SHADOWED!

By 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

Design: Sonia Yoon

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.

     “Rothenberg’s work investigates the tension between looking toward the past in the present moment, and the inevitable contraction into the future—as if to say we are all Januses looking back to disparate points in time, and in doing so take them with us into the future.” –BOMB

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.

“Rothenberg’s feminist social sculpture and animated objects echo radical en-actions from Brecht, Fluxus, suffrage street theatre, and Black Lives Matter protests. Worn shoes declare that the way lies both forward and backward, for the past always underlies the present and reverberates deeply in the desires of our current work and lives. This radical book should be in your backpack at a May Day parade or protest strike! Mourn and organize!” —FAITH WILDING, artist, writer, and educator.

“Ellen Rothenberg’s book/archive serves as a complex memory machine where the global 20th century’s cultural, political, and social revolutions encounter the local now. The captivating imagery of Rothenberg’s reflexive and expansive work lifts you out of history’s shadows and makes you feel alive, resisting the wave of inevitability. Shadowed! is timely. This book is a gift to anyone curious about or deeply interested in material culture, history, social change, and contemporary art.”—IRINA ARISTARKHOVA, author of Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture.

“Needed: An example of health which will paralyze the Angels. Provided: The fortifying Forward/Backward groove of conceptualist Ellen Rothenberg. Part performance, part archive, part tonic, elsetime is what happens to a retrospective when historical engagement is already the problem of the work. If you know Rothenberg’s art, Shadowed! is essential reading. If you are coming to it for the first time, it is a compelling invitation to voyage.” —DANIEL ROSENBERG, cultural historian and author of Cartographies of Time.

Shadowed! troubles temporal linearity and spatial capture. It is a time of multiple moments and simultaneous directions. A performance in its own right, Shadowed! is an invitation to time travel towards alternative futuresof the the past. In these pages we trespass (lightly, with worn shoes) through ecstatic and traumatic territories.” —BETTINA KNAUP, curator and author of re.act.feminism, performance art of the 1960s and 70s today.

“Breathing new life into dog-eared crime novellas, faded bellbottom jeans, and a tattered armchair, time-bending artist Ellen Rothenberg virtually collaborates with the past, reanimating the material traces of a gone world through an archival agency of the elsewhere.”—GREGORY SHOLETTE, artist and author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism.

  • TITLE: SHADOWED!
  • AUTHOR/S: 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
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Caroline Picard
  • GENRE: Art + Theory
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • YEAR: March 2018
  • EDITION SIZE: 750
  • ISBN: 978-0-9974165-1-0

On Civil Disobedience

Monthly Pamphlet Series

On Civil Disobedience is a monthly pamphlet series featuring writers from a range of professional backgrounds to contribute essays addressing the title topic. The series will recall 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, confirmed contributors thus far include Ravi Agarwal (Environmental Activism), Robin Blaser (Poetry), Romi Crawford (Race and Affect Theory), Stephen Lapthisophon (Art and Theory), Nathaniel Mackey (Poetry), Abhishek Narula (Data Engineering), Nina Power (Feminist Theory), T Clutch Fleischmann (Essay), Jennif(f)er Tamayo (Poetry), and others. This series launches this Fall 2017; subscribe to here and be the first to receive your copy in the mail.

Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening

By 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

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. Featured 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.

Reviews

“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

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  • TITLE: Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening
  • AUTHOR/S: Giovanni Aloi, Kristina Chew, Every house has a door, Brooke Holmes, Joela Jacobs, Devin King, Eben Kirksey, Deanna Ledezma, Renan Laru-an, Michael Marder, Chantal Neveu, Nathanaël, Mark Payne, Caroline Picard, Catriona Sandilands, Steven Shaviro, Eleni Sikelianos, Monica Westin, & Leila Wilson
  • EDITOR/S: Caroline Picard
  • GENRE: Art & Theory
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 292
  • YEAR: Nov 2016
  • EDITION SIZE: 750
  • ISBN: 978-0-9974165-0-3

NOTES ON

By Magalie Guérin

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

“Magalie Guérin applies her artist’s receptors to the call and response between art object and the object of art; an ongoing subjective dialogue of creation. Her sense of balance, aspiration, and blurred boundary not only illuminates her own process, but the sensibility that we bring to our perceptions of what art can aspire to, its journey to our bared soul.” — Lenny Kaye

NOTES ON knits together an intricate and impressive network of friends, acquaintances, mentors, and peers whose critical insights converge on painter Magalie Guérin’s studio practice. Expanding on the tradition of Richter’s The Daily Practice of Painting, its multitude of voices—including Guérin’s own—foregrounds discursiveness and its role in shaping contemporary art. But there is also magical thinking afoot. What Guérin disregards from her collection of studio generated language tells us as much about her creative process as the words and ideas she shares with us.” — Michelle Grabner

