SPAM Press (C) 2022
SPAM Press are delighted to welcome you to Series 6 of our pamphlet series. For stock and review copies: >kirsty.spamzine@gmail.com For press/author interviews: >alice.spamzine@gmail.com
series director & design maria sledmere editors mau baiocco kirsty dunlop alice hill-woods max parnell
Contents Ali Graham, Wreathing Gonçalo Lamas, some times zero hours Ian Macartney, ! / Object Jay Gao, TRAVESTY58: Lake Poems Parel Joy, The Queen of Cups and Other Poems :) :)
Ali Graham, Wreathing Wreathing is alive with fresh possibilities for the sonnet form. The extensive use of prepositions shows the ways in which queerness repositions subjects with respect to one another. These poems ask the reader to follow them past the familiar and it is worthwhile to do. Graham disrupts the complacency of the cis heteronormative tradition metrically and gifts the reader a greater appreciation for the complexity of human networks. — Julia Rose Lewis I love Wreathing, it’s my favourite way to travel. Its density entraps nobody; there is no full stop. The sonnets spill into one another and flip themselves over, knocking against undefinable things. Reading them was being ‘borne / horselessly awry’ through a long valley of gold-flecked apple orchards, pulled to the point of saying something tender and mirrorish like ‘I love Wreathing, it’s my favourite way to travel’. — Kat Addis About the author: Ali Graham lives and works in Norwich. Their poetry has been published by The Tangerine and Cambridge Literary Review, and their essays have been published by Fruit Journal and Stride. They have a pamphlet called Shade Song Sea Dream forthcoming from Distance No Object, a pamphlet called English radiant ground forthcoming from Osmanthus Press, and a book called Shop talk forthcoming with Veer2. They are interested in folds, film, and duration, and they can be found online on Instagram as @aligrhm and on Twitter as @A__Graham . 32pp. £5 RRP ISBN: 978-1-915049-11-7
Gonçalo Lamas’ some times zero hours Gonçalo Lamas’ some times zero hours is a something of a ‘common place’, through the perils and preciousness of London living seen from the vantage-point of pandemic time; the continual crisis at present as the subtended contemporary arcs through the plenum we call social life. Drifting through digitally-mediated urban environs, prosodically and metonymically, through states of anxiety, irony, distaste and waywardness, the corporate capture of the everyday resisted and retold in spates of bodily motion and semantic resignification. We move together in Lamas’ foretelling assembly. — Kashif Sharma-Patel About the author: Gonçalo is an artist and writer from Porto, Portugal. After briefly studying film, he joined the BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2017, after a semester at UdK Berlin. In 2020, he presented the performance 'Boeing Nº 737800 in F#m' at Culturgest Porto and launched an accompanying bilingual book at the 6th Artist Self-Publishers’ Fair. ‘Granary Squares’, his first work for cinema, shot and edited in London, premiered at IndieLisboa International Film Festival, in 2021. ‘some times zero hours’, edited by SPAM Press, is his first poetry pamphlet. 40pp. RRP £5 ISBN: 978-1-915049-13-1
Ian Macartney, ! / Object Ian Macartney has mashed together a vibrant portrait of the way we live now, a living mausoleum disguised in a forest of words. His borrowed jagged language is restless, stuffed with images of whip-cracking wit, with one eye on the absurd ridiculousness we find ourselves living in, the other on our need to connect to the solid, the real, the natural, however contrived that might be. Did I say ‘! / Object’ was a hoot too? It’s that, and so much more.d so much more. — Rishi Dastidar Dripping in frantic lexical lushness, occult robotic desiredome, and dutifully desperate hotness... as rousing, raunchy and roistering as any word circus right(eous)ly should be. — Michael Pedersen About the author: Ian Macartney is a writer. He can be found at ianmacartney.scot. 32pp. RRP £5 ISBN: 978-1-915049-09-4
Jay Gao, TRAVESTY58: Lake Poems In Jay Gao's new pamphlet, ‘virtual ghosts’ reconfigure inert, recently shed skin to create an opaque shelter. For whom? Questions of home and touch co-mingled, for me, to generate a poetics both bodily and with-held. From whom? Thinking is private. ‘EMPTIED. BACKSPACE’. Yes. Like that. — Bhanu Kapil Jay Gao shreds the received text of the I Ching, smashes hegemonic translations with new procedures, pollutes nostalgia with corrupted files. TRAVESTY58 is meta data take over, a machine rereading with an oracular bent. The poet as mechanical Turk finds affinity with other lowly devices: printers, electric toothbrushes, and surveillance cameras. White is excretion, excess, scum. The page is toxic, melted, but also polished, varnished. Finding joy in the de-familiar, these poems harness the critical forces of detritus and refusal. — J. R. Carpenter About the author: Jay Gao is the author of Imperium (2022), forthcoming from Carcanet Press, as well as the poetry pamphlets, TRAVESTY58 (2022), Katabasis (2020), and Wedding Beasts (2019). He is a Contributing Editor for The White Review. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he is currently studying for an MFA at Brown University. 44pp. RRP £5 ISBN: 978-1-915049-10-0
Parel Joy, Queen of Cups and Other Poems Literature about contemporary urban Aberdeen is long overdue — here, Parel Joy’s poems express that strange grey cold sometimes-sparkling city through queerness, dykedom, a focus on utopic little moments where a lesbian commune can bake ‘sourdough loaves the size of a room’. These are poems strung between place and form, Amsterdam and Aberdeen, Dutch and Scots-informed English, a global displacement backlit by the whorls of late-capitalist affect. But also, critically, tenderness; care. A cottagecore unlimited. – Ian Macartney About the author: Parel Joy is a poet, writer and printmaker. Their work was previously published in Wicked Gay Ways, Blacklist Journal, The Gaudie and Hysteria, and their zine I Dreamt I Was Kissing a Stranger is currently for sale at Good Press in Glasgow. They were recently commissioned to design a temporary mural in Aberdeen's city centre, on view during June 2022, and their work was also included in the Unseen World printmaking exhibition in De Wintertuin, Antwerp. Parel relocated from Aberdeen to Antwerp in the summer of 2021, and occasionally works as a literary translator. The Queen of Cups and Other Poems is their pamphlet debut. 28pp. RRP £5 ISBN: 978-1-915049-12-4
The end.