¶    Select Spines    /
As Author



Veronica lake, Walden Pond & River Phoenix / A three-part sequence of prose poems, a ‘Legend of Duluoz’ in which the author argues with varied objects of attention in a borderless field of enquiry.


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2    Magnolia or Redbud    /    
Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs
31.07.24            978-1-7393851-5-6        
                            Tenement Press / John Cassavetes

I had a chlorophyll habit.
       —William S. Burroughs

¶    In the late 1930s, The Coca-Cola Company aimed to spearhead a campaign to better establish their product as a household staple and enrapture the middle-class homemaker’s market. A Trojan horse, the resulting promotion was run through the distribution of a ¢10 mail-order publication via Good Housekeeping on flower arrangement. Three illustrated editions, authored by St. Louis resident Laura Lee Burroughs, that would explore the practice of domestic and decorative horticulture as a means of sitting a bottle side-by-side with a bouquet: Flower Arranging: A Fascinating Hobby (Volumes i and ii) and Homes & Flowers: Refreshing Arrangements.
       In 1940, the first of Burroughs’ works was offered to the public to a thunderous reception. More than a million and a half copies were printed to meet the degree of demand, and a second and third volume would follow in 1941 and 1942. Following the first outdoor wall advertisement for Coca-Cola—a hand painted sign Cartersville, Georgia, 1894—the replacement of the spring-sealed Hutchinson bottle with the signature hobble-skirt design of 1915, and the company’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, 1935, the campaign cemented Coca-Cola’s market centrality and enflamed its suburban appeal.
       Mother of author William S. Burroughs, Laura Lee’s work sits as in poetic counterpoint to her son’s subsequent experiments with collage and cut-up—a formal flower arrangement of his own—and the poems collected in Magnolia or Redbud mimic the Burroughs brand of appropriation and textual re-combination by borrowing words and phrases pooled exclusively from Laura Lee’s three publications for Coca-Cola as a basis from which to essay an afterwork out of the family habit.

With collage-works
by Lucy Sante;
& an afterword
by David Keenan


Magnolia or Redbud is a beguiling, intoxicating mystery garden. In its hothouse alcoves, groves and bosquets, figures and figurations merge into shadowy projections that flit between domestic and psychic scenes. Like cut flowers, Jaeckle’s poems sit in a medium that both nurtures and traps them, formally thwarting their speaker’s quest for secrets and centres. What to do with the floral impulse to locate a centre, when the centre is understood to be a trojan horse filled with market forces, and the alienated variegations of desire? Jaeckle demonstrates how the cut-up’s disruption is also its irrigation, suspending these poems in quiet menace and beauty.
       —Daisy Lafarge

This beautifully composed volume also goes beyond the more familiar uses of the cut-up, fashioning an unpredictable array of gifts through its trance-like modalities.
       —David Grubbs

My mother returning to me is one of the primal images of my life. Added to all this, I could not help marvelling, is what booksellers call a sort of brogue. These are all part and parcel of this precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me ...
       —David Keenan, from his afterword,
       ‘Redbud, or Her First Voyage’


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1    36 Exposures   /    
A Bastardised Roll of Film
Texts by Dominic J. Jaeckle    /    
Photographs by Hoagy Houghton    /
Designed & typseset by Ana Baliza

31.07.24                978-1-7393851-4-9  
                                Tenement Press / John Cassavetes  

¶    The methodology was as follows. Over the course of a single year, 2018, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying prose-work for each image.
       At the year’s end, the resulting collection would cover twelve months, comprising thirty-six images and thirty-six reactions, and express itself as a roll of film in the abstract. A contact sheet spoilt by written interventions; an index of distractions and elaborations; an array of materials that pictures a false or disrupted communication as ideas are exchanged and images developed over the course of a calendar year.
       From the onset of the project to its end, Jaeckle and Houghton never met in person—this exchange of materials was their only means of communication—and thus, this collaboration is a form of conversation twelve-months wide and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days long. The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal; short stories, prose-poems, and assimilated citations. The images are largely personal: snapshots; familiar faces; passing objects of interest and attention. The resulting Exposures project is a near-novel, a broken love song, an experiment in a direct and indirect address of ideas in both high and low resolution, at high and low tide, when the moon is up, and when the sun is near.


This feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. While there are encounters by the galore, and biographical instants dropped like crumbs on a forest walk, the focus here is not on the story, but the lighting, the staging, the choreography of digression. Talk about talking. In these mirrors are reflections of a lost brother, an almost date, an almost self, on the times we used to have, the blood rites we shared until we couldn’t. Black and white photos offer starting points to think about colour. What colour is the memory of brother? The photographs offer shadowy basement creatures caught in the half light, as if the camera wasn’t even there, vacuuming up every decisive moment. Pensive, coiled, we are dropped in the midst of a drama that will need to bury a few Russian philosophers before life can begin again. And coursing through it all this essential belief: that the right painted apple, the right sentence—the right thought—would change the world. The revolution is in the waiting room.
        —Mike Hoolboom

According to the Midrash, the light created by God on the first day of creation shone for exactly 36 hours. What lasting images were developed in that moment?

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Writing as an organising principle. 
Writing as complete commitment.

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Jaeckle shows us the difference between watching and looking. Between staring and focussing. Between thought-making and thinking. 

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36 Exposures is a source book containing enough ejector seats for Jaeckle to get high as a writer for the rest of his life.

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Camera exposure relies on light to make a picture darker or lighter. The more light, the brighter the photograph.     
        —Chris McCabe, from his afterword, 
       ‘36 Expositions’


(First published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe 2021)