the87press 2023 Book Subscription Crowdfund

About the87press

the87press (est. 2018) is a South-Asian, non-binary and neurodiverse led independent publisher based in South London. Known for their commitment to experimental literatures across the intersections of class, race, neurodiversity, sexuality, and gender, the87press have been awarded National Portfolio (NPO) status for 2023-2026 by Arts Council England (ACE) which will see them host multiple medium to large scale readings, writing workshops, an online summer school, publish 10 books and 24 commissioned pieces on their online journal theHythe.

Our Book Subscription

At the87press we are offering book subscriptions and bundles for our next cycle of publications. We are looking to raise between £20,000 and £25,000. All money from this subscription will be used towards book production only. With revenues down due to cost of living crisis and inflation, it's important that small organisations like the87press keep momentum with the support of our community and international audiences. 

ACE NPO funding will see us receive £100,000 per annum and this money will be used exclusively to cover staff salaries, freelancer payments, speaker and travel fees, and workshop tutor fees, enabling us to expand our operations, widening scope to include more people. As such we look to use this subscription initiative to generate book production costs in advance to help us manage cash flows prior to each title's launch. We will also be improving the printing quality and distribution of our books with a new partnership with CPI group and Inpress, looking to make books available with reduced postage costs this year whilst also reducing our carbon footprint. For both international and domestic orders - the87press will cover distribution of your subscription. All books will be sent out a month before the release date.

There are 10 books to choose from covering a range of material from Hip Hop music videos to Amerindian mythology with poetry, fiction, and essay collections in the mix. Various bundles group together titles by form and range between £20 and £200 in price. We thank you in advance for taking the time to read about each title and this brilliant group of writers.

Single Author Titles

1. Joseph Coward, Run-Out Groove (Fiction) – October 2023

From debut novelist Joseph Coward: Run-Out Groove is the story of Jude, a kid leaving home under a hail of his father's fists, escaping to a big city in search of something, anything else. He finds the alluring Astrid, a musician who takes him under her wing, and propels him onto a waiting music scene. Quickly discovering the dangers of success, Jude realises he must now survive this new, turbulent life, leaving behind where he has come from without forgetting who he is. For fans of: Samuel Beckett, Ann Quin, Nick Hornby.

Joseph Coward is a writer from London

2. David Grundy, A True Account (Poetry) – October 2023

"Gorgeous and real poetry. This book is a bright spot in a bleak time." – Peter Gizzi

A True Account collects works written between 2013 and 2020, published by a variety of small presses in the UK and the US. Here are variously refracted the student movement, austerity, general election, referendum, the crisis of 2020 or 2019 or any year you care to name; the Massacre of the Innocents, the housing question, the October Revolution in November; Sappho, Mingus, Storm Ophelia; Rukeyser, Rilke, Rodefer; the aesthetics of resistance, the insistence of history: luxury and voluptuousness, peace and pleasure, beauty and order, the questions that still remain unanswered and the problems that remain unsolved.

“Wanting poetry to save my life, to shame my life,

as LONG as the WORLD is WIDE,

and as WIDE as the WORLD is LONG.”

David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of Present Continuous (Pamenar Press), and A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury  Academic) and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press). He co-runs the small press MATERIALS/MATERIALIEN.

3. Aaron Kent, The Working Classic (Poetry) – December 2023

The Working Classic is a collection of poetry, interviews, and essays with Aaron Kent. These diverse texts attempt to showcase how a gentrified creative industry routinely ignores working class voices unless that voice is an act of appropriation by a middle or upper class individual. Through a history of struggling with his own accent and upbringing, Kent showcases a working class poetics that aims to present both a reality of experience and a subversion of expectations. The interviews, essays, and reviews of Kent's work are a hostile depiction of how establishment arts attempt to set out the guidelines under which working class voices are allowed to participate, while the poems prove that working class voices can offer more than schadenfreude.

