︎



Dominic James Jaeckle
(Assorted Books & Paper Matter)

A press called Tenement
A magazine called Hotel 
Curriculum Vitae








Dominic J. Jaeckle is an author, publisher, editor and broadcaster. Jaeckle runs & manages Tenement Press, and curated & collated the irregular magazine series Hotel (& its adjacent projects), 2016 to 2023. Jaeckle at work on a series of “paper planes” under the banner John Cassavetes.
.





                                                              
As John Cassavetes ...


                                                   
i.    
            36 EXPOSURES (A Bastardised Roll of Film) †        
            with Hoagy Houghton
            designed & typeset by Ana Baliza                 
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-4-9                                
ii.    
            MAGNOLIA or REDBUD (Flowers for Laura Lee) †
            with Laura Lee Burroughs
            designed & typeset Traven T. Croves          
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-5-6


            †         Forthcoming








(Other) Collaborations & Ephemera ...


                                                           

  •         with Benjamin Pickford,
            The Paintgrinder : Ralph Waldo Emerson & Karl Marx
            on a Horizon of Thought
            (see here), ℅ a journal called Capitalism / Penn Press



  •         with Nadia de Vries,
            Verse & Chorus : A radio work, a sonic collage ...

Featuring an  assembly of verses (de Vries & Jaeckle) amidst a patchwork quilt of borrowed noises (& a score by Matthew Shaw, & accompaniment from Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood); with readings by Nadia de Vries, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Cíntia Gil, Mark Lanegan, Stanley Schtinter, Becket Flannery, & Vilde Bjerke Torset.


           

            See Spotify ...




   




                                                                
As Tenement Press (in order of appearance) ...


                                                    


i.
            Joan Brossa, tr. Cameron Griffiths
            El saltamartí / The Tumbler
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-1-9 


   
Joan Brossa creates distilled excitement. He is both wise and wild. His poems are surreal and matter-of-fact, playful and minimalist and utterly original. In his ability to make it new, Brossa is an essential modern poet.
Colm Tóibín

Playful, sharp, unbelievably fresh, ironic and free, Brossa’s poetry translates wonderfully into English as an ode to irreverence, a work of art and a magician’s trick. As the curtain rises the words appear, the wordsmith is here, the wizard is here. Hold tight. Abracadabra.
 Irene Solá

A breath of fresh (Catalan) air or a scream? This book, in the original & in this excellent English translation, is both at the same time. It is fresh in the plain openness and open plainness of the language, & a scream of pure delight when you discover that the tumbler of the title is the people, who, despite despotic abuse, will ever land on their feet. This is a poetry all in support of that tumbler, doing its best to help right itself—bluntly, without irony, and with the iron of conviction that freedom is a core value.
Pierre Joris

Brossa has always been a solid reference point; and remains an endearing and comforting presence.
Pere Portabella





ii.
            Stanley Schtinter,
            The Liberated Film Club
            (see here) , ISBN: 978-1-8380200-3-3
            feat. John Akomfrah, Chloe Aridjis, Dennis Cooper, 
            Laura Mulvey, Chris Petit, Mania Akbari, Elena Gorfinkel, 
            Juliet Jacques, Ben Rivers, Dan Fox, Sean Price Williams, 
            Adam Christensen, Stewart Home, Stephen Watts, Tony Grisoni, 
            Gideon Koppel, Astra Taylor, Miranda Pennell, Gareth Evans,
            Adam Roberts, Tai Shani, Anna Thew, Xiaolu Guo, 
            Andrea Luka Zimmerman, William Fowler, Athina Tsangari, 
            John Rogers, Shama Khanna, Shezad Dawood, Damien Sanville,
            & Stanley (& Winstanley) Schtinter



I’m a sucker for genre-defying “What is it?” books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged inside might consist of.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Screen Slate



iii.  
            Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger,
            Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-4-0

(A White Review ‘Book of the Year,’ 2022)