“What would it mean to be open and honest? To reveal the most vulnerable part of one’s identity? Artists poke at that activity, but to put a narrative—a shredded, recursive, nonlinear narrative—to the act of self-revelation means meditating on the things that make one uncomfortable, addressing the petty concerns and daily anxieties, weighing the relative value of friends and foe, comparing big, inspiring ideas and irksome minutia, boredom and terror, stupidity and insight, the major and minor triumphs, the leaps and bounds and incremental steps that make up an artist’s ecosystem. Magalie Guérin has found abundant material in the tender passage from school to world. She is a painter, but she is also an acute and sensitive observer and a skillful writer, and her book gives shape to the dialogues—both interior and exterior—of a creative person.” — John Corbett

About the Author

Magalie Guérin was born in Montreal in 1973. She lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey. NOTES ON is her first book.

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  • TITLE: NOTES ON
  • AUTHOR/S: Magalie Guérin
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Caroline Picard w/ an Afterword by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
  • GENRE: Art
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 240
  • YEAR: March 2016
  • BINDING: Perfect bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 540
  • ISBN: 978-0-9884185-9-2

Zenith

By Patrick Durgin

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.)

 

 

About the Author

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (Kenning Editions, 2013) and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2008). You can read his criticism in Contemporary Women’s WritingJournal of Modern Literature, and Postmodern CultureThe Volta published “Prelude to PQRS,” a reflection on his work in poets theater originally presented at the New [New] Corpse event series of Green Lantern Gallery. His performance piece Interference was featured in the 2015 Festival of Poets Theater at Sector 2337 and the script published in the newspaper that December. He is currently writing two books: a critical biography of Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner and a collection of poetry with the working title Imitation Demise. He edits the non-fiction series Ordinance for Kenning Editions, an independent press he founded in 1998. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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  • TITLE: Zenith
  • AUTHOR/S: Patrick Durgin
  • GENRE: Poetry Chapbook
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • YEAR: April 2016
  • BINDING: loose scratch off pages in 7" sleeve

culebra

By Roberto Harrison

A new collection of poetry by Roberto Harrison due out Spring 2016 and now available for pre-order.

“How do we get from zero to one? ‘let the stories execute themselves, and tell / the digital accretion of its tiny head / the warmth of prehistoric times (inside the bomb)’ spanning climates and continents, tracing countrysides in an eternal present, speaking multiple natural and artificial tongues, Roberto Harrison’s visionary culebra breathes a time-defying saloma panameña into the violence and alienation of the twenty-first century, in a ‘radio permeation’ that writhes and shimmers to vibrations mysterious and uncannily familiar, from the digital to the meteorological and back again in this winding, horizontal, synesthetic text, Harrison constitutes a landscape through a mindful care that recognizes the world’s animacies with its unlimiting recirculations of motifs —knot, rain, ice, fish, weather, lake, beacon, face, dog, worm; but also: Host, cash, erasure, network, series — culebra becomes a ‘reveal codes’ of Harrison’s Wisconsin and his Panamá (Penonomé, La Chorrera, Darién) that executes, compiles, and redirects, to connect dream with extreme wakefulness, north with south, Atlantic with Pacific here inner-crosses outer-crosses cyberworld in flashes of solid state memory’s delayless capture, as culebra’s ‘bit yoga’ intricates its reader in centroversions (Neumann) of nature and culture : ‘to sift the wilderness / from oceans in a plastic water-fall’ an uroboros of mattering ‘D.e.m.a.t.e.r.i.a.l.i.z.a.t.ion.s’ while ‘behind the language/a river threatens for its music’: these zero-ones spark electric with calypso, son, décima, pindin, even Akita’s Merzbow as Harrison introduces a new kind of ‘open ring’ terza rima, rushing with lush stretches of accretion in repetition, permutation ‘for this in, for this it, in the it together, gone / and then this has it to the other one’ take in this exquisite neo-mola, its design lithe and serpentine, as it leaks colors, numbers, windows for Harrison has released a mind of light into the cells of this book: ‘the intermediate link exists,’ and it’s not the canal — it’s culebra.” — Judith Goldman

Reviews

“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

About the Author

Roberto Harrison is the author of the poetry collections Os (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), and bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), as well as of many poetry chapbooks. He edits the Bronze Skull Press chapbook series and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee.

