HOSTILE BOOKS

FREE SERIES

The free series consists of books made of cheap, everyday materials.

They are constructed with chaotic ease.

They are full of errors.

They are studies in decay.

They are sometimes totally defective.

They are an endeavor in frailty.

They are produced and distributed with no expectation of compensation or reward.

They will not last.

Proceed cautiously.

TITLES

#1: Lemon Books

     1.0 NO - All copies circulated

     1.1 LEMON - All copies circulated

#2: Trump l'oeil - All copies circulated.

#3: Sign Climacteric - All copies circulated

#4: Exploited Labor series - 4 autostereograms, like those made popular in the 1990s by the Magic Eye series. Cross your eyes just so to reveal a 3D image. Request a copy by emailing [email protected]

HAZARDOUS MATERIALS

The transaction of controlled substances often involves substantial risk for purveyor and buyer alike.

Their circulation is limited.

The production processes employed in the creation of some of these books are hazardous and labor-intensive, and they are priced accordingly.

The authors have taken pains to ensure that textual interface, if improperly or incautiously negotiated, will be painful.

TITLES

#1: Asbestos, Vol. 1 - Under quarantine.

#2: emmenagogue - 4 Left

#3: Hand Maid - All copies circulated

#4: UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY - ?

#5: Crude Intimacies - All copies circulated

FREE SPEECH

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ 

socially fungible 

lithium sonnet 

w/prime afterlife  

14 of 14 of 14 

--> $28.18 [includes 

shipping]: “Free Speech: Sonnet on 

Fourteen One Dollar Bills

in a Container with Several

Copies of this Sonnet, Each 

Line Available to Purchase for 

One Dollar and Fourteen Cents

#1” by Joe Hall. To purchase contact

I grew up so close to it. The distance between us was the height of two stories in an old building in Tehran, the distance between the basement and the second floor. Oil (Naft) was kept in different amounts as part of any household’s essential supplies. It was commonly used for heaters, lanterns, and stoves. Like rice, potatoes, and onions, Naft was a staple of any Iranian household during the Iran-Iraq war, and in the following years of frequent blackouts and continued scarcity.

Once Naft was no longer a household element in my adult life, I still felt close to it in myriad abstract ways every day. From the rubber keyboard cover I am typing this text on, to the parts of this computer; the socks I am wearing and the floor under my feet, I am surrounded by petroleum byproducts. Despite its presence in numerous everyday objects we consume, crude oil is often reduced to a figure indicating its price per barrel: $50.49 on October 3, 2017 when I began researching this project; $70.74 on June 26, 2018 when I am about to print this book. Through the oil market and its effects on geopolitics, we understand petroleum as constantly fluctuating figures. This abstraction affords us the necessary distance to accept crude oil and the industry’s reliance on death by removing oil’s most biological manifestation: smell. This removal continues to normalize the cannibalist practice of putting our millions of years old ancestors back into our bodies in the form of different hydrocarbons’ byproducts that look and smell nothing like death.

This is where I would like to begin experimenting with this book. The objects I have chosen for the photograms include many beauty products, polyester, sunscreen, ink, rubbing alcohol, crayons, candles, condoms, Ibuprofen, nail polish, dye, and golf balls among others. The photograms are bookended with photographs I had taken in 2007 in Genaveh Port in the oil-rich South of Iran.

—Gelare Khoshgozaran

Black and white photograms on paper.

40 pp, risograph printing, perfect bound. $30.

Cover design and printing by Tiny Splendor.

Copies available on request.

one of many beloveds says, why do they only want us when we are grieving, and i say, when are we not grieving? not to be all suffering and pain defines me, cuz fuck you, but seriously when am i not holding back tears or yelling at you til i drop, and you just go on like you are white. wtvr being a word i stole from yours to stay numb enough to kill you. jk, feds, jk. the world is broken enough that if you kill me, i may or may not be remembered. it has come down to needing to remove the body, and cry in peace on a full stomach, but really isn’t this all just hell, aka a line, aka forever delaying our ability to touch. i will never forgive you. stop trying. i will never love you, no matter how many times you threaten to never love me, because the trick is that your threat hides the fact that you offer to withhold what you never had. bluff after bluff called imperial hustle. this is a sealed object even when you think it’s for you, even when you open the pages like readers trapped by the eternal, you dust, you gone. deadbeat amerikkka, you been riding our horses into the ocean, and driving us over cliffs since i had a history. your dead beats and your pretty plaids: multiculturalism, like colored squares. you win, and i lose. you live, and i die. you vote, and i don’t.

                                                               color this in without color:

                                                                           this is what we do.

                                      we, the monster that you kill in your sleep.

                                may we survive another night, in the shadows.

—Raquel Salas Rivera

When asked, I proposed a wet chapbook on “the climacteric” as a Hostile Book.

Climacteric: a crucial event, a tipping point in earth’s history and in a woman’s body, in botany regarded as “ripening on the vine,” and in western medicine, who regards the woman as useful only if procreating, synonymous with “decline.” There is a narrowed vasomotor tolerance range leading to an over-response to heat; there is sweat and its accompanying social revulsion; there is thin sleep, exhaustion, and the desire for retreat.

A Hostile Book: a paper book sealed in a zip-lock bag called GLAD with at least one tablespoon of water. A sweaty book. The reader chooses to open, to touch the wet pages, to try and read it, or to leave it sealed up to possibly break down and transform—both choices being ways to read/touch the planet and the body of a woman not young but knowing, on her way to death but not ending.