The perils of translating ancient poetry from the East into English (say Arabic, Persian or Tamil) are many: the rich images and archaic language often trigger a fawning orientalism that dilutes the complexity of the material. The text risks slipping into the abyss of easily accessible platitudes. As the poems flip back and forth between Seale and Moger, they accrue a kind of poetic difficulty that is hard to reduce to cliches. The translations are approximations of a source poem—in some instances there is a flash of clarity, in others a profusion of ambiguity. They defy the expectation that a translation must decipher or explicate—the poems flicker in the margin between the known and unknowable. For all that the book conceals, the process reveals itself fully—the translator’s hand is plainly visible, their calibrations conspicuous.
Janani Ambikapathy, Modern Poetry in Translation


In this heavenly and heartbreaking collection, the nasibs, preludes or love-songs of Mohieddin Ibn Arabi are translated to vividly retell the human erotics of divine love. The dialogic method of the translator-poets means that each poem is a collaborative attempt to retrieve a passion that is elusive and ‘steady;’ set to ‘sliding scales,’ the lyric like a ‘waterski’ on the distance between them. The imagery is touching and evocative, sweet and spiritual. The reader is reminded of a love that is active and ongoing, told in a linguistic tense that subtly, tragically, holds the sought for moment away from us. We may never find anything that gets as close to the deferring grammar of love as the phrase, ‘when held.’  Through these translations of ancient poems, we remember that love produces a relationship with time. The lover of a love poem is looking forward to it, already in its wake, mourning and restarting to yearn. It’s like a spiritual lesson in how to love God, where the erotics of times’ surfaces react to each other, causing a space like grace, and a situated feeling ‘Regardless of where you are’. In nuanced and humble syntax, Seale and Moger recreate in English the event of fresh longing in every word, as accurate as it is provisional. They do this with tender and careful poetry, finding in the original a fleeting but piercing voice, as if from underneath another voice, fragmented and reaching for its reply. Small elliptic lines, ‘no fun being locked here,’ create all the more agitated air for intimacy.  
Holly Pester

Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless—it can dance this way and that, and then turn and turn again. The exchange of voices, singing lines that meet and part, pick up on the presence of the lover and the beloved in the poems; as Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger pass each newly wrought phrase back and forth between them, the distance between Seale in Istanbul and Moger in Cape Town is bridged, and so are the centuries that separate us from Ibn Arabi, his motifs, his mystical ascents and descents, and his anguished yearning. This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.
Marina Warner



iv. 
            SJ Fowler,
            MUEUM / A Novella
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-6-4

(Shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, 2022/2023)



A strange, absurd, difficult book by a hero of London’s poetry scene, MUEUM is disconcerting and enlightening. Reading it feels like walking beside the author through a lucid nightmare—as real and unreal as our own dreams, as illogical and packed with implication, but taken to horrendous extremes. At his best, Fowler shows us what would happen if we could freeze-frame and pursue the bits of our own daily lives that make it into our sleep states: a terrifying array of the small and menial alongside the vast, ghastly, and symbolic. Without affectation, in a voice very much his own, he comes close to the uncomfortable truth-telling of Ballard, McCarthy, Céline, and the rest of the minatory canon who form the backdrop to this remarkable fiction debut.
Guy Stevenson, The Los Angeles Review of Books 




v.
            Jeffrey Vallance,
            A Voyage to Extremes:
            Selected Spiritual Writings
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-5-7



Jeffrey Vallance is our Philip Marlowe, quite literally our private eye, with a private vision of pied beauty and sacred banality that extends to the horizon.
Dave Hickey

Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes seems to me to be the most successful literary embodiment of the human cognitive structures that have evolved with the internet—not from imitation, but from pre-existing structural resonance. A playful, weightless curiosity may seem like a fey and inconsequential thing, but when it drifts across a border as if the border wasn’t there, watch out! That’s when Luther’s excrement hits the Devil’s fan!
Doug Harvey, Artillery Magazine



vi. 
            Kyra Simone,
            with assorted photographs
            by John Divola
            Palace of Rubble
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-7-1