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$20 via preorder

  • TITLE: culebra
  • AUTHOR/S: Roberto Harrison
  • GENRE: Poetry
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 240
  • DIMENSIONS: 6" x 9"
  • YEAR: Feb 2016
  • BINDING: Perfect Bound
  • EDITION SIZE: Edition of 500; 100 w/ silk screened dust jackets by Sonnenzimmer
  • ISBN: 978-0-9884185-8-5

The New [New] Corpse

By 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.

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.

With written contributions from 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. 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

Reviews

“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 Kinsella, Let 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.

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  • TITLE: The New [New] Corpse
  • AUTHOR/S: 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.
  • EDITOR/S: Caroline Picard
  • GENRE: Art / Philosophy / Poetry
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 144 w/ full color gatefold print
  • DIMENSIONS: 6.5” x 9”
  • YEAR: July 2015
  • BINDING: Perfect
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 978-0-9884185-7-8

Didactics

Warp + Weft: Poster Construction by Sonnenzimmer + Formal Additive Programs

By Sonnenzimmer

Didactics by Sonnenzimmer is a collection of two out of print self-released artists’ publications combined anew.

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.

 

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Nick Butcher is an artist and musician living in Chicago, Illinois. He is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Printmedia. Butcher’s work, though diverse, has centered around printmaking since 2001. He received his BFA form Middle Tennessee State University under the guidance of printmaker Christie Nuell in 2002. A Chicago resident since 2003, Butcher has worked under local printmaker Jay Ryan, as well as established Sonnenzimmer, a collaborative art practice, print and design studio with his wife, Nadine Nakanishi. Their collaborative work has been shown in the United States, Europe, and China with recent exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Nadine Nakanishi is a Swiss-American artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Nakanishi works across several disciplines including printmaking, painting, weaving, and graphic design. She studied typography at the Gestalterische Berufsschule in Zürich, Switzerland. In 2006, she established Sonnenzimmer, a collaborative art practice, print and design studio with her husband, Nick Butcher.

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$30.00

  • TITLE: Didactics: Warp & Weft and Formal Additive Programs
  • AUTHOR/S: Sonnenzimmer
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Nick Butcher & Nadine Nakanishi (w/ Prefaces by Caroilne Picard & Devin King, and Dakota Brown)
  • EDITOR/S: Lauren Weinberg
  • GENRE: Contemporary Art, Printmaking & Design
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press & Sonnenzimmer
  • PAGES: 96
  • YEAR: 2015
  • BINDING: Perfect bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: ISBN 978-0-9884185-6-1

Ghost Nature

By Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Laurie Palmer, João Florêncio, Nettrice Gaskins, Jamila Woods, and 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

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. Featuring artists 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.

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$20.00

  • TITLE: Ghost Nature
  • AUTHOR/S: Written contributions from Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Laurie Palmer, Caroline Picard, João Florêncio, Nettrice Gaskins and Jamila Woods.
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Érik Bullot
  • TRANSLATED BY: Jean-François Caro, Jeanne Trombetta and Sophian Bourire
  • EDITOR/S: Caroline Picard
  • GENRE: Contemporary Art, Ecology, Philosophy
  • PUBLISHER: La Box & The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 175
  • DIMENSIONS: 6.5 x 9”
  • YEAR: 2014
  • BINDING: Perfect
  • EDITION SIZE: 1,000

Mothernism

By Lise Haller Baggesen

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.

Reviews

“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 FoumbergChicago Magazine

About the Author

Lise Haller Baggesen (1969) left her native Denmark for the Netherlands in 1992, to study painting at the Academy of Art and Industrial Design in Enschede and the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam. In 2008, she relocated with her family to Chicago. She has shown internationally in galleries and museums including Overgaden, the Municipial Museum, MoMu, Wurttembergischem Kunstverein, CAEC, The Poor Farm, Wisconsin, 6018 North, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Mothernism is her first book.

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$19.79

  • TITLE: Mothernism
  • AUTHOR/S: Lise Haller Baggesen
  • GENRE: Critical Theory, memoir
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press & Poor Farm Press
  • PAGES: 152
  • DIMENSIONS: 5.5 x 8”
  • YEAR: 2014
  • BINDING: Perfect
  • EDITION SIZE: 1,000
  • ISBN: 9780988418554

The Brightest Thing In The World

3 Essays From The Institute of Failure

By Matthew Goulish

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

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 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.

