Iliazd (ed.): Poésie de mots inconnus (1949)

An early anthology of experimental visual and sound poetry featuring poems by 21 avant-garde authors and illustrated with seven woodcuts, six etchings, two engravings, three drypoints, two aquatints, and six lithographs.

“Iliazd was well acquainted with the work of James Joyce, of Christian Morgenstern, and other writers who had played with the phonetic and graphical potential of language in the 19th and 20th century. But he chose to focus on the work of his peers, those figures within the modern movement of the first decades of the 20th century with whom he had been acquainted, and whose experiments he wished to bring to light and into a formal platform for recognition. He had good reason, in the late 1940s in Paris, to want to do this, as a gauntlet thrown down by the newly arrived upstart poet-theorist of Lettrism, Isidore Isou, challenged the emerging history of avant-garde literature with claims about the originality of his inventions.” (Source)

Poems by Ibronke Akinsemoyin, Pierre Albert-Birot, Hans Arp, Artaud, Jacques Audiberti, Hugo Ball, Nicolas Beaudin, Camille Bryen, Paul Dermée, Raoul Hausmann, Vincente Huidobro, Iliazd, Eugène Jolas, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Krutchonykh, Pablo Picasso, Boris Poplavsky, Kurt Schwitters, Michel Seuphor, Igor Terentiev, Tristan Tzara.
Images by Arp, Georges Braque, Bryen, Marc Chagall, Oscar Dominguez, Serge Férat, Alberto Giacometti, Albert Gleizes, Hausmann, Henri Laurens, Alberto Magnelli, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, Joan Miró, Picasso, Léopold Survage, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Edgard Tytgatt, Wols, Ribemont-Dessaignes.

Publisher Le Degré Quarante et Un (Iliazd), Paris, 1949
26 folded sheets, 32 x 25 cm
Edition of 157
via MoMA

Commentary: Johanna Drucker (Amodern, 2016).

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Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.”

Publisher Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2014
ISBN 9781555976903, 1555976905
169 pages

Reviews: Holly Bass (NYT), Nick Larid (NYRB), Dan Chiasson (New Yorker), Kate Kellaway (Guardian), Kenna O’Rourke (Adroit).
Commentary: LA Review of Books, (cont.).

Publisher’s resource page for book
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Alastair Brotchie, Mel Gooding (eds.): A Book of Surrealist Games (1995)

“This delightful collection allows everyone to enjoy firsthand the provocative methods used by the artists and poets of the Surrealist school to break through conventional thought and behavior to a deeper truth. Invented and played by such artists as André Breton, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, these gems still produce results ranging from the hilarious to the mysterious and profound.”

First published 1993
Publisher Shambhala Redstone, Boston & London, 1995
ISBN 1570620849, 9781570620843
165 pages
via Blanca Alaníz

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PDF (54 MB)