a heart.” — Megan Milks, Montevidayo.

“Erica Adams’ collection of short stories is a fantastical romp of contemporary fables that are at once completely fresh, and also seem to have sprung from a bygone era. The through-line in “The Mutation of Fortune” is a female character who slides easily between human and animal form. She stumbles through perpetual danger and yet always survives.” — Kelly Roark, New City.

“While there was something in the tone or perhaps in the continuous mutations themselves that instilled in me undeniable sensations of ever-present danger and urgency, the voice of the narrator soothed me and promised marvels.” — David Atkinson, PANK.

“The book, as a physical artifact, is a work of art and includes several full color, glossy images of collages created by Adams. The typography and design lend to an ancient, fortune telling aesthetic and really enhance the reading experience. Each story is accompanied by a series of runes which categorize the stories. The bookmark included with the book serves as a key to the runes. This is a book that remains very true to its concept in both content and design. Each fairy tale in the book features the same protagonist in circumstances that are, at times menacing or complex or surreal.” —Roxanne Gay, htmlgiant.

The Concrete of Tight Places

Published 2010

Justin Andrews

$15.00

When dictators drive down pristine boulevards, what can a discarded cigar band tell you? Beginning as a critique of the mystifyingly objective rhetoric of travel guides and ending with letters to a woman named Alyssa, The Concrete of Tight Places attempts to find both a language for globalized experience and globalized experiences that produce language. From Egypt to New Jersey, India to Alaska, the hallucinatory tour of the world that results questions what is left when the levels of mediation that separate us from an encounter with people and places are stripped away. With an introduction by Stephen Rodefer.

“I’ve never read Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling travel memoir of self-affirmation Eat, Pray, Love (2006) (and perhaps it’s unfair to gesture to it now), but I suspect that in a perfect world, it would not be a bestseller. No, in an idealized universe, when homebound escapists sought stories of exotic locales, they would shudder at Gilbert’s privileged hunt for enlightenment and pick up Andrews’s slight volume The Concrete of Tight Places.” — Jessica N.A. Berger, American Book Review

“This book is an adventure that has its own unwashed and unseen beauty.” — Jason Behrends, Chicago Subtext

The North Georgia Gazette

Published 2009

Sir William Edward Parry, the Crews of the Helca and Griper, Lily Robert-Foley, and John Huston. Edited by Caroline Picard and Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf

$30.00

THE NORTH GEORGIA GAZETTE AND WINTER CHRONICLE is an annotated transcription of the 1821 newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette. The newspaper was written aboard an English ship trapped in the Arctic. The ship’s captain had the sailors produce the newspaper in order to ward off scurvy. Caroline Picard, (Ed.) describes THE GAZETTE as an “incredible existential metaphor, where, a group of people stranded in the dark, are forced to make their own meaning in order to survive the harsh conditions.” THE GAZETTE comes at a time of enormous environmental change, and it seeks to point out the importance of the relationships between humans and their surrounding environment. In addition to the entire 1821 newspaper, the book includes excerpts from Captain William Edward Parry’s  journal, original annotations by transcriber/poet Lily Robert-Foley, an introduction by St. John’s (MD) Professor Dr. Michael Comenetz, an essay about optimism and humility by contemporary Arctic expeditionist John Huston and contemporary artwork by artists Deb Sokolow, Daniel Anhorn, Jason Dunda, and Nick Butcher. Layout and design by Jason Bacasa.

“In some sense, the Green Lantern’s project is both a resurrection and a preservation effort. It’s certainly one of the most creative and original projects to come across our desk this year, the kind of thing we find ourselves often being desirous of.” — Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago

“The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle’ came into Green Lantern’s hands as a weathered yellowing pile of newspaper pages still holding the dust and mold from almost 200 years ago. From there, the transformation became a polished and readable bound edition of a piece of history.” — Jonathan Kaplan, NewCity

“…every time I pick up the book to dig further, I get so consumed in a single page that reading the book as a whole could conceivably go on forever.” — Blake Butler, HTML Giant.

