Textshop Editions: The Opening

It’s been quite a journey since my last entry here for Textshop Experiments. As I reflect on the last few years and navigate through this transitional period, I wanted to share some of the incredible work we’ve accomplished over the past few years.

Before I took a hiatus from the journal in 2022, allowing for introspection and the opportunity to reassess our creative direction, I launched a new publishing arm for the press Textshop Editions. This work was made possible by creative and editorial collaborations with long-time friend Piotr Florczyk. This new venture marked a significant expansion of our mission to celebrate and publish creative-critical experiments. Although this arrives a bit late here, I’m thrilled to announce the publication of three extraordinary books under this imprint, each offering unique perspectives and pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling.

As I look ahead now, I am filled with anticipation for projects yet to unfold. I have exciting plans in the works, promising more thought-provoking experiments, collaborations, and publications to come. My commitment to fostering creativity and pushing the limits of literary expression remains steadfast.

I invite you to stay tuned as we embark on this new chapter together. Whether you’ve been a longtime supporter of Textshop Experiments or are just discovering us now, your curiosity and engagement are what make this community thrive. Thank you for being part of our journey.

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More information on the titles below and upcoming work is available at http://textshopexperiments.org/textshopeditions.

Defense Mechanism

By Krzysztof Siwczyk, Translated by Piotr Florczyk
ISBN: 978-1736465806

Description
In Defense Mechanism, Krzysztof Siwczyk attempts to conventionalize—in the form of a dramatic one-act play—the basic dialectic of light and darkness. This dialectic turns out to be the leaven of every poetic act. From this poisoned source of poetry understood as a mediation between what is clear in the language and that which obscures that clarity, comes the “defense mechanism”—a test of voices whose fate is to drift toward the chiaroscuro border. This is a bilingual edition and includes the Polish-language original.

Biographies
Krzysztof Siwczyk is an award-winning Polish poet, critic, and essayist. His work has been translated into numerous languages, including Italian, French, and German. He lives in Gliwice and works at the Rafał Wojaczek Institute in Mikołów.
Piotr Florczyk is a poet, essayist, and translator. His latest volume of poems, From the Annals of Kraków, which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, is published by Lynx House Press.

Sonnet 100

By Marilyn Allen
ISBN: 978-1736465813

Description
Sonnet 100 was written in isolation during the COVID 19 pandemic. This collection of 100 ‘new’ sonnets was written in collaboration with voice recognition software and explores the relation between the human and the digital, a dynamic which inevitably intensified during social distancing measures imposed upon communities during the Coronavirus outbreak. Shakespeare’s 100th Sonnet (“Where art thou Muse”) provided the primary text from which the 100 sonnets were created. Sonnet 100 examines the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through anomalies generated between human speech and computational voice recognition. These digital sonnets are frequently nonsensical yet poetic phrases emerge which resonate with the absurdities of our social and cultural lives.

Biography
Dr. Marilyn Allen is an artist, writer, lecturer and collaborator. Allen’s praxis involves collaborating with technology to examine how meaning is distributed between human and digital voices. Allen explores the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through the anomalies generated between the human voice and computational voice recognition systems. Allen describes this process as enacting ‘word events’ which generate a speculative space for the intensification of language. The diverse collaborative iterations and interactions adopted by Allen are a methodological approach to facilitate the synthesis of different voices and agencies.

Library Of—

By Dan Beachy-Quick
ISBN: ‎ 978-1736465820

Description
The artist Roni Horn’s permanent installation in Iceland, Library of Water, consists of floor-to-ceiling cylinders filled with water—melted ice from all of Iceland’s twenty-four glaciers. These poems are inspired by this simultaneous act of attention to crisis and preservation against it. The “library” of these poems imagines each letter of the alphabet as its own peculiar archive, part deeply personal, part radically in common. Each poem seeks to catalog a set of associations embedded in the memories, experiences, and curious resonances each letter evokes. The urgency underlying the project—not exactly ecological, but not exactly not—lurks in that vague but omnipresent sense of oblivion’s inevitability. This is tied to the ancient Greek sense of ἀλήθεια, truth as that which shines out of actual being, and the λήθη hidden in that same word, that oblivion, that forgetting—that melting away as of ice into water and water into air—that abides in what truth we know.

Biography
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include Arrows (Tupelo 2020) and a translation of ancient Greek lyric poetry, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions 2020). His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.