Epics are generally in sections or cantos, but there’s also a narrative coherency that supersedes the modular nature of the individual poems. Palace of Rubble is that way, too; there's no single dominant narrative that asserts itself across every story, but there are narrative currents and recurring characters and preoccupations. The sections flow into each other in a way that also feels reminiscent of a certain kind of deconstructed epic. If the linebreak is a technology that creates “units” or slows the pace of the reader’s eye on the page, I would argue that part of the power of the prose in Palace of Rubble has to do with the lack of separation, the lack of breath or space between ideas, and how that density operates on our attention. Each chunk of prose becomes its own edifice.
Maggie Millner, BOMB

Like traditional methods of salting, pickling, drying, and smoking, Palace of Rubble saves transitory substance from expiration. From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, the patterns and variations on patterns that define the sphere of the daily, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure. The world she constructs is recognizable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact, possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time—a lamp store in Chinatown is “a gallery of lights all blinking in dissonant rays of color,” the disassembling of a famous church that will be put together a few miles up the road is rendered via “the villagers holding pieces of it in their hands as they head over the hill in a great procession into the distance.”  As the author herself puts it, these texts retain “a distant ember of the world from which they were first generated,” an effect that can feel for the reader like peering into a place that is both familiar and unknown, gazing at this place through the blur and distance implied by the passage of large swathes of time, physical displacement or shifts in ontological perspective.
Alexandra Kleeman




vii.
            Pier Paolo Pasolini, tr. Cristina Viti
            La rabbia / Anger
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-8-8



La rabbia is a sequence of poems and commentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1963, made to accompany a documentary of the same name—a departure from the fictionalised studies of Roman poverty that defined his earlier work. Trawling through some 90,000 metres of archive footage, the director gathered a collection of images and footage portraying recent events, including the Hungarian Revolution, the Algerian War, the Korean War and the Suez Crisis. Much of the text of La rabbia / Anger didn’t make the final cut; even so, with music and narration overlaid on frenetic and disturbing scenes, the film sometimes tips into overload. The words are better appreciated on their own and Cristina Viti’s fresh translation captures their grim vitality.
Mark Glanville, The Times Literary Supplement

La rabbia remains one of Pasolini’s most singular achievements, an all-consuming expression of the restless and relentless fury that defined his work and his thinking. In an age of increasingly one-dimensional political art, this most welcome volume is an urgent reminder of its dizzying possibilities.
Dennis Lim

Pasolini’s poems thrive with passion and outrage. A 20th century Dante, he grieves at inequity, feels disgusted by corruption, and wails against the evil that people do. Pasolini doesn’t render a coming paradise, but contests hate with love, meanness with generosity, and through the reality of his beautiful poems, suggests the possibility of creating a better world.
Lynne Tillman

Pasolini saw what was coming, and saw the poet’s mission as an excoriation of this world to come, that has now arrived. His tremendous energy was not negative. It came from an abounding love of the world. Picturing himself like a hero from ancient days, he struggled mightily, in and against the powers arrayed against life. What he called neocapitalism already came with its own brands of neofascism. Good comrade that he was, he knew the mark of our enemies, and where to direct his rage. Here we find him in a moment when he thought the good fight might still be won. A book to give us courage.
McKenzie Wark

La Rabbia, Pasolini’s anger, penetrates the untruths still beating in Western capitalism’s dark imperial neoliberal heart.
Alistair Findlay, The Morning Star




viii.
            Reza Baraheni,
            Lilith / A Novella
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-8380200-9-5




Baraheni is a literary man, so his revolt took the form of breathing “reality and harshness” into the Persian language, and turning it against his oppressors.
Kirkus


Iran’s finest poet
Harper's



ix.
            Dolors Miquel, tr. Peter Bush
            El guant de plàstic rosa /
            The Pink Plastic Glove
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-0-1



