Four postcards in a folder published by Guy Schraenen éditeur, 1978. Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache wrote dozens of books, hundreds of letters and postcards, and countless texts. Not a single one was legible, yet, in their promixity to language, they all resonate with a mysterious potential for meaning. Using ink on paper, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with its own unique lexical and syntactic structure, laden with poetic and sometimes visceral suggestion.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Initially, inspired by the experimental visual poetry of the mid-sixties, Ketty La Rocca critically investigated questions of communication in the age of mass media. She soon began addressing herself in her work as both an artist and a woman in a desire to find “another” language to express difference and the non-identical. She worked with collage, photography, video, text, drawing, and performance to develop a language of gestures and appropriated imagery of disempowerment. But her work was only granted the short time span of a decade’s production, during which she underwent a rapid artistic development with enormous energy and intelligence.

This book is the first international monograph on Ketty La Rocca’s works and writings. With texts by Emi Fontana, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Angelika Stepken and Ketty La Rocca

American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

The Matrix by Norman H. Pritchard (1939–1996) gathers a selection of the Concrete and Black Arts poet’s work from 1960 to 1970. The seventy-one poems collected here might be regarded, as Charles Bernstein has written, as “sound” poems, being tethered not only to the literature of the Black Arts Movement but also to jazz culture and urban life in New York. Drawing as much from the visual arts and concrete poetry as from sound-based experimentation and music, Pritchard utilized the simple tools of spacing and typography to create syncopations, vibrations, and musical rhythms. What emerges is nothing less than a self-contained system of mimetic codes that challenge modernist modes of perception and representation. Formally innovative and anticipating what Michael Riffaterre would come to call the semiotics of “ungrammaticalities,” the book is a syntactical and visual experience in repetition, stutters, and structure.

A poem first published in 1975 by Bern Porter, presented in alphabetical order, with the same number of acts for each letter. This new edition presents an additional introduction, transcribed from a reading given by Bern Porter on May 19, 1985, in Madison, Maine.

Bern Porter (1911–2004) was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist. He was a representative of the Mail Art and Found Poetry avant-garde art movements.

Edited by Alice Dusapin and designed by Robert Milne.

A poem written by the artist for the space of the book composed only of punctuation marks. For about twenty years, Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle, East Germany, lives and works in Berlin) has been producing conceptual artworks influenced by a philosophical background inherited from its formative years in East Germany, questioning the deadlocks of romanticism and Marxism. Alternating between photography, sculpture, publishing, design, installation and performance, Nicolai creates artistic situations whose purpose is to hijack the production patterns of the industrial world as well as its cultural, financial and social representations.