The Artists Run Chicago Digest

Published 2009

Lori Waxman, Mary Jane Jacob, The Pond, John Neff/Scott Speh, Abigail Satinsky, Allison Peters Quinn/Britton Bertan. Edited by Shannon Stratton and Caroline Picard

$15.00

The ARC Digest is an archive of the activities of Chicago’s artist-run spaces between 1999-2009. It acts both as a companion to, appraisal of, and extension for an exhibition at The Hyde Park Art Center. Included are essays by Lori Waxman, Mary Jane Jacob, The Pond, John Neff/Scott Speh, Abigail Satinsky, Allison Peters Quinn/Britton Bertan, and the editors, Shannon Stratton and Caroline Picard; a series of interviews between Dan Gunn and the over 30 spaces participating in the exhibition. Interviews, essays, and conversations alongside floorplans, exhibition histories, and other visuals, present a 10-year time period in Chicago’s artist-run culture while providing history, reflection, critique and dialog about artist-run culture, its importance, difficulties, sustainability and necessity as well as its specificity to a community and generation. Co-published by ThreeWalls and The Green Lantern Press and designed by JNL Design

Fascia

Published 2009

Ashley Donielle Murray

$10.00

n. pl. fas·ci·ae 1. Anatomy A sheet or band of fibrous connective tissue enveloping, separating, or binding together muscles, organs, and other soft structures of the body. 2. The debut collection of short fiction by Ashley Donielle Murray. Like the tissues binding the heart to its arteries, the stories in Murray’s collection describe the threads, sometimes thin, sometimes strong, that connect daughter to father, husband to wife, and ourselves to our own histories. Each story is its own quiet revelation and has the ability to bind the reader to the book long after the covers have been closed. Printed in an edition of 500 with silkscreen covers by Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer. 2009

“Murray’s collection of Southern vignettes describe the delicate webs of familial and communal relationships in deftly composed prose.” – Women & Children First

So Much Better

Published 2009

Terri Griffith

$20.00

A debut novel about a self-sabotaging Credit Union employee, a cold woman at odds with and alone in the world. She, in no particular order, seduces her lover’s sister, wades through old storage units, tries her hand at pinball, and wonders after her own absent family. Printed in an edition of 500 with silkscreen covers by Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer. Featuring a color plate by LA artist Zoe Crosher.

“The dramatic moments are indifferent to themselves; there are no histrionics here. Terri Griffith’s writing recalls mumblecore. Dialogue and description don’t figure much in this story, more ideological than character driven. This all becomes haunting and real and as always, dystopian. So Much Better is a performance of real life, the kind you might want to shake, say “Yes! That’s It!” but sadly. There are details that Griffith gets astonishingly right, especially vis-à-vis the workplace. We need more literature about work, where most people spend their time.” — Katie Nolfi, Bookslut

CLOPS

Published 2009

Devin King

$10.00

Using lyrical language, repetition and abstraction, King retells the Odyssey representing the original characters as surface icons who move in and out of the first person. Implicating the reader in the action of war, King reforms the epic. Printed in an edition of 250 with color plates by artist Brian McNearney.

“King’s book handles repetition in a way that excites me more than I’ve been able to be excited by repetition before.” — Jac Jemc, html giant.

Devin King reads at The Foxhead in Iowa City for the Mission Creek Literary Festival

“Because time is a ghost, I must wait for it to come, and so to speak about what understanding(s) are to come, would be to ask the ghost to come too soon…” — Devin King in Requited.

Lust & Cashmere: Choose Your Own Adventure

Published 2008

A.E. Simns

$10.00

Things can happen when a man falls in love with a sweater. This book is about an unrequited love limited to self-imposed doctrines of propriety. Any number of intellectual conclusions can be drawn, but even the most serious will have to negotiate the gutter, which plagues Jon McManus and eventually the reader. It is divided in three parts, beginning with a Cinderella story. The first part is a straightforward narrative, the second a choose your own adventure and the third an absurd play. Lust & Cashmere is part of the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection.

