recent books
warning: Creating default object from empty value in /home/members/autonomedia/sites/autonomedia.org/web/modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.module on line 1418.
book blurbs: "With typical sangfroid, CAE dissects the beast of our own making: the
Anthropocene. Clarifying the philosophical roots of the Euro-American
confusion about nature, this text offers severe and essential medicine for
coming to terms with our ecological predicament."
Claire Pentecost, professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago "This book presents a perspective about the environmental crisis that I
suspected was there but couldn’t put my finger on. Follow these authors
deep into one of the biggest cultural lacunas of our day: necropolitics. is
book fully abandons solutionist bull in favor of a measured approach
grounded only in what we know. Read it, weep, and then kick ass. Once
again, CAE has blown my fucking mind."
Mike Bonanno, The Yes Men "Aesthetics, Necropolitics, and Environmental Struggle takes a deep look at the
elephant in the Anthropocene. is book calls the bluff on the unacknowledged
relationship with death that has long haunted environmental
positions from the far left to the far right. Digging deep into the
philosophical underpinnings of the many anthro- and enviro-isms, CAE
returns with overlooked contradictions that have been historically and
strategically ignored. And despite its unflinching look at the politics of
death, the book remains approachable and highly readable, and it won’t
have you tightening a noose around your neck."
Rich Pell, Center for PostNatural History
book blurbs: “The towers fall and Mary Tyler Moore tosses her beret into the air,”
says Wierzbicki in “9/11 Paradox.” Paradoxes like “inertia drives the working
masses” inhabit these poems. Wierzbicki constantly puts her finger on the
workings of societal insanities so institutionally ingrained they cannot be
questioned. There can be no reasonable dialogue because, as she puts it in
“Age,” we are in a place “where we all speak different languages and yet push
the same buttons.” The experience of reading this book is crucial for our
times; the poems are a cagily “accessible” balm for what ails us. — Stephen
Paul Miller, author of any lie you tell will be the truth (Marsh Hawk Press) Wierzbicki successfully challenges the notion of what poetry is as she
generously takes us to its core/essence. In this three-part collection,
whether they are socio-politically charged poems, odes to the borough
she lives in, poems written for her parents & her friends or for music she
loves, the brilliant accuracy of her viewpoint, where she stands, & the direct
humane manner in which she uses language is her strength & grace.
Be ready to open your mind/heart fully to get poetically distracted!
— Yuko Otomo, author of STUDY & Other Poems on Art
(Ugly Duckling Presse) and KOAN (New Feral Press) There are plenty of anti-establishment writers who present themselves as wild
rebels raging outside the system, or who tell tales about marginalized characters.
Wierzbicki’s work offers a more bitter and more accurate takedown of
many of the mainstream’s hollow idols and ideas. The deft conclusion of her
ruminations is a sense of earned sadness about the tiny shifts people make to
preserve a single shred of dignity in the corporate landscape, shown with such
measured compassion in “Letter to a Security Guard.” — Jim Feast, author of
Neo Phobe and Long Day, Counting Tomorrow (Autonomedia)
book blurbs: "The only porn I read is Tsaurah Litzky’s. It has the necessary je ne sait toit.” — Tuli Kupferberg, co-founder, the Fugs, author of Teach Yourself Fucking
“The bawdy tales that make up Tsaurah Litzky’s memoir serve as the perfect antidote to the fear and loathing gripping America’s psyche today. Flasher is funny, poignant, sexy, philosophical and one hell of a good read.” — Danny Shot, author of Works “Tsaurah Litzky is fully exposed. Flasher moves the reader quickly with incisive prose that places you immediately in the moment. This is a beautiful history of New York, old and new, experienced through the life of one woman living unconventionally; balancing lovers, family and bohemia, with a passion for desire and all things lusty and strange.” — Chavisa Woods, author of The Albino Album; Love Does Make Make Me Gentle or Kind; and Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country
“in Flasher, Tsaurah Litzky writes with brio, wisdom, insight, and humor, about sex, yoga, the family, the body and aging, the New York scene past and present, work, and, most of all, love. She illuminates the experiences, processes, and strategies of a bountifully creative woman who has sustained a significant body of work and joyously full life.” — Marjorie Tesser, editor of Mom Egg Review
