Materials

Finally in this new run of reprints is D.S. Marriott's Duppies, now re-designed and re-typeset, a book in three parts that pays “deliberate attention to the debased – and misunderstood – aspects of black and white working class grime culture in London; an attempt at a kind of grime prosody, whether imagined though Eski beats, multicultural London English (MLE), cockney rhyming, or sino techno formal experimentation.” /2020/10/ds-marriott-duppies.html

Lisa Jay Jeschke's The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women, another essential title, is now its fourth printing. /2020/10/lisa-jeschke-anthology-of-poems-by.html

Laurel Uziell's T, now it its second printing, is an essential book, a long poem in multiple parts. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. /2020/10/laurel-uziell-t.html

Candace Hill's 'Short Leash Kept On', now in its second printing, is an illustrated epic written in late 2022, in dialogue with the work of Lloyd Addison, Russell Atkins, and Tom Feelings. /2023/01/candace-hill-short-leash-kept-on.html

Now onto its second printing is Tongo Eisen-Martin's 'Waiting Behind Tornados for Food', a collection of poetry and essays. “World history has a proletariat when the lights come back on”. /2020/12/tongo-eisen-martin-waiting-behind.html

Also back in print, James Goodwin's Faux Ice, a set of poems inheriting from eskibeat and drill and from other sources of experimental Black sociopoetics: /2023/01/james-goodwin-faux-ice.html

Pleased to announce that a number of titles are back in print. First up, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck, now onto its third printing. /2020/10/anne-boyer-money-city-sick-as-fuck.html

A sneak peak of what we're working on... Very pleased to announce that Materials will be printing Abdellatif Laâbi's 'l'oeil et la nuite: itinéraire' in a first-ever English-language translation by Howard Slater. The picture shows the front cover to the 1969 of this visionary text. We'll be printing the translation with a newly-commissioned introduction. Very excited to be working on this project! A bit more about the text below: "Published in 1969, at the height of the vitality of the magazine Souffles, of which Laâbi was the driving force, presented as a manifesto book, L’Oïl et la nuit is without a doubt one of the founding texts that allowed Moroccan literature to free itself from colonialism and freely engage in the adventure of modernity. Written between two tragic events that left a deep mark on consciences in Morocco and the Arab world (the bloody repression of a popular riot in March 1965 in Casablanca and the humiliating defeat of the Arab countries in June 1967), this story performs a kind of autopsy on a living and deeply wounded body. The violence of reality is met by a radically new language and mode of narration in which poetry does not let go of the controls. Announcing Laâbi’s future work in many ways, L’Oïl et la nuit already shines and will continue to shine with the strange brilliance of major works." (Description from: /produit/15228/) #abdellatiflaâbi #howardslater

Older titles from Materials no. 9: 'Of · The · Abyss' by J.H. Pryne, from 2017. A sequence of ten poems; in separated continuance, an outcry that ventriloquises and manifests languages of exclusion and yet with dogged persistence protests them. “Oh strike the light, float the boat, for sake of common peril they are fallen away as gathered up in sight of lamentable in- difference and will go down against us”. /2020/10/jh-prynne-of-abyss.html

Older titles from Materials no. 8: 'Another Round: Selected Poems' by Alli Warren, from 2021. "Dear Comrades don’t get it twisted" This Selected Poems presents work from Warren's first three full-length books: Here Come The Warm Jets (2013), I Love It Though (2017), and Little Hill (2020). Shot through with clear-sighted hope, yet intensely attentive to the specific cruelties of our present epoch, Warren asks “who is permitted unhindered breath”. This work aims to “study the past to denaturalize the present”, to reverse the mirrored and self-perpetuating notions of nature and culture, human and animal. Warren knows that poetry can’t sing from beyond mediation, but insists that poetry can acknowledge mediation’s more mendacious disguises and bring them out into the open. Carried through by a prosody alternately razor-sharp and capaciously crowded, in lines and sentences harshly yet lovingly aware of the “possible future in the tender measure”, poet-as-ventriloquist throws multiple voices to see what’s revealed under poetry’s light. With glamour and imagination and biting humour in abundance, Warren seeks to walk to the end of the world-system, “the terror of the totally plausible future” at once post-apocalyptic and utopian—“When I said I was going / to the bar I meant / no death, no death”. Such work may “begin from economic fact”, but it’s where you go from there that matters. Operating within the flows and constraints of racialised capitalism—a space of horror, shared with monsters—Warren’s poetry also throws up multiple pleasures, guilty and otherwise, and glimmers of collective possibility, of possible futures we can sometimes glimpse and live within. This is poetry written from community, poetic and otherwise, living and dead and otherwise: from Oakland, El Cerrito, San Francisco; from the meadow, from the street, in a car; marching to shut down the port, walking to breathe in a charged air everyday and Orphic, “buoyant” and “forked”. These poems give us the measures, the strength, the breath to propel ourselves through the circumscribed day. /2021/06/alli-warren-another-round-selected-poems.html

Older titles from Materials no. 7: 'Kruk Book: An Anthology for @francesfrances1991 Frances Kruk', from 2022. Frances Kruk’s poetry is a gothic poetry, a perverse poetry, a poetry of slashers and slapstick, of intricate detail and messy smudges, of work and the refusal of work. Across her books—clobber (2006), dig oubliette (2006), A Discourse on Vegetation and Motion (2008), Down You go, or Négation de Bruit (2011), Dwarf Surge (2013), PIN (2014), lo-fi frags in progress (2015), and A series of perceptual failures and reckless reckless cutting (2014)—it cuts through our times like a scalpel. In that spirit, we hope, this anthology contains poems, prose and visuals for Frances from, in alphabetical order: Sascha Akhtar, Tom Allen, Tom Betteridge, cris cheek, Francis Crot, Nia Davies, Ellen Dillon, Helen Dimos, Laura Elliott, Harry Gilonis, Emma Gomis, Chris Gutkind, Dom Hale, Tessa Harris, Sarah Hayden, Danny Hayward, Ian Heames, Rosa van Hensbergen, Dimitra Ioannou, Lisa Jeschke, Justin Katko, Sarah Kelly, Linda Kemp, Rob Kiely, Peter Manson, Lila Matsumoto, Stephen Mooney, Ghazal Mosadeq, Gizem Okulu, Nell Osborne, Richard Owens, Eleanor Perry, Jessica Pujol Duran, Richard Parker, Luke Roberts, Will Rowe, Andy Spragg, Dolly Rae Star, and Stolen Goods. Every one of the 40 contributors here has been touched in some way by Frances’s work, and we hope that this anthology gives something back from all that writing has given us. /2023/01/kruk-book-anthology-for-frances-kruk.html

Older titles from Materials no. 6: 'T' by @upper_crust_punk Laurel Uziell, from 2018. 'T' is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. From the Afterword: "Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature." 'T' spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door. /2020/10/laurel-uziell-t.html