For my birthday, you can order me a copy of Lust & Cashmere by A. E. Simns, newly released by Green Lantern Press. It combines all three of my favorite things: choose your own adventure stories, silk screening, and beautiful sweaters. Lust is okay, too.” — Bookslut

“Despite your best efforts the circles you perform are always imperfect. This makes you sad. And as the inconsistent curvature of your formal circles persists your sleep has become similarly arduous.” — One of many possible endings

Phonebook 2008/09

Published 2008

Edited by Caroline Picard, Nick Sarno, and Shannon Stratton

$10.00

An annual director for art spaces. Threewalls and Green Lantern Press teamed up to provide their second “travel guide to artist-run centers, small not-for-profit, fringe galleries and other exhibition and presentation projects.” This is the second guide that the two Chicago art spaces have made.

Fragments

Published 2008

David Carl

$12.00

An extended meditation on the sentence—an inquiry into how we make use of language to express our selves, and an investigation of how language helps shape and determine who and what those selves are. An imaginary conversation between Falstaff and Chuang Tzu, Veronica Lake and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A love story told through grammatical miscalculations, syntactical anomalies, and the fortuitous discoveries of vocabulary: “Intelligence is manifest in the ability to get what one wants, wisdom in the ability to properly determine what that is. For months he lived on Altoids, coffee, vitamin C, and the hope that she would call. There is no present like the one you imagined in the past. Skepticism as a kind of tourism. An economy all their own in which his vocabulary is not even legal tender. Printed in an edition of 500; layout and design by Jason Bacasa, with silkscreen covers (4 variations) by Alana Bailey.

“Margaret Atwood once described one of her characters as ‘moving away from the imprecision of words.’ David Carl carefully moves closer.” — Lilly Lampe, Proximity

“Forget this notion that this is somehow a story—that there are people hiding in a thicket of words.  These teasing pronouns that recur are flypaper for being, so desperate is the reader to identify, and the moment of identification is the moment where the sentence, the phonetic cudgel, is brought down, delivering the reader a little death, so that a little birth can then necessarily come about.  So let’s abandon the old ‘death of author’ blather.  This is the ‘death of reader’.  Isn’t it?” — From the Introduction

Sketches: The Arts Administrator’s Sketchbook

Published 2007

Elizabeth Chodos and Kerry Shneider

$5.00

Just as the artist’s sketches, revisions, and failures don’t usually hang on the wall next to the finished project, it isn’t often we get to see a curator’s notebooks, memos, or emails. SKETCHES illustrates what curatorial ideas look like when they are forming. Green Lantern published this book with the hope that arts administrators could pick it up, flip through its pages and become inspired. It is also for curious non-arts administrators, however — in these pages anyone can see the mess and process behind a final exhibition. This communal collection of “sketches” will pass ideas for exhibitions, organizational structures, or academic projects between colleagues and strangers in an effort to connect people and expand thinking on arts administration. Hand bound (saddle stitch) with silk screen covers by Mat Daly.

Phonebook 2007/2008

Published 2007

$10.00

Because a space heater and good friends can be a million times warmer than central heating and track lighting, PHONEBOOK is an invaluable, yet by no means exhaustive (yet) guide to America’s finest alternative artspaces. These are the galleries you are unlikely to find in your average tourist guide, the ones located in basements, in lofts, off of alleys, in suburban backyards. These are the movies Moviefone won’t tell you about and the lecture series you won’t find among your course guides. These are the places that will remind you why you liked this stuff in the first place. Layout and design by Sonia Yoon and copublished with threewalls.

God Bless The Squirrel Cage

Published 2006

Nick Sarno

$12.00

There comes a time in the lives of people of a certain disposition when following any path other than that of an artist seems unthinkable. They read books with titles like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and see something of themselves in their pages. They begin painting or writing poetry. They throw themselves into such a life with passion and fury that seems reserved for such an age and then, usually, they stop. They grow up, leaving that life behind them. And yet books wherein the protagonist overcomes all obstacles to become an artist, books where, in the final pages, one learns that the young man or woman picks up a pen and begins to write that very book, books with titles like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, continue to be written. GOD BLESS THE SQUIRREL CAGE is not one of those books. Printed in an edition of 500 with silkscreen covers by Mat Daly; introduction by Gerard T. Kapolka, layout and design by Jason Bacasa.

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