“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

“Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening cues us, from its title onward, to the necessary shift of temporality and expectation that we must make to savour this vibrant, provocative and engagingly hybrid ensemble of essays, poems, artworks, performances, conversations and floating images. At the heart of this catalogue, as of the exhibition it serves as an afterlife, is a theme that has exercised a perennial fascination over thinkers and researchers: the mysterious subjectivity of plants.

In its rhizomatic structure and germinative tenor, this volume closely reflects the growth patterns that characterize plants. It invites us to renounce, however temporarily, the accelerated pace, fragmented attention and intermittent foci of engagement that define contemporary life. The contributors – who include artists, poets, philosophers, theorists, art historians, classicists and translators – draw us into a zone of renewed attentiveness as they address questions that have preoccupied us since classical antiquity. How might we dismantle the boundary between culture and nature, artificially drawn and enforced in the epoch of industrial expansion, when nature was reduced from an animate context of living to an inanimate domain of exploitation? How might we overcome the legacy of the Romantic moment, when nature’s otherness was variously framed through the optics of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the wilderness? Might we ever engage in dialogue with the many species that share their planet with us?

The contributors to Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening approach these questions in memorable ways, drawing on a spectrum of reference points including Platonic, Aristotelian and Neoplatonist thought, as well as the world-views of Homer, Pindar and Virgil. This volume reminds us that the vegetal kingdom, far from remaining rooted in the associations of stasis and locality that we ascribe to it, exhibits many of the features of life we normally associate with the animal kingdom: the rhythms of adaptation, mutation, migration and resistance to challenges, as well as a range of predatory and defensive behaviors.

Once we have recognized that plants demonstrate intelligence through a range of perceptive, cognitive, affective and volitional capacities, we must begin to cede our cherished notion of the unique and sovereign human subject. This is not an anthropomorphic projection but an empathetic acknowledgement, based on empirical experience, of our vegetal Others as fellow sentient beings. It ought, potentially, to prompt a new neighborliness and solidarity with plant life, with correspondingly profound implications for the manner in which we interpret our tenancy of the earth. Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening revolutionizes our normalized, indeed ‘naturalized’ concept of the environment as a choreography of pitched skirmishes and uneasy periods of truce, presided over by the human animal as predator-in-chief. If physics premises its narrative on entropy, portraying the universe as declining inexorably towards heat death, botany may well embrace the opposite principle of vitality, an exuberant, resilient force that expresses itself through diversity. Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening gestures toward possibilities of thought and action that might help us redeem ourselves, as members of a species whose rapacity has driven its home planet to the edge of catastrophe.” – Ranjit Hoskote

“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

“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

“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

“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).

“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 Jemc, My Only Wife, and A Different Bed Every Time from Dzanc Books.

“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.

“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-à-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

“Mothernism. Ha! Baggesen could’ve stopped there. But I’m glad she didn’t. She is not one for cheap irony. Her tack sharp wit ultimately gives way to sustained theoretical analysis required  to unpack such a funny but formidable elision. Besides, irony, no matter how pointed, does little if any justice to the all too real ‘mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse,’ a Mary Kelly-shaped hole to be specific. And if that lacuna weren’t wide enough, between, say, Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, mothers contend with a representational force field that amounts to a funhouse mirror, making Baggesen’s reflections a welcome rallying point. But it’s clear from the get go that this ain’t about galvanizing soccer moms in a campaign against texting and driving. Negotiating the eddies and whirlpools of an intergenerational feminism makes a retreat into any kind of movement all but impossible, leaving Baggesen to speak for herself. She is a demographic of one. Above all, Mothernism is rooted in Baggesen’s voice whose tone is by turn tough, tender and by the end of the book, downright touching. A seamless mixture of cultural criticism, theory and biography, the  essays double as a paean to disco and an open letter to her daughter. Engagingly conversational and endearingly confessional, Mothernismfinds Baggesen (long my fashion idol) psychically naked one minute, and speaking frankly of sequins the next. Yummy Puffy Mommy Yoni, Yummy Yummy.” — Hamza Walker

“For the cross-town bus ride in rush hour traffic, bring the new book on everyone’s reading list this month: Lise Haller Baggesen’s Mothernism. The Chicago-based artist’s collection of texts are presented as letters to women in Baggesen’s life.” — Jason Foumberg, Chicago Magazine

“In these three of Matthew Goulish’s lectures on failure, language, thought, and feeling add up with stunningly multiplicative affect, where scope — conceptual, historical, political, intimate — expands and contracts across discontinuous trajectories of domains and sourc- es. They are lectures resonant without intra-subjective expertise, on failure, of failure, of only the most”active, transparent and absorbing, synapse-firing, generous kinds.” — Jesse Seldess, author of Who Opens.

