Coming Soon!
dispersed holdings is thrilled to announce the publication of two new books: *A New English Grammar by Jeff Dolven and The Uses of Art by Sal Randolph. The books will be available during a pre-launch at the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair from October 13-16, 2022. *A New English Grammar and The Uses of Art will be officially released in early November, 2022. PREORDER NOW FROM SPD.
Information about launch events and celebrations is forthcoming. Stay tuned!
Praise for *A New English Grammar
In Wittgenstein’s later writing, he proves the dependence of grammar on context. The strangest sentences make sudden sense in the right context, while the most familiar phrases—on investigation—sound suddenly strange. *A New English Grammar undertakes the same transformation in a lyric context. “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is,” Wittgenstein proposes, and here it tells us the object is poetry. For the philosopher, being alert to grammar saves us from being misled into error; for the poet, it seduces us into reverie. “Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy,” Wittgenstein learned, “is the hardest thing.” The same could be said for poetry, and Dolven makes it look easy.
— Craig Dworkin
A philosophical poetics, an excursus and dithyramb, a riddling undoing of rule and prescribed rightness, Jeff Dolven’s *A New English Grammar swims deep into beautifully distressed, surprising waters. I was about to about to about to about to say it is unlike anything else, and I am saying it. Dolven has the peculiar capacity to rewire your brain. “A-wandering somewhere” and a wondering through and with grammar, this book shows how error spurs the poet’s errand, grammar births lyric glamour, and the apparently wrong sponsors a new kind of song. This is brilliant mindfuckery and tender art.
— Maureen N. McLane
About the Book
The poems in *A New English Grammar begin from the bad sentences in traditional grammar, the ones marked with an asterisk in the handbooks. They are experiments in making a new language where the counterexample—*he had had gone, *we’ve got any milk, *he was recognizing her—can be exemplary, and therefore also experiments in imagining new worlds.
Each poem is accompanied by an exacting, authoritative, intermittently slant facing-page explanation of the rules it breaks. A theory of poetry as the confusion of mistake and premise develops from the conversation between them. No book can hope to reform all the systematic constraints on English usage, nor to redeem all the foreclosed possibilities of syntax and idiom, but this one makes a start.
About the Author
Jeff Dolven is a poet and a scholar of poetry in no particular order. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, and in a collection, Speculative Music; his books of criticism include Senses of Style and In Other Words. He teaches at Princeton University and is an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine.
Praise for The Uses of Art
Sal Randolph’s The Uses of Art is a dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent and—I’ll say it—profound examination of the relationships between human beings and art, with the understanding that there’s often no clear boundary between the two. It’s rigorous, wide-ranging, and full of the emotion and humor often missing from books about art. It altered and expanded my own awareness, which is not something I say often, or lightly, about any book of any kind.
— Michael Cunningham
A precious book of textured passions and reverential restlessness. Sal Randolph’s hungry, generous, roiling intelligence both entwines and unfolds the works of art on which her attention falls. And she uses them to do the good work—the work of words and hands, of self and other, of pain and politics; the beautiful work of living—from the soul to the skin, out through the eyes and ears and lungs (and back). Michel Foucault, famously, distinguished “experience books” from “demonstration books”: the latter think they know what they should, and think you should know it too; “experience books” are achievements of self-experimentation that body forth the contingency, openness, twisting labor, and infinite potential of true emancipation. They are invitations. This is an experience book par excellence.
— D. Graham Burnett
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book that provides what the best art experiences do: the kiss that wakes you up. My secret name for this book is How to See. Sal Randolph has built here a portal into the magic of performance art and more traditional art. For those who love and who hate museums and galleries, who often feel disappointed but sometimes unbelievably thrilled and even transformed by an experience of art, this is a mind-expanding companion and guide. And it is, in itself, a giddy pleasure to read.
— Bonnie Friedman
Waking up, over and over again, to see, to recognize, to not recognize—how many ways can we expand and become intimate with the art before us, in us, around us? Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again. And, in reading Sal Randolph’s text, allowing ourselves to be delighted by word and idea, as well.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
On her sublime tour of familiar and exotic artistic realms, Sal Randolph is both companion and docent—you’ll learn a ton and fall in love with her in the process. But The Uses of Art is also genuinely useful. In its gentle way the book is deeply, subversively, empowering. It may change the way you experience art. It will certainly change the way you think about it.
— Adam Moss
About the Book
The Uses of Art is a memoir of transformative encounters with art, asking what it would mean to make use of art in the way we make free and personal use of music and literature. Artist and writer Sal Randolph answers with stories of sitting eye-to-eye with Marina Abramović, making the pilgrimage to Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, and returning again and again to a Tiepolo painting at the Met. The Uses of Art invites readers into new methods of looking, engaging with both the classic museum visit and with contemporary art, including the work of Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, David Horvitz, Juliana Huxtable, Donald Judd, Ragnar Kjartansson, Agnes Martin, Bernadette Mayer, Aki Sasamoto, and Tino Sehgal. Liberating and emboldening, this book will change the way you experience art.
Foreword by Paul Soulellis. Afterword conversation with Adam Moss.
About the Authors
Sal Randolph is an artist and writer who lives in New York and works between language and action. Her language works have been featured in BOMB, jubilat, Sound American, and elsewhere; her performance and social art works have appeared internationally at museums and in exhibitions including the Glasgow International, Ljubljana Biennial, Manifesta 4, and the São Paulo Biennial. She has taught at Princeton and Bennington College. Sal Randolph is co-founder of dispersed holdings.
Paul Soulellis (foreword) is an artist and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. His practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies and network culture. He is founder/director of Queer. Archive.Work, a nonprofit reading room, publishing studio, and artists’ residency, and Department Head and Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design.
Adam Moss (conversation) is an editor and journalist. He worked as the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine and editor of The New York Times Magazine. He was the founding editor of 7 Days.