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Matthew Goulish co-founded Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. His 9 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance was published by Routledge in 2000, and Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, which he co-edited with Stephen Bottoms, in 2007. He was awarded a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency in 2004, and in 2007 he received an honorary Ph.D. from Dartington College of Arts, University of Plymouth. He teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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$15.00

  • TITLE: The Brightest Thing In The World: 3 Essays From The Institute of Failure
  • AUTHOR/S: Matthew Goulish
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Jane Blocker
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 70
  • YEAR: 2012
  • BINDING: Perfect Bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 978-1-4507-4217-7

The Pedway of Today

By Hui-min Tsen

“The buttons in the small elevator at the end of the platform give you the choice of going to ‘Door Open’ or ‘Emergency Bell.” When presented with such options for the future, it is difficult to know exactly where you are coming from, and where you intend to go.”

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 passagways 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 it, one can — for the very first time — follow the same journey independently in person, or while seated before a fire, in a comfortable living room chair.

  • TITLE: The Pedway of Today
  • AUTHOR/S: Hui-min Tsen
  • GENRE: Guidebook, Psychogeography, Chicago
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 20
  • DIMENSIONS: 5.25 x 9”
  • YEAR: 2013
  • BINDING: Accordion fold
  • EDITION SIZE: 2nd edition of 400

The White House

By Joel Craig

“Odd to find a book of poems whose range of subject matter and modality is this palatial. Odder still to find no muddy effect or signs of cannibalism among the poems. Perhaps most odd is the central realization conceived, tested, and by lyric authority summoned in this gorgeous book—treating one another decently not only strengthens the intuitive forces and enlarges one’s capacity to make and hear music, it also just makes for a hipper scene. In so far as that’s true for civilization is another subject Joel Craig is happy to float, spin, beseech, and entertain at this late hour.” —Peter Richards (author of Helsinki)

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.

 

Reviews

“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

  • TITLE: The White House
  • AUTHOR/S: Joel Craig
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 80
  • DIMENSIONS: 6 x 9”
  • YEAR: 2012
  • BINDING: Perfect bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 500

Palm Trees

By Nick Twemlow

Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD in 2013

“Reading Twemlow gives one a deep sense about what’s exciting about the lyrical possibilities embodied not in just of a first book of poems but any book of poems published in 2012. Of course I was enticed by verbal savvy, consequential wordplay, cultural élan. Of course I value a poetics that does not eschew the personal over the political or vice versa. And of course, I needed the whole book to complete its arc without faltering. Skip the front and back matter. Put off reading the brilliant introduction by Robert Fernandez until after you have committed this ‘Damage Manual’ to memory. This book seared my conscience, altered my sense of what it’s like to go on . . .” Timothy Liu

 

 

“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.

Reviews

“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

 

 

 

  • TITLE: Palm Trees
  • AUTHOR/S: Nick Twemlow
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Robert Fernandez
  • GENRE: Poetry
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 80
  • DIMENSIONS: 6 x 9”
  • YEAR: 2012
  • BINDING: Perfect bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 2nd Edition of 500

Service Media

Is it “Public Art” or Art in Public Space?

By 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.

“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

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 features the work of 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.

  • TITLE: Service Media
  • AUTHOR/S: 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.
  • GENRE: Social Practice, Art, Theory
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 145
  • DIMENSIONS: 6.25 x 8.5”
  • YEAR: 2013
  • BINDING: Perfect bound
  • EDITION SIZE: 500

The North Georgia Gazette

By Sir William Edward Parry, the Crews of the Helca and Griper, Lily Robert-Foley, and John Huston

An annotated transcription of the 1821 newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette. The newspaper, written and published aboard an English ship trapped in the Arctic, was an attempt by the captain to lessen the boredom of a long, isolated winter.

The result is an vivid existential metaphor, in which a group of people, stranded in the dark, are forced to make their own meaning in order to survive. The Gazette comes at a time of enormous climatic 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 the Captain’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. Printed in an edition of 500 with silkscreen covers by Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer. 2009. Read an excerpt from the endotes on Omnia Vanitas Review.

 

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Sir William Edward Parry , 1790-1855, British arctic explorer and rear admiral. He entered the navy at 13 and made his first voyage to the Arctic under Sir John Ross in 1818 in search of the Northwest Passage . He was then put in command of the Hecla and the Griper in an expedition (1819-20) to hunt for the passage. Parry sailed westward through Lancaster Sound and discovered and named Melville Island and others of the Queen Elizabeth Islands , as well as naming Barrow Strait. Two other unsuccessful attempts were made (1821-23, 1824-25) to find the Northwest Passage, in the course of which Fury and Hecla Strait was discovered and new information about the Arctic was disclosed. By discovering the entrance to the passage and the way to the north magnetic pole, Parry had also found important whaling grounds. In 1827 he made an attempt to reach the North Pole by sledge from Spitsbergen, attaining lat. 82°45′N, but was forced to turn back mainly by the fatigue of his exploring party. He published three journals describing his quest for the passage as well as a narrative of his attempt to reach the pole. (taken from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2008).