“Goulish has in the most humble of ways shown here how negative capability is no longer only the ability to linger in mystery and doubt, but is the active pursuit after those honest ways in which writing must fail in order to succeed.” — Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler’s Dictionary.

“On the night of the book launch, Goulish read ‘The Butterfly Catastrophe,’ a work that explores the Fibonacci sequence as well as the strange circumstances surrounding the freezing death of monarch butterflies in 2002. The essay, like much of Goulish’s work, is hypnotic in its subtlety. Propelled by Goulish’s calm presence and careful delivery, the reading was reminiscent of what Stanislavski identified as the kind of quiet theater experience one finds in the lingering shadows of a performance long after the curtain falls. A recent collaborative performance by Hannah Verrill and Matt Shalzi accompanied Goulish’s reading.” — Anthony Romero, ArtWrit

“Jane Blocker writes in the book’s introduction of Goulish’s performance project Goat Island, ‘As Charles Garoian (writing about a Goat Island workshop….) has noted about these pedagogical practices, the curriculum is constituted by interruptions, based on interventions designed to break continuity and disrupt the conventional linearity of time and space.’ Goulish’s reader audience may approach this work with a series of expectations based on what is understood as a lecture, what results the solitary act of reading usually delivers, and likely much more. Goulish’s work is to disrupt those pressures, acknowledging and ultimately deconstructing the potential impact those burdens have on art.” — Claire Glass, Gapers Block

“And yet, one might ask, borrowing from Goulish-of-the-delightful-name: What exhalation escapes our vanquished human form? What angel of the light finally ascends?”— Jenny Hendrix, LA Review of Books

“Is it possible to feel love without an object for that love? Without a person, or creature, place, or recipient of any kind? Can writing serve as a form of training for such objectless love? For aligning the powers of thought with the powers of feeling, as an exercise, that brings one into a relation with oneself, or constantly adjusts one’s being in the world? Those are questions for which I do not have an answer, but questions that I want to stay close to, or keep near at hand, in any act of writing.” — Matthew Goulish, interview with GLP editor, Bad at Sports.

“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

“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

Listen to Nick Twemlow and Joel Craig read at Prairie Lights, November 2012.

“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

“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.

“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.

“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

Justin Andrews in ILK Journal.

“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

“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

“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

“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.

“Born under the sign of Aries, the person … excuse me … this creature, will be very energetic and high spirited by nature. Aries is a fire sign and Sun Aries is very active and brave, loves challenging projects and sometimes has a trouble sitting still. However, our creature will have Moon in Virgo which is an earth sign. While Sun is the character’s truest nature, Moon indicates the emotional side, and with Moon in Virgo this creature should be kindhearted, cautious and observant, and very accurate in everything it does. Its challenge will be to create a balance between Aries and Virgo by making use of the Aries’ force and enthusiasm along with the cautious cleverness of Virgo. Both Mercury and Mars are placed in Aries, and since Mercury is the planet of thought, this creature should be an independent thinker who loves to debate, and Mercury Aries is usually excellent at promoting its ideas. Mars in Aries means that the creature should be a very good fighter without being resentful. Venus is placed in the sign of Pisces which indicates a dreamy and somewhat innocent nature, and a highly creative imagination. The creature should be unselfish and giving in relationships, and very sensitive to other creatures’ needs. The last but not the least to mention is the ascendant, Libra, which gives this character a very amiable disposition. The creature should be very attractive, someone who befriends others with ease and has a luring affect.” — Thordis Bjorndottir’s fortune for Adam’s book.

“To me, the fairy tale offers an intersection between good storytelling and delight… Originally they were oral, of course. And originally they conveyed knowledge about life—about marriage, etc. Many of those fairy tales have continued to shift, and in the space of our contemporary culture, reduced the role of women to one specific occupation: waiting for the prince. What I love about Erica’s book is that while using the same archetypal voice, her focus is on something else entirely—Erica’s stories describe an often violent struggle through different hierarchical scenarios.” — Caroline Picard, quoted by Chicago Humanities Blog.

