No. 2 And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’
by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano trans. Honora Spicer
Winner of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s 2020 National Literature Award in Nonfiction. And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal, surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of contemporary Peruvian poetry.
$11.98
US (+ $3 shipping)
International (via Asterism)
No. 1 Miss Nobody Knows
by Leslie Kaplan trans. Jennifer Pap
The first English translation of Leslie Kaplan’s crystalline novella Miss Nobody Knows, about the lived aftermath of May ’68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.
“Ostensibly about the May ’68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr
“Thank you for sending Leslie Kaplan’s book, so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.” —Jean-Luc Godard, letter to Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens
“One thought he understood it all, the other wanted to see it all. Through two opposing characters, Leslie Kaplan brings to life something of May ’68 … This novel breaks an opening out of the infinitely mad universe that was captured by Leslie Kaplan’s first book, Excess-The Factory.” —Claire Devarrieux, Libération
$15
US (+ $3 shipping)
International (via Asterism)
Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress/Diario de una costurera proletaria
by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano trans. by Anastatia Spicer & Honora Spicer
Co-published with Cardboard House Press, this book of threads binds the autobiographical and the bureaucratic, the maternal body and the factory floor. In fierce and tender lines, contemporary Peruvian poet Victoria Guerrero-Peirano pierces intergenerational silences with erupting screams. Three scenes probe the precarity of textile lineages tensioned against patriarchal violence and neoliberal industrial orders. “I leave words,” a daughter speaks in the face of her mother’s tactile engrossment, tangling with doubt what it means to “know enough” by a life of letters. Of immigrant seamstresses killed in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history, the poet asks: “can poetry speak?” And a state’s forced sterilizations inhibit women from practicing traditional weaving by kallwa, shaping a verse of testimony. In the face of multiple unfolding violences and ruptures in practices of world-making, the Diary declares, “We seamstresses are timeless.”
$17.50 (via Cardboard House Press)
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