CLOPS

By Devin King

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.

Reviews

“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.

The Concrete of Tight Places

By Justin Andrews

“In The Concrete of Tight Places, an unsettling oscillation continuously occurs between the familiar and expected and near on the one hand, and the strange, the terrible and the far-away on the other.  The beauty of the writing is how it seems to conjure with utterly simple, concrete (in places, almost sing-song, child-like) repetitions of words and phrases (man, dog, river, key, snow, dream, book, money, flower, tall reading men, etc.) a world that is (in its details) simultaneously totally realized and discreet and recognizable, and yet at the same time, totally discordant, context-less, irruptive, unfamiliar, horrifying.” —Rob Phelps

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.

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Justin Andrews lives in Atlanta where he studies Comparative Literature at Emory University. Anarch, his second book, is forthcoming from Open Mouth Records.

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18.00

  • TITLE: The Concrete of Tight Places
  • AUTHOR/S: Justin Andrews
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Stephen Rodefer
  • GENRE: Fiction. Travel. Poetry.
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 111
  • YEAR: 2010
  • BINDING: Perfect bound. Silk Screen Covers
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9780982029275

Fiction at Work

The Biannual Report

By Various

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 80’s, 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 with writing by 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; this work was edited by Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf.

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8.00

  • TITLE: Fiction At Work
  • AUTHOR/S: Varios
  • EDITOR/S: Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf
  • GENRE: Flash Fiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 46
  • YEAR: 2011
  • BINDING: Perfect bound.
  • EDITION SIZE: 250
  • ISBN: 9780982029299

Forgery

By Amira Hanafi

forge (v.) To create by hammering. To fake, invent, contrive, devise, excogitate, or formulate. To move ahead steadily. To shape, form, work, mold, or fashion. To make out of components, often in an improvising manner.

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 with silk screen covers by Crosshair.

Reviews

“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

About the Author

Amira Hanafi lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. She is the author of Forgery, Minced English, and various other printed matter. Her work has appeared in Fence, DIAGRAM, American Letters & Commentary, and other fine publications, and is forthcoming in Pleiades. Her current project, A Dictionary of the Revolution, a popular documentation of the Egyptian revolution, was recently featured in the Guardian. Amira received her MFA in Writing in 2008 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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  • TITLE: Forgery
  • AUTHOR/S: Amira Hanafi
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Stephen Lapthisophon
  • GENRE: Literary Nonfiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 80
  • YEAR: 2011
  • BINDING: Perfect
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9781450742122

Artists Run Chicago Digest

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 the Artist Run Chicago 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; and a CD with two audio interviews by Bad At Sports with artist-run media groups and Temporary Services. Interviews, essays and conversations alongside floor plans, 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 it, its importance, difficulties, sustainability and necessity as well as its specificity to a community and generation. Published in conjunction with threewalls. Printed in an edition of 500. 50 copies feature a limited edition silkscreen cover by No Coast Collective. 2009

 

Sketches

The Arts Administrator's Sketchbook

By Elizabeth Chodos and Kerry Shneider

Just as an artist transposes an idea into a particular medium, so the curator of an exhibition must transpose an idea into an exhibition.

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 non-arts administrators, so like Dorothy they might see the mess and process behind a final product. 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.

Fragments

By David Carl

“Is ‘David Carl’ simply whoever happens to pick this up?” — From the Introduction

 

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.”

 

Reviews

“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

 

 

 

 

About the Author

David Carl has been leading seminars across the country and around the world for more than 15 years. He holds a BA from Pomona College, a MA from Claremont Graduate School, and a PhD from the University of California. He is a senior member of the faculty at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and a co-founder of the St. John’s College Film Institute. A Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Cultural Artifacts, David has also written several other books, including Heraclitus in Sacramento, Meditations on Initiating the Apocalypse, and Further Adventures in the Unsubconscious.