Dolors Miquel is the grand disappearer of words, with a style so lucid, and savage, that it makes tangible the invisible behind words and the long blank at the end of meaning without ever losing faith in the power of language to do exactly that. I’m struggling to say exactly what the experience of reading this book feels like, which is exactly the effect of this supremely discomfiting book, to be in the un-worded presence, through words themselves, of the sacred. The Pink Plastic Glove is a supreme act of faith and despair.
David Keenan




†
            Seven Rooms (Tenement Press & Prototype)
            (eds.) D. J. Jaeckle & J. Chandler
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-913513-46-7
            feat. Dominic J. Jaeckle, Jess Chandler, Mario Dondero,
            Erica Baum, Jess Cotton, Rebecca Tamás, Stephen Watts,
            Helen Cammock, Salvador Espriu, Lucy Mercer, Lucy Sante,
            Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Ryan Choi, John Yau, Nicolette Polek,
            Chris Petit, Sascha Macht, Amanda DeMarco, Mark Lanegan,
            Vala Thorodds, Richard Scott, Joshua Cohen, Hannah Regel,
            Nick Cave, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Matthew Gregory,
            Olivier Castel, Emmanuel Iduma, Joan Brossa, Cameron Griffiths,
            Imogen Cassel, Hisham Bustani, maia tabet, Raúl Guerrero,
            Velimir Khlebnikov, Natasha Randall, Edwina Attlee,
            Matthew Shaw, Aidan Moffat, Lesley Harrison, Oliver Bancroft,   
            Lauren de Sá Naylor, Will Eaves, Sandro Miller, Jim Hugunin,
            Levina van Winden, Aram Saroyan, Glykeria Patramani,
            Will Oldham, Antonio Tabucchi, Yasmine Seale,
            Elizabeth Harris, Nina Mingya Powles, Isabel Galleymore, 
            Jason Shulman, Jeffrey Vallance, Preti Taneja, Stanley Schtinter, 
            Wayne Koestenbaum, Sophie Seita, Ralf Webb, Jonathan
            Chandler, Iain Sinclair, SJ Fowler, Cass McCombs, David Grubbs,
            Agustín Fernández Mallo, Pere Joan, Thomas Bunstead,
            Adrian Bridget, John Divola, & Gareth Evans


     

Once a magazine, now an anthology, a selection, a condensing, a celebration, a feast, call it what you will, for this volume takes on different forms in the eyes of each reader.
Paul Buck

 A HOTEL IS DEFINED BY ITS INHABITANTS, runs Hotel’s tagline. If Hotel itself were a concrete edifice, it would be more like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’s Circus-Circus than the Grand Budapest, despite its tasteful, clean exterior. Its commitment to “new approaches to fiction, non-fiction and poetry” promises all manner of havoc. It is not the only journal committed to literary innovation, but it is among the best.
Camille Ralphs, The Times Literary Supplement




x.
            Stanley Schtinter
            Last Movies (A book of endings.)
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-1-8


All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment.
Alan Moore

Wade more than a dozen pages into Last Movies and these connections start to reveal themselves like constellations on a cloudless night.
Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian
           
            •

            For the Tenement Press / purge.xxx ltd. edition,
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-6-3







xi.
            Mario Benedetti, tr. Adam Feinstein
            El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel’s Birthday
            (see here), ISBN: 978-1-7393851-2-5 





It’s extremely difficult to find a poem which fulfils the condition of a novel and a lyrical text without betraying both. El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel achieves this feat through experimental verse. It’s an extraordinary river-poem in which, without abandoning the nucleus of poetic art, Benedetti takes the genre of militancy and the pamphlet a step further. As if a true Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the protagonist passes through different stages as revolutionary as they are imbued with a biblical, epic quality. It is so fortunate for all those discerning English-speaking readers that this book is now published.

Agustín Fernández Mallo

The work of Mario Benedetti, my friend and brother, is surprising in all its aspects, whether the varied extent of genres it touches, the density of its poetic expression or the extreme conceptual freedom it employs.

José Saramago