Aaron Kent is a working-class writer and publisher from Cornwall. His work has been praised by J. H. Prynne, Gillian Clarke, Andrew McMillan, Andre Bagoo, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Abdul Kadeer El-Janabi, Ian Duhig, and John McCullough. His poetry has been translated into Latvian, French, Persian, and Kernewek (Cornish). Aaron was awarded the Awen medal from the Bards of Cornwall for his poetry pamphlet The Last Hundred.

4. Sophie Seita, Lessons of Decal (Essay Collection) – December 2023

Lessons of Decal is a queer-feminist meditation on reading and learning, a bibliophilic memoir, in a series of lyrically spun experimental essays. A decal is a copy, a transfer of forms and knowledge, something that sticks. In this book, I ask how we or I make decals through our reading, writing, and teaching. So the book is also a meditation on transfers, on sluggishness, on slickness, on the stickiness of knowledge, on listening, on not planning, on vulnerability and fierceness. Other topics include alternative and embodied modes of learning and relating, my teachers of reading (which may be objects), poetry’s phantom limbs, lazy laboratories, a pedagogy of percolation, playlists as gifts, queer love poems, serious copying, and non-dull repetition. Formally, it’s a book of creative non-fiction that blends critical analysis, personal reflection, poetics, and performance writing. Deeply informed by attentive reading and research, these lyric essays are accessible yet playful and at times experimental. They might, for example, play with sound and imagery; employ narrative and poetic vignettes; use associative and speculative transitions, or simply follow different visual and argumentative lines of argument. Thematically, they’re about process and pedagogy: proposing that serious copying and repetition can be essential decals for learning, or, relatedly, that the thing that sticks and stays from or in our reading is unpredictable, entangled, and pleasurably non-programmatic. Lastly, all chapters are interested in the pull between autobiography and abstraction; between hospitality and formal difficulty. Most of these essays have their origin in some kind of live occasion, usually performative lectures which combine research with costume, projections, choreography, poetic language, and performative delivery. 

Sophie Seita is an artist who uses language as a material within and across performance, books, video, sound, and installation. Her work has been commissioned, supported, performed, and published internationally, most recently, by the Roberts Institute of Art and Hunterian Museum in Glasgow; Independent Dance; Ma Bibliothèque; Queer Art Projects; Canada Council for the Arts; British Council; UP Projects; Literarisches Colloquium Berlin; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; JNU (New Delhi); Stanford University Press; Ugly Duckling Presse; Nightboat; and others.

5. Sabeen Chaudhry, Rimming the Event Horizon (Poetry) – January 2024

Rimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, ‘a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,’ a brutally disruptive ‘xenogenerosity’ (Harney & Moten). This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon’s tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain. Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also ‘out of control,’ Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out...

Sabeen Chaudhry writes poetry, theory and fiction. She has been published in magazines such as Worms, Gutter and SPAM, and in journals including Chiasma, and Journal for Cultural Research. She regularly collaborates with artists, most recently for the Singapore Biennale 2022-23, and with collectives like Foreign Objekt and DEMO Moving Image. She also co-edits Deleuzine. Rimming the Event Horizon is her first collection.

6. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Night of the World: Book 2 (Prose and Poetry) January 2024

After her battle with the witch and the djinn, Hoodoo Girl find herself stranded at sea. Across the ocean, she arrives at a place named Babylon. In Babylon, everyone comes from elsewhere. All languages are spoken. All the books and scrolls are smuggled there, all the stories told and traded. But the story of Babylon itself remains a mystery. A legend tells of twin founders, whose names begin with H. Hoodoo Girl meets Hunap'eh. Together they will relive the story of the rise and fall of Babylon, which closely follows the tale of the Book of the People, Popol Vuh. 

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of two critically acclaimed books, What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award. More recently, In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), and the poem/novel Night of the World (the87press, 2021). Professor at the University of London. Fellow of the RSA. His “Peace & War” Reformation and the docu-video “Art & Fire: A Journey in Five Films”, with Hay Festivals.