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  • TITLE: Fragments
  • AUTHOR/S: David Carl
  • GENRE: Literary Fiction.
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 11
  • YEAR: 2008
  • BINDING: Perfect bound. Silk Screen Covers.
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9780978575694

So Much Better

By Terri Griffith

“No one uses the intercom function. Instead of the quiet, rhythmic pulse of the phone’s inside line, the intercom makes an upsetting squawking noise like the sound of a strangling goose, which sets the  intended subject of the squawk on edge…From Susan’s bypass of the voicemail system and use of the intercom, followed immediately by “pick-up,” Liz knows for certain someone is dead. Not a famous, abstract person like Dame Judy Dench or Michael Jackson, someone for whom it  would be imperative to learn about, but can wait ten or fifteen  minutes for the inevitable telling. Maybe her father had suffered a sudden heart attack, passing away at some early-bird dinner  buffet near his retirement condo in Arizona. No, certainly it is  Jenny who is dead, hit by a bus while on her bike.” — So Much Better

Liz is an employee at The Unified Telecommunications Credit Union, a job she has not missed a day of for three years. In between her daydreams of moving someplace warm, she peers at the bank account of her former lover, runs background checks on herself, attempts to dodge the young girl she has started an affair with, and hopes to reconnect with her missing sister. At first glance, it may seem as though very little happens over the course of the novel, but before long the minor events which seem so unimportant build upon one another until they collapse completely, as Liz forces herself to explore the depths a person will go to be alone. Printed in an edition of 500 with silkscreen covers by Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer. Featuring a color plate by LA artist Zoe Crosher. 2009

Reviews

“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

About the Author

Terri Griffith is the book advocate for Bad at Sports. In addition to reviewing books with Joanna Topor, Terri is also interested in queer art and culture. She attended the unimaginably liberal Fairhaven College in Bellingham, WA, where she graduated with an interdisciplinary degree in Writing, Literature and Publishing. She has an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the last ten years, Terri has been a regular book reviewer for BUST magazine. Her essays are included in the anthologies Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working Class and Are We Feeling Better Yet?: Women’s Encounters with Health Care in America (forthcoming). Along with Nicholas Alexander Hayes, she is co-authoring a queerly transgressive retelling of the Greek Myths. Their versions of The Rape of Io and The Story of Tantalus have appeared in Bloom and Suspect Thoughts respectively.

The Mutation of Fortune

By Erica Adams

“Beware the opening of this book for herein lies a multi-dimensional vortex, whereby one life lives all pages at once in the whir and dizzy of existence. She is shy. She is bright. She is wild with abandon, dangerously open with a predeliction for water birds. She is slick with consciousness: a cavorting tempest that glimmers as a diamond, with many faces at once.” — Mama Sky

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.

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Erica Adams is a 500 year old witch.

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  • TITLE: The Mutation of Fortune
  • AUTHOR/S: Erica Adams
  • INTRODUCTION BY: In Iieu of an introduction, Alchemilla V. Midnight, Rowland Saifi, Thordis Bjornsdottir, Rowland Saifi, and Derek Guineas gave this book palm readings.
  • GENRE: Fiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • YEAR: 2011
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 978-1-4507-4209-2

Phonebook 2008/09

Back by popular demand, PHONEBOOK is the essential travel guide to artist-run centers, small not-for-profit, fringe galleries, and other exhibition and presentation projects. This new edition adds over 50 news spaces in the United States and over 40 Canadian centers alongside updated entries, periodical listings, a series of essays from across the country and some road-trip tips from the editors. PHONEBOOK is a valuable resource for artist and audience alike, connecting a web of makers and projects while acting as an archive of work by smaller organizations and groups throughout the visual arts community. Use PHONEBOOK 2008/2009 as a research tool, as a travel guide to the visual arts, for networking, for exhibition proposals or to facilitate artistic exchanges. Edited by Caroline Picard, Nick Sarno, and Shannon Stratton.

Phonebook 2007/2008

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 back yards. 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.

Fascia

By Ashley Donielle Murray

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

 

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

Reviews

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

About the Author

Ashley Donielle Murray is the author of Fascia (The Green Lantern Press), a collection of stories drawn from southern vignettes focusing on a delicate web of familial and communal relationships that intersect, overlap, and impede on the landscape. She was raised in Texas and North Carolina, which both serve as a backdrop for the stories in this collection. A graduate of the MFA creative writing program at Columbia University, she now lives in Queens, New York. She is currently at work on a novel set in the twenties.

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  • TITLE: Fascia
  • AUTHOR/S: Ashley Donielle Murray
  • GENRE: Fiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 149
  • YEAR: 2009
  • BINDING: Perfect Bound. Silk Screen Covers.
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9780982029251

On Marvellous Things Heard

By Gretchen E. Henderson

“My volume of nonfiction, On Marvellous Things Heard, vocalizes silence through counterpointed micro-essays about literary appropriations of music.” — Gretchen E. Henderson, Delphi Quarterly.

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.

Reviews

“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.

  • TITLE: On Marvellous Things Heard
  • AUTHOR/S: Gretchen E. Henderson
  • INTRODUCTION BY: G.C. Waldrep
  • YEAR: 2011
  • ISBN: 9781450742115

Lust & Cashmere

Choose Your Own Adventure

By A.E. Simns

A sexy book about a protagonist who falls in love with a sweater…and yes, it includes a choose your own adventure section. You know, so that the reader is implicated in the adventure as well.