“Cutting through the symbols, the color plates, the layers change and characters you find a depth of writing that sets Erica apart in this area of fiction writing. She is an incredibly talent writer and artist. That effect is multiplied by Green Lanterns ability to present literature in a unique and beautiful way.” — Jason Behrands, Orange Alert.

Listen to a recent audio book of Fascia from Palavar Press here.

“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.

“On Marvellous Things is a translation, a metamorphosis, and, in some parts, it’s just really awesome and funny and you don’t have to overanalyze it. All told, the book is one to read and re-read, a different way each time.” — Another Chicago Magazine.

Read interviews with Hetcherson on Fourteen Hills, Delphi Quarterly, and Bad at Sports.

“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

Video trailer of Lust & Cashmere here….

“You have been teaching at a boys’ school for three years. You teach geometry. You describe circles and points and parallel lines. The boys like you because you have a boy’s smile. You draw circles on the board with vigor, using your forearm as the circle’s diameter. You execute the circle rapidly, with manic speed, supposing that your diameter might be less affected by human error if you describe its bounds as quickly as possible.

“The effort makes your blond hair come loose and cling to the inspired damp on your forehead.

“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

“The Visions for Chicago contributors seem to reflect the city’s racial and economic makeup; the people posing proudly with their signs include individuals, couples and families, as well as students from Humboldt Park’s Orr High School. Their diversity makes the similarity of their dream cities pretty poignant.” — Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago.

“Lapthisophon is a multimedia artist, so a book might seem an odd venue for his work. But the words and photographs here—some his own, some drawn from popular culture—effectively draw linear text (McLuhan’s bugaboo) into a multisensory nexus. They simultaneously challenge ‘normal’ reason and propose instead an ir-rational logic of actions as diverse as achieving ‘firm footing in black socks,’ lining ‘up next to your neighbor shoulder to shoulder,” and attempting ‘direct political action [that] becomes a matter of trying to pick poison out of a boiling stew.'” — Barbara Ladner, MAKE Magazine.

“‘This is wreckage,’ writes Stephen Lapthisophon toward the beginning of Writing Art Cinema: 1988-2010. ‘These fragments I have shored up against my ruins,’ wrote T.S. Eliot toward the very end of The Waste Land. I can’t help but think that if Eliot lived in our age, an age when text is image, an age of textimagesound, he might have made art like Stephen’s: elusive, fragmentary, elliptical.” — Sean McAleer, Vimeo.

“‘…with refusal art embraces the ephemeral, the irrational and the difficult. Art must brush against the grain of reassuring stories and build a new narrative of disjuncture, displacement and defamiliarization.'” — Stephen Lapthisophon, as quoted by The Dallas Morning Times.

“Stephen Lapthisophon begins an essay accompanying his installation with the words ‘I can’t read my own writing’. This declaration could be read as an existential realization of self-alienation (‘I am so depressed I can’t trust what I say’) or as a Postmodern admission of the failure of originality. Such self-reflexivity has always been part of Lapthisophon’s ongoing investigation of language and art history through the constraints of Modernist ideology. But now this statement has taken on a new meaning; Lapthisophon has become legally blind, so he literally cannot read his own writing.” — Kathryn Hixson on Lapthisophon’s artistic practice, Frieze.

“The book itself comes with a screen-printed cover and illustrations by Aay Preston-Myint [and Lilli Carré], whose powerfully monochromatic characters, such as ones displaying Kordian’s terror and imagination, manage to summon from the reader both a comfortable curiosity and a repelling sense of mystery. The language itself is colorfully romantic, with Kapolka’s translation of Słowacki’s verse calling forth with ease both senses of hilarity and revulsion.” — Isaac Dwyer, Parallax

See some of Lilli Carré’s Kordian drawings here.

Watch the Urbesque trailer, courtesy of Billy Morrocco.

Urbesque played on the Denver Streets of AWP 

“Moshe Zvi Marvit is an absorbing writer, the kind of author whose descriptions linger in your brain long after you stop reading. His attention to detail is like something between Sherlock Holmes and a stalker…both beautiful and enigmatic” —Jewniverse

In an interview with Paul Decak:

Moshe

Watch the God Bless The Squirrel Cage trailer, courtesy of Billy Morrocco.