Poetry in Translation

7. Juana Goergen, Sea in my Bones/Mar en los Huesos, trans Silvia Tandeciarz (Poetry) – October 2023

The fourth collection of poetry in Juana Goergen’s rich trajectory, Mar en los huesos [Sea in my Bones] bears witness to a shared collective experience of trauma. It interweaves indigenous and African belief systems, languages, and memories to recollect the Caribbean’s ancestral past and its imagination of the future. As is true of all memory work, Sea in my Bones simultaneously speaks to the broken present: its cry against injustice rests on the hope that through its labor, “the Zemies might awaken and the Caribbean peoples’ origin be remembered.” A multilingual tour de force that slips between Spanish, Taino, and Yoruba, Goergen’s deployment of the poem as trace, as evidence, results in a cacophony of voices that bring together what life has torn apart. At the same time, the collection poses questions for all of us about the role of poetry in communities that have survived collective trauma. In the absence of justice can such poetry of witness serve as a form of restitution? Or does it hold the promise of something else?

Juana Iris Goergen (Puerto Rico). Poet and Emerita Professor at DePaul University, Chicago. Visiting Professor at InterAmerican University, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. She has published La sal de las brujas (finalist of Letras de Oro Awards, Betania 1997,) La piela medias (2003,) Las Ilusas/Dreamers (in Desarraigos, contratiempo, 2008) and Mar en los huesos (Pandora/Lobo estepario, 2017.) Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies, most recently, LatinUsa (Mexico, 2018). She was initiator and co-organizer for eleven years of the Chicago International Poetry Festival Poesía en abril. She has edited nine poetry anthologies, among them: Susurros para disipar las sombras, Rapsodia de los sentidos and Ciudad Cien en (Erato Poesía, Poesía en abril Chicago). She has been awarded contratiempo Poesía/Cultura Award, 2014 and the José Revueltas Poetry Award, 2018. At the moment she is working on two poetry collections La celda del iris/ Iris prison cell (under review) and Requiem al sueño americano: otro “Canto general”/ Requiem to the American Dream: another “Canto general.” In 2019 she was honoured by the International Poetry Festival Poesía en Abril Committee and at DePaul University with a poetry award that bears her name, the Juana Iris Goergen Poetry Award.

Silvia R. Tandeciarz holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. She is Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Vice Dean for Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at William & Mary, where she has worked since 1999. A translator, poet, and scholar in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, she has published widely on the intersections between memorial and human rights initiatives in postdictatorship Argentina. Her most recent book, Citizens of Memory: Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina (2017,Bucknell University Press) appeared in Spanish in 2020. In addition to the poems of Puerto Rican poet Juana Goergen, her work in translation includes the book-length critical treatises Masculine/Feminine (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Insubordination of Signs (Duke University Press, 2004), both by the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard. She is the author of the poetry collection Exorcismos (Betania, 2000).

8. Emné Nasreddine, The Dance of the Fig Tree, trans. Stuart Bell (Poetry) – December 2023

Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.

Emné Nasereddine was born in France in 1990 and grew up in Lebanon where she studied French literature at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Her poetry explores her experiences of immigration, loss and mourning, the lives of Lebanese women, and the customs and traditions of southern Lebanon. The Dance of the Fig Tree is her first book and was runner-up in the 2021 Émile-Nelligan Prize. She lives in Montreal.

Stuart Bell is a translator of French literature. He studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge where he was later Translator in Residence (2021). His previous publications include Bird Me (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and Yo-yo Heart which was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their 2022 Winter Translation Choice. He also edited the 2021 collection Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience, the inaugural issue of The South London Cultural Review.