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 Flash Artists’ Book Collection.

Reviews

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

About the Author

A.E. Simns is the paper face of many persons working collectively. Those people include but are not restricted to Moshe Zvi Marvit, Bennet Porter, Kellie Porter, Sarah Stickney, Meg Hammil, Terry Duvall, Lucas Ford, Jonathan Cooper, Jonathan Polk, Caroline Picard and Moshe Marvit. Occasionally they perform under the moniker Thee Iran Contras. Like Pessoa’s ghosts, Simns was conjured over a joking OUIJA board and hasn’t left the couch since.

Visions for Chicago

By Daniel Tucker

Visions for Chicago is a politically charged public art project taking place in front yards, empty lots and public spaces throughout Chicago, Illinois during a historic mayoral and city council election season.

The question of “What is your vision for Chicago?” is important at this time because the mayor and the city council he controlled for over 20 years are retiring and the political culture of corruption, defeat and disengagement they have encouraged has an opening and opportunity to be changed. But change doesn’t happen in the small and busy window of time afforded by elections, it happens over long periods of time through the implementation of strategic vision by people acting collectively and individual-level internal transformation of how we think, behave and consider ourselves in relationship to other people and our surroundings.

This project was organized by Daniel Tucker. Featuring photography by Lauren Cumbia and Hillary Strack. With an introduction by Micah Maidenberg and an interview by Abigail Satinsky. Produced with support from Lantern Projects and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Visions for Chicago contributors: Aaron Hughes, Abigail Satinsky, Adam Kader, Alex Han, Alexa Roberts, Alice Kim, Amanda Klonsky, Amy Ellison, Amy Mall, Ana Katsenios, Athena Thasiah, Augie Montes, B. Loewe, Ben Helphand , Bill Ayers, Brad Thomson, Carlos Fernandez, Carolyn Thomas, Carrie Spitler, Charlie Vinz, Chasity White, Courtney Moran, Coya Paz, Dalin and Lightie, Damon Locks, Dana Carter, Dara Epison, Darlene Gramigna, Dave Pabellon, Dave Stovall, Dawn Herrera Helphand, Dayna Kriz, DeBrina Moore, Devin Mcintosh, Eden Thasiah, Elise Zelechowski, Elizabeth Thasiah, Ellen Rothenberg, Elly Fishman, Elvia Rodriguez-Ochoa, Eric Rogers, Eva Preus, Fausto Lopez, Fereshteh Toosi, Frank Edwards, Gabby Higgins, Graham Stephenson, Grant Buhr, Harishi Patel, Hazel Bee Womac, Hector Gonzalez, Hillary Strack, Ida Rocket Xoomsai, Jackie Ingram, Jaiya Ovid, Jeanne Walker, Jen Blair, Jerome Grand, John Preus, Kai Preus, Karen Furlong, Kathleen Duffy, Keshawnda Eggleston, Khila Clay, Kristina Pilman, Kyla Lyles, Lauren Cumbia, Lillie Mccartin, Liz Goss, Louisa Womac, Manchershaw Engineer, Marcus Thomas, Mariame Kaba, Mark Shipley, Marquesha Mance, Martin Macias Jr., Marvin Scott, Maximiliano Benitez, Melissa Dean, Micah Maidenberg, Michelle Lugalia Hollon, Miguel Colon, Mike Phillips, Nat Zorach, Neil Brideau, Nicole Mauser, Nina Xoomsai, Peter Zelchenko, Rachel Caidor Rebecca Zorach, Roxy Trudeau, Ryan Lugalia Hollon, Salem Collo-Julin, Samuel Barnett, Sara Brodzinsky, Sarah Jane Rhee Solveig Preus, Talib Becktemba-Goss, Theaster Gates, Tiana Jones, Tyra Williams, Tzitlalli Cienfuegos, Victor Thasiah, and Vinay Ravi.

You can see the entire contents of this book online by going here.

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Daniel Tucker was a founding member of AREA Chicago. His (co-authored) book, “Farm Together Now” (Chronicle Books) was released last year. “Visions for Chicago” is his second book.

  • TITLE: Visions for Chicago
  • AUTHOR/S: Daniel Tucker
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Micah Maidenberg
  • GENRE: Nonfiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 143
  • YEAR: 2011
  • ISBN: 9781450775236

Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010

By Stephen Lapthisophon

“Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 startles and provokes on a first examination, and promises to continue to do so on many subsequent readings. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the integration of art and criticism.” — Barbara Ladner, MAKE Magazine.