“The bawdy tales that make up Tsaurah Litzky’s memoir serve as the perfect antidote to the fear and loathing gripping America’s psyche today. Flasher is funny, poignant, sexy, philosophical and one hell of a good read.” — Danny Shot, author of Works
“i think the Greeks got it right when they posited a precarious balance between life (eros) and Death (thanatos). With so much crap being dumped daily on that side of the scale, it’s vital to create life-affirming work to keep everything from being totally erased. Flasher, Tsaurah Litzky’s collection of stories, does that; she not only gets the eros right, she transcends the worldly altogether on her path to the spiritual, taking us along with her on a wild ride! Highly recommended!” — Ron Kolm, author of A Change in the Weather and Night Shift
“ Flasher: A Memoir is the powerful testimony of woman/human/poet/writer/collagist Tsaurah Litzky whose life is always lived to the maximum in ways only a courageous human spirit can manifest. Written with her uniquely genuine poetic voice, the forty-two chapters can be read individually, each a precious gem with its own charm, or you can read the entire book as a big embracing ocean of dynamic human drama in one shot.the sparkling wisdom born out of a life guided
by her non-conformist passion will take you to the magically nurturing world where the tides of life come in and out every morning and night individually.” — Yuko Otomo, author of Study
book blurbs: Until now, no one has ever written a book about how the secret grand jury system works in this country from the inside—from the point of view of a grand juror. The Trial before the Trial is that insider’s expose. Ernest Larsen served nine days on a special narcotics grand jury in Manhattan before being forced off—at the insistence of the district attorney—and accused of contempt of court. Why? Because day after day he kept trying to halt what he saw as the exercise of racialized injustice. This book, at once ironic and angry, written in the form of a nonfiction novel, brings to light what really happens on a grand jury, a factual story that takes place just a few months before the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the rise of Black Lives Matter. “For years, now, Autonomedia has published some of the most provocative political thinking we’ve seen from a small press. The Trial Before the Trial is right in there with the best and most interesting.” — Samuel R. Delany "Richard Pryor said when he went to court seeking justice what he found was ‘just us.’ Forty years later Ernie Larsen again has found ‘just us.’ Through his extraordinary observations that are fascinating, engaging, troubling, really funny and a whole lot more, Larsen finds a broken system of justice that discourages curiosity and defies common sense and reason. Unfortunately, what is revealed is not shocking but the changing same: the tragic dimensions of justice. Larsen finds himself in a conundrum. While
he cannot sit in judgment of his fellow human beings, he can judge a system that was meant to protect and serve." — Carrie Mae Weems
book blurbs: Rasken Hasp is dying of AIDS, given only a few months to live. Then someone tries to kill him. "Raskin Hasp, the paranoiac, dourly funny, HIV-positive hero of Jim Feast s nonlinear trip of a novel, goes down the rabbit hole in order to avenge a fellow patient s suspicious death and, in the bargain, save himself. Finding humor amidst life-threatening illness is never easy, but Feast pulls it off. Like a bombshell hitting a major chord (to use one of Feast s own gleefully mixed metaphors), Long Day, Counting Tomorrow is a loopy, vinegary, but ultimately and unexpectedly solemn tale of narcissists and wisecrackers, junkies and AIDS activists, trying to make sense of an epidemic that has always been a matter of politics and prejudice as much as viral counts and body fluids." — Patrick E. Horrigan "In Long Day, Counting Tomorrow, Jim Feast gives a panoramic view of the social chaos, community energy and despair during the height of the AIDS crisis. Many of the poet-activists in this novel face eminent death while dealing with a medical and political system compromised by money-grubbing, corporate fame-seekers. The characters try to sabotage institutions, detour their misguided efforts and uncover the truth. A suspicious- acting doctor who owns a hospice for AIDS patients that s the mystery that drives the novel, but there is a far greater mystery here: Why are we dying? An exceptional storyteller, Feast moves fluidly from one conversation to another, fracturing time and place while spinning forward with the energy of those who insist on living a vibrant activist life, even while facing early death. After the Gay Pride Parade, one of the characters reflects: The nebula. It looks like that. Like a great circle of interlocked elbows. This novel is funny, sad, ironic and absolutely a must read to understand where we have been and where we are now." — Barbara Henning
