The Last Books

The Last Books is a small press based in Amsterdam. It was founded in 2012 by typographer and writer Phil Baber and artist Snejanka Mihaylova. It publishes mainly experimental poetry and poetics, both in translation and in the English language. With Rietlanden Women’s Office, TLB co-organizes an occasional reading series, Don’t Pay Your Rent.

Keston Sutherland, Meditations, The Last Books, 2024 © Keston Sutherland

A manual of meditations on grief blocked by trauma, pliers, goats, remedies, meaning, conduits, suicide, eggs, times, tutting, God, lifts, treasury tags, wrecking yards, Douglas Barrowman, involuntary spasms, front desks, manganese deficiency, weevil shit, Mr Sheen, coal potential, the bison, The Final Cut, tone of voice, trillions of cicadas, Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman, bogus antler cannibalism, the Preces Gertrudianae, parodies of communication, “Cary Grant’s Wedding,” the corruption of youth, a tripod or cable, Culverwell on the Vacuola, geese, Hemans’s line on Mary Tighe, annihilation, the proletariat, plastic bags, La Compiuta Donzella di Firenze, poetry, rooms, beheadings, S106 obligations, and planks. Containing single, double, triple, and sextuple sestinas, in the old mode of retrogradatio cruciata, and other canzoni, crushed to prose.

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David Brazil, figurae, The Last Books, 2022 © David Brazil

What’s history? Dante Aligheri ensconced Joachim of Fiore, di spirito profetico dotato, in the heaven of the wise (Paradiso XII) as testament to the earlier writer’s visionary exegesis of John’s Apocalypse, the scripture’s last book, from which the Calabrian abbot exegeted a pictorial history of the world’s successive stages, culminating in the age of the Holy Spirit. David Brazil’s figurae collects the first eight fascicles of a projected sequence of twenty-two into a singular meditation on form, time, hope, faith, and song. We grow out of the Bible: Paul Celan. Come and see.

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A chapbook featuring the work of nine Palestinian writers:

Hiba Abu Nada

Hind Joudah

Asil Yaghi

Al-Meqdad Jameel Meqdad

Ebraheem Matar

Husam Maarouf

Ahmed Mortaja

Beesan Nateel

Noor Aldeen Hajjaj

The texts in this chapbook were sourced from Passages Through Genocide, which collects translates, and publishes texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza. Passages Through Genocide encourages the publishing, printing, and distribution of these texts by all possible means in support of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

All income from the sale of this chapbook is split between Palestine Trauma Centre and legal aid for Palestine Action.

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