Stephen Lapthisophon brings his skills as an installation artist to the page with six essays written over the last 20 years. For fans of both continental philosophy and modern poetry and prose, Lapthisophon shows how writing about writing, art, and cinema can dissolve into its subject, becoming all of those things or none of them.

Reviews

“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.

About the Author

Stephen Lapthisophon is a multimedia artist and writer whose work investigates how language and mark-making are linked to the formation of self-identity and language. His installations incorporate everyday objects such as furniture and foodstuffs as a means to break down the barriers between the work of art and daily life. Legally blind since 1994, the inclusion of food materials such as rosemary, saffron, or bacon fat mixed with pigments challenges ideas of permanence, skill, and process as they relate to art making. Lapthisophon’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally in London, Barcelona and Berlin. Books include Hotel Terminus (White Walls), and Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010 (The Green Lantern Press).

  • TITLE: Writing Art Cinema 1988-2010
  • AUTHOR/S: Stephen Lapthisophon
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Devin King
  • GENRE: Literary Nonfiction. Film Studies. Art.
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 103
  • YEAR: 2011
  • BINDING: Perfect
  • EDITION SIZE: 250
  • ISBN: 9781450742108

Kordian

By Juliusz Słowacki

The play’s first English translation by Gerard T. Kapolka. Illustrations by Lilli Carré and silk screen covers by Aay Preston-Myint.

Kordian is a Polish classic written in 1833 by Juliusz Słowacki and features an amalgam of revolutionary spirit, tradition, modernist bravado and suffering–topics navigated by a young Romantic protagonist after whom the play is named. Within the canon of Polish literature Kordian offers pivotal insight into the development of Poland’s Romantic movement (her literary golden age), and Polish literature as a whole. This book was published in an edition of 500.

Reviews

“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.

 

  • TITLE: Kordian
  • AUTHOR/S: Juliusz Słowacki
  • TRANSLATED BY: Gerard T. Kapolka
  • GENRE: Drama
  • PUBLISHER: Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 143
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9781450742085

Urbesque

By Moshe Zvi Marvit

Urbesque is a collection of short (in the sense that most, though not all, of the pieces are shorter than forty pages) fiction (because they are untrue except, of course, for the parts that are). The characters who populate these stories do not travel to India or hang out with matadors. They do, however, go to job fairs, make furniture, leave their swords in the lockers at work, write letters to the objects that surround them and take pictures of it all, years after the fact, to remind them not to forget. If, one day, a copy of Urbesque should appear unannounced on your doorstep, looking a little worse for wear, with whiskey on its breath, invite it in. Make room for it on your couch or bookshelf. Or, better yet, read it.

 

Reviews

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:

 

Dear Paul,
I agreed to be interviewed by you in service to our common friend, Caroline Picard, but I must insist on some ground rules. I hope you won’t find them out of line, but I read that chop job you did on Jesse Ball, and I want to make sure that you don’t try the same thing with me. Plus I’m still a little unbalanced from the incident at the Mid-Town Yacht Club in Baltimore a few years ago, and I blame you.  So here are my ground rules:
1) All your questions must be emailed to me.
2) I may choose to answer by email or letter.
3) You may send only 1 question at a time. If you send more, I will choose one to answer.
4) Either of us may call the interview off at any point. If either of us takes this “kill” option, then the interview must be published in full and unedited.
5) No questions may be asked about the following time periods: 1996-1998; 2001-2003. And nothing involving theories of Y2K.
As a show of good faith, I will answer one of your questions.
4. Who is Dan Mazal?
A: Dan Mazal is a scoundrel.
I hope that these terms are amenable.
Yrs,

Moshe

About the Author

Moshe Zvi Marvit continues to write and read and work in Pittsburgh. His Open Letter to a Dot Matrix Printer was published by McSweeny’s, and he has continued to write regularly on the subject of labor. In 2012 he co-authored Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right.

God Bless The Squirrel Cage

By Nick Sarno

“Fuck you, Erasmus. The burden you have placed on me is too great.”

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 continue to be written. God Bless The Squirrel Cage is not one of those books.

About the Author

Nick Sarno lives in San Francisco.

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  • TITLE: God Bless The Squirrel Cage
  • AUTHOR/S: Nick Sarno
  • INTRODUCTION BY: Gerard T Kapolka
  • GENRE: Fiction
  • PUBLISHER: The Green Lantern Press
  • PAGES: 247
  • YEAR: 2006
  • BINDING: Perfect bound. Silk Screen Covers
  • EDITION SIZE: 500
  • ISBN: 9780978575618