book blurbs: "Pareidolia's field of play is that of the questions behind the questions. Granted, as Watson suggests, a determinist science has proved humans are basically simple machines, rotors, churning a mix of DNA & biological chemicals. And granted a determinist outside of persuasive ads, sellthrough thoughts & FB solicitations have configured people into simple, will-free consumption buckets. Watson poses this question: Not only is there but has there even been a human life? And if there has been how could it survive under this determinist assault? The answer unrolls in querulous, curious infernos of seductive lyrics. Referencing (and poking) Stevens, Hopkins, Eliot & Baudelaire, these poems (like those of the last master mentioned) offer the reader the excitement & ecstasy of a sponge bath of blood in the basement of the famed Heartbreak Motor Lodge." — Jim Feast "Talking of pareidolia, Leonardo Da Vinci said, If you stare at the stained wall long enough, you see an infinite number of unimaginable things. Like a sharply observant clear-eyed artist, Carl Watson stares at the stained wall called LIFE in order to reflect its mesmerizing light & shadow on his psyche. His vision will guide those who are ready to morph themselves into anything unimaginable to reach the untouched shore pulsing with the devastatingly ecstatic & cruelly existential JOY of LIFE to its highest degree." — Yuko Otomo "Carl Watson is a writer who comes from the ancient age of madness, with his singular style and approach to the phenomenon of living. Watson s work explores with an unrivaled intensity the essence of our common destiny. For those readers who really pay attention, his words are like small bobs injected into the brain and memory that we cannot defuse or neutralize. We are proud to have him in our catalog." — Benoit Laudier
book blurbs: The Aaron Burr Society believes it should be obvious that the People, not corporations, and not billionaires, must redefine the Common Good and decide how to use our Commonwealth to address the humanitarian and environmental crisis of the 21st Century. These prose-poem rants and striking photos by Jim Costanzo of the Aaron Burr Society document his participation in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and seek to further the Society's aims: bottom-up economics for social justice, local cooperative economies and environmental sustainability.
book blurbs: Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2018! Our 26th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective. Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the ""New World"" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear at the dawn of this new millennium that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!
book blurbs: In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Children of William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus—Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few.
Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo’s masterwork, The Rose, “calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art.”
This questioning marks each essay in the collection, a volume that sets out to reorder, if not outright dismantle, the exclusionary hierarchies that have dominated cultural discourse for decades. Blake’s “wild children” are alive and well, and in Yau’s nimble, intelligent prose their dissonance is exactingly parsed and joyously celebrated.
book blurbs: A Change in the Weather is a new collection of poems by legendary downtown poet Ron Kolm, founding member of the Unbearables and author of The Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Duke & Jill and Night Shift.
“A born storyteller, documentarian and wild soul, Ron Kolm brings all the insight of a keen observer of life, whether it is in New York City, the Pennsylvania landscape of his youth, or the scenarios in fictionalized collage poems culled from photographs and letters. Kolm embraces the world around him: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.” –John J. Trause, author of Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears, Exercises in High Treason, Seriously Serial, and Eye Candy for Andy.
“Open these pages and join Ron Kolm, arch-denizen of New York City, as he picks his way through the lethal and potentially surreal. In Kolm’s world, dada is a verb and anything is possible in the mope-eyed bookstores and dystopic subway darknesses he traverses. Expect the unexpected. Charles Bukowski throws shade on Velvet Underground. James Joyce makes late-night calls from the dead zone. Andy Warhol is reincarnated as a potato chip. Ladies and gentleman, this is the full affliction.” –George Wallace, author of Poppin Johnny and Who’s Handling Your Aubergines, and Great Weather for Media editor and spoken word reading series host.
|