This long poem is part of a longer work featuring a middle-aged woman walking through an imaginary city that is not quite the Middle East and not quite the US Midwest. Situated in many middles, she feels anything but average and dull. She feels the heat of insights acutely as she investigates cellular respiration, citizenship and so-called free speech, the feminized labor of teaching, and the menopause instruction to “give birth to yourself.” As a poet and artist this last bit of advice is useless; she’s only ever birthed herself. Menopausal whales, good at distributing resources, make an appearance.

This Hostile Book may be a punk text—but it is not the singular voice of a rebel in her twenties breaking away from family, acquiring addictions, wearing fish-nets with cut-off shorts and so on. This life-stage language is pacing itself, just as this subject must: warding off exhaustion and bullshit she can’t control so as to be receptive to self while optimally networked with others.

—Jill Magi

On October 18, 2016, some two weeks before the U.S. A. presidential election, I was one of several individuals who received a general call for work from Hostile Books. After poking around the press’ website and looking at previous work, I replied on November 12, 2016, four days after the election, with a proposal: fifty-two crushed tissue boxes containing epithets directed at the president-elect, though largely inspired by the campaign season. I don’t recall exactly how I generated this idea; I do know I wanted to play around with three interrelated ideas: the nostalgia for a return to the country’s childhood when there were “only” thirteen colonies, the incorporation of the District of Columbia and territory of Puerto Rico as “states” within empire (hence fifty-two boxes) and the “illusion” of three-dimensional space as isomorphic with, for lack of a better word, “reality.” The partial destruction of the tissue boxes represents the “intrusion” of temporality (I smashed each box with my right foot in my office), that “fourth” dimension called change which undermines every status quo, every “state,” as such. But in my initial response to Hostile Books I also said I wanted the tissues to be used—sneezed on, coughed on, etc. I eventually decided against the hazmat route (but if there is a next time…) since I’d be forced to either wait until I actually had to sneeze or cough or fake it—the exigencies of the academic year made the former too chancy per the deadline and I didn’t want to do the latter. Instead, each of the fifty-two boxes contains thirteen inscribed tissues, one-liners, single zingers that nonetheless continue to be outperformed by the antics of the leader of the…ahem…free world. The ephemeral status of the project constitutes a shot across the bow…

—Tyrone Williams

Sample poems:

Author: Claire Nashar

Women have historically controlled fertility and reproduction through ingestion of herbs and plants. emmenagogue features paper handmade from plants used for centuries to control menstruation, for contraception, and to induce abortions. Some plants featured in the book, such as the common cooking herbs sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley, do not have negative effect when ingested orally. Others, such as rue and pennyroyal, have been since scientifically proven capable of causing serious injury depending on dosage.

While the usage of potentially dangerous herbal abortifacients has become uncommon in the United States due to the development of safe, medical abortions and birth control, lack of access to safe, legal abortions continue to push women into unsafe reproductive choices.  emmenagogue not only points to the historical reality of women's reproduction and the inherent physical dangers to women when reproductive rights are restricted, but through its circulation, emmenagogue will highlight the numerous medically unnecessary legislative methods used by U.S. state governments to restrict women's access to abortion. emmenagogue will be made available in states with the most restrictive access and most medically unnecessary requirements placed on women seeking abortions. We will then add states primarily based on the availability of safe, legal abortions and birth control in the state.

Full copies of emmenagogue are available for $50.

Ingredients: potato, lemon, water soluble ink, staples, printer and construction paper.

LEMON contains poems made of real lemons.

LEMON attempts to literalize a wager about the currency of words, about their abilities to summon objects.

LEMON rejects the notion of currency.

LEMON is a translation.

LEMON does not believe in translation.

LEMON is a liar.

LEMON is alone. For now.

LEMON wants to touch you in the eye.

LEMON demands to be touched.

READING INSTRUCTIONS

TO PARTIALLY READ NO AND LEMON PREHEAT OVEN TO 350 DEGREES.

LOOSELY WRAP BOOKS IN FOIL.

PLACE EACH BOOK IN THE CENTER RACK OF OVEN. 

AT 17-20 MINUTES CHECK LEMON FOR LEGIBILITY. 

AT 30-35 MINUTES CHECK NO FOR LEGIBILITY.

  REMOVE EACH BOOK WHEN THE INK IS LEGIBLE ENOUGH AND BEFORE THE PAPER BECOMES AS DARK AS THE INK.

IF NO INK HAS APPEARED, CONTINUE BAKING.

AIM FOR SOMETHING BETWEEN TOASTED AND BURNT.

Asbestos Series

Email subject lines by .org-anizations printed on six nonfriable asbestos gaskets.

Individual pieces are currently available for $50 each.

For purchasing information, contact Mike Flatt ([email protected]).

Ingredients: potato, lemon, water soluble ink, staples, printer and construction paper.

NO is rapidly decaying.

NO contains one poem: “No.”

“No” cannot be read.

READING INSTRUCTIONS

TO PARTIALLY READ NO AND LEMON PREHEAT OVEN TO 350 DEGREES.

LOOSELY WRAP BOOKS IN FOIL.

PLACE EACH BOOK IN THE CENTER RACK OF OVEN. 

AT 17-20 MINUTES CHECK LEMON FOR LEGIBILITY. 

AT 30-35 MINUTES CHECK NO FOR LEGIBILITY.

REMOVE EACH BOOK WHEN THE INK IS LEGIBLE ENOUGH AND BEFORE THE PAPER BECOMES AS DARK AS THE INK.

IF NO INK HAS APPEARED, CONTINUE BAKING.

AIM FOR SOMETHING BETWEEN TOASTED AND BURNT.