Essay Collections

9. South London Cultural Review: Volume 2, edited Stuart Bell, includes So Mayer, Emma Wilson, Catherine Grant, Louisa Wei (Essays) – ­March 2024

Five essays, each on an international female filmmaker, spanning the countries: China, Argentina, Italy, France and the UK.

Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. Her recent books include Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image (2012), The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin (2019) and Portraits: Céline Sciamma (2021). She has previously collaborated on a number of 87press projects including writing an introduction to The Softest Sleep and contributing a chapter to the South London Cultural Review volume 1, Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience.

Catherine Grant is a film scholar and video maker, and also works as a guest speaker, research consultant and external examiner. As a researcher and critic, she mostly makes and reflects on audiovisual essays about screen media studies. Grant is former Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and also lectured and researched for several decades at the Universities of Kent, Sussex, and Strathclyde. She is founding author of the Open Access website Film Studies For Free (and its social media accounts) as well as several other scholarly research platforms. 

So Mayer is a writer and activist. Their books include Political Animals, From Rape to Resistance and The Cinema of Sally Potter. Their writing about queer and feminist film features in Sight & Sound, The F-Word, Cléo and Literal, and their essays feature in Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. After a decade in academia teaching film studies and creative writing at Cambridge, Queen Mary, King’s College London and others, they work as a bookseller at Burley Fisher Books and with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes. So is a Co-Founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents and carers in film. They tweet at @tr0ublemayer. 

Louisa Wei is a documentary filmmaker and a member of Hong Kong Director’s Guild since 2018. She is also an award-winning writer and an Associate Professor teaching film related courses in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Wei has four documentary features to date: Storm Under the Sun (2009, co-director Xiaolian Peng), Golden Gate Girls (2014), Havana Divas (2019), and A Life in Six Chapters (2022). She also made three TV documentaries, Writing 10000 Miles (2019, RTHK), Wang Shiwei: The Buried Writer (2017), and Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, Cable TV HK).

10. Monopolated Light and Power by Edward George, Louis Moreno, Ashwani Sharma, Paul Rekret (Essays) – March 2024

The narrator to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man squats a basement with only a turntable and whose ceiling he has adorned with 1,369 light bulbs, powered by electricity poached from Monopolated Light and Power, to create the brightest spot in New York city. In 1993 Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs founds the Bad Boy Entertainment label as an imprint of Sony Music and, in the years that follow, leads the mainstreaming of New York hip-hop and RnB in global popular culture. Between them, these moments mark the changing coordinates, from the middle to the end of the twentieth century, of an aesthetics of light and a politics of economic monopoly. This collectively written book takes Bad Boy Entertainment as the starting point for a reflection that intersects financial capitalism and gentrification, the physics of light and the metaphysics of value, death and mourning, the history of black music and millennial video aesthetics. In doing so it seeks to outline the way a music label typically derided as trifling commercialism incarnated the passing of a novel experience of luminosity and a new state of global power.

Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He and hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection.

Louis Moreno's research explores the spatial, historical and cultural modes of financial capitalismwith a particular focus on architecture, urbanism and music. Louis is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures and the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London. Louis is a member of the collectives freethought, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and Unspecified Enemies.

Paul Rekret is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence, Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics and Poetics, and editor of George Caffentzis’s Clipped Coins. He is currently writing a book on work songs titled Take This Hammer and has published widely on contemporary cultural and political theory. He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and teaches political theory at Richmond American International University.

Ashwani Sharma teach and write in the areas of film and contemporary art, poetics, race, diasporic culture, postcolonial, media, Marxism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. They are the founding co-editor of darkmatter journal (https://darkmatter-hub.pubpub.org/). They are a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication (UAL). They are working on a monograph on race and audiovisual culture (Bloomsbury Academic), and their first collection of poetry/experimental writing. They co-wrote, with Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel, Suburban Finesse (Sad Press). They have also published poetry with Mote and the87press' e-journal theHythe. Ashwani is the co-editor of Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of Asian Dance Music (Zed Press).