rile* books

The recording of the launch of 45-120, a bilingual anthology of poetry edited by the Juf project and published by Caniche editorial, 2025. The launch took place at our space in Brussels on the 26 October 2025 where we were joined by the editors Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra. About the bookPersonal space is understood as the distance between 45 and 120 cm that surrounds a person. This bilingual anthology brings together the work of eighteen contemporary poets who take this intimate measurement as a starting point to challenge its apparent rigidity and explore how political, social, sexual, racial, class, and accessibility factors shape it. Beyond a simple physical distance, personal space also becomes a stage where desire draws and negotiates the boundaries between the inside and the outside.The publication contains contributions by Samuel Ace, Justin Chin, Kyle Dacuyan, Rhea Dillon, Tracy Faud, Elijah Jackson, Taylor Johnson, Nadia Marcus, Park McArthur, Nat Raha, Joan Retallack, Trish Salah, Juan de Salas, María Salgado, Assotto Saint, Cedar Sigo, S*an D.Henry-Smith, Nayare Soledad, Perla Zúñiga. About Juf projectJuf is a curatorial and research project around contemporary art and poetry, directed by Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra, and now based between New York and Madrid. It has organized exhibitions, performances and readings at Small Press Traffic (San Francisco), 99CANAL (New York), Judson Memorial Church (New York), Gasworks (London), SYSTEMA (Marseille), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), NYU Tisch School of the Arts (New York), Hangar (Barcelona) or TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Madrid).CreditsIntroduction by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas 

The recording of the reading with Claire Star Finch to celebrate the publication of their first novel Fuck Me Judith published by After 8, 2025. A groundbreaking, anachronistic experiment in literature informed by the counter traditions of New Narrative and queer writing. Claire Star will be joined in conversation by Chloe Chignell to talk queer literature, performative writing and the body as material.   About the bookIn Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action. Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain—sex and democratic theory—Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/fuck-me-judithAbout Claire Star FinchBorn in the United States and based in Paris, Star Finch writes and performs weird experimental pornography, at the intersection of theory and poetry. Their literary performances are regularly presented in art institutions in France and internationally (Palais de Tokyo Paris, ICA London, CAPC Bordeaux, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe). Their ongoing research interests include vomit and dildos, exploring how these materials function as literary technologies. In 2024, They received a doctorate from l’Université Paris 8 in Gender Studies for their dissertation that traced the literary queerfeminsms of Kathy Acker, Hélène Cixous, Violette Leduc, and Audre Lorde. With the collective RER Q, they stage the performance of sexually explicit literary texts. They are the author of the novel Fuck Me Judith (After 8 Books, 2025) and the poetry collection Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche [Spit in my mouth then spit in my other mouth] (Les petits matins, 2024). Their other literary projects include Kathy Acker 1971-1975 (Éditions Ismael, 2019), and contributions to Lettres aux jeunes poétesses [Letters to young poets] (l’Arche, 2021) and Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2022). With sabrina soyer, they translated the poet Lisa Robertson into French, in Debbie: une épopée [Debbie: An Epic] (Joca Seria, 2021).CreditsIntroduction and interview by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas 

The recording of the launch of Exocapitalism – Economies with absolutely no limits (becoming press 2025), with authors Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks that took place in rile* the 9th October 2025. Exocapitalism is a rigorous account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limitsAbout the publicationAt the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale.About the guestsMarek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, especially with respect to deep learning. He’s based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marek and his primary research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU) have been working to situate deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure (inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subject to contingent processes, and transmitted).Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. Based in Hong Kong, his research engages the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he investigates AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends into sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy.  CreditsIntroduction by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas 

The recording of the launch of Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising, a collaborative work by queer scholar João Florêncio and artist Liz Rosenfeld from the 29th of June 2025. After a reading from the book, Liz Rosenfeld was joined in conversation with Chloe Chignell.Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/crossings-creative-ecologies-of-cruisingAbout the publicationCrossings is not your conventional book. It hovers in the charged space between academic inquiry and literary experimentation, between critical manifesto and queer sex memoir—Crossings is an erotic hybrid form that dares to think through desire, with desire. Throughout its chapters the book moves swiftly between  different streams of discourse from theoretical conversations to reflections on aesthetic and artistic practice  to sensuous descriptions of bodily encounters. The writing darts in and out of these thought spaces with such dynamic that it thoroughly, and pleasurably, disoriented me as a reader and had me pause to ask: what is sex? And what is theory?  In this work, an artist and an academic intertwine their voices in a dialogic exploration of cruising—not only as a sexual practice but as a method of knowing, remembering, and of constructing queer sociality. The book unfolds both the poetic and political forms that cruising enacts. Together Joao and Liz, take queer sex practices seriously as sites of knowledge production, opening up the possibility for other kinds of thinking that occur through the body and in public, in order to enact tenuous and vital spaces of queer community.About the authorsLiz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working across performance, moving image, experimental writing, and drawing. Their work explores questions of queer temporality, memory, and emotional and political ecologies, often through the lens of cruising and corporeal excess. Working with what they call "flesh as a non-binary collaborative material," Liz's practice, often auto-theoretical, questions how queer ontologies are grounded in variant and hypocritical desire(s.)Joao Florencio is a queer scholar currently work at the university of Linkskoping. His research draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary sex cultures. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig published by Routledge, in 2020.CreditsIntroduction and interview by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas

This episode brings you the recording of an evening of readings with authors Rosie Stockton and Hannah Baer. The event took place at our space in Brussels on the 7th of June 2025. Rosie and Hannah read from their recent work, followed by a conversation with Chloe Chignell.Find their books here:https://rile.space/authors/rosie-stocktonhttps://rile.space/authors/hannah-baerAbout the authorsBoth Rosie and Hannah are writers whose work engages rigorously with the poetics of desire, and with how language acts as a site that both makes and unmakes relations. In different ways, their writing troubles the idea of a coherent, stable, or “good” subject. They approach gender and identity as sites of negotiation, opacity, and play—doing so with a rare mix of clarity, humor, and formal experimentation.There’s something in both of their work that feels like it emerges from a deeply personal space that’s never fully private: a kind of intimacy that's always entangled with the social. Their writing makes room for contradiction, for not knowing and for desire as its own kind of thinking.Rosie Stockton is the author of two poetry books Permanent Volta and Fuel. Their poems are full of lyric loops, erotic tension, and deep attention to the structures—both poetic and social—that threaten to both hold and break us.Hannah Baer is the author of trans girl suicide museum. She writes across genre and form, weaving memoir, criticism, and theory into a writing that is as intellectually cutting as it is emotionally generous.CreditsIntroduction by Chloe Chignell This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo.The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas.

For this episode we are delighted to share with you an evening of readings by poets Mia You and Obe Alkema. They read from their latest poetry collections, respectively Festival and Bewogen selfies. The event took place at rile*books on February 14, 2025 in Brussels.Find their books here:https://rile.space/authors/obe-alkemahttps://rile.space/authors/mia-youAbout Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025)The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power.About Bewogen selfies (het balanseer, 2024)In Bewogen selfies, Obe Alkema investigates the relationship between landscape and memory. What does he find when returning to important places from his memory? What does he not remember, but Google does? Can a memoir be purveyed from his metadata?About Mia YouMia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.About Obe AlkemaObe Alkema is a poet based in The Netherlands. He debuted with Obelisque (2018), a poetry glossy in millennial pink, followed up by another Obelisque in 2022. His 2024 publication Bewogen Selfies is a collection of memoirs about New York, poet Kevin Killian and New Narrative, sex and sexuality, Italy, depression and therapy, and much more. He regularly reviews poetry collections for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and works for the municipality of Utrecht.CreditsMixing by Ros Del OlmoIntroduction by Chloe ChignellMusic by ive

In this episode we are sharing a reading by and conversation with Lauren Bakst that took place on the 16th of March 2025 at our space in Brussels.wetness x surround is a reading of poetic essays and meditations on the submerged materiality of dyke-sex-in-the-city. Spinning centrifugally around research on the Clit Club, wetness x surround skims the ephemera and transmissions of this legendary-to-some 1990s party in New York City where “every single place in the club was for sex.” Through cycles of dissolution and reappearance, by way of withdrawals and refrains, the writing moves in the spirit of the dispossessive impropriety it studies.Following the reading Chloe Chignell joined Lauren Bakst in conversation.About Lauren BakstLauren Bakst is a writer, artist, and scholar working in experimental performance and queer studies. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation focuses on the socio-poetics of lesbian sex and erotics. She curates and organizes the School for Temporary Liveness, a para-site for performance and collective study, the next iteration of which will take place at the Kitchen in July 2025. Her writing on the Clit Club is forthcoming in TDR/The Drama Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog Riot.CreditsThis podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo.The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas - @iv.iv.iv.iv.iv.iv

We’re super excited to be able to share the recording of an evening of readings by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha and novelist Sulaiman Addonia. It took place at our space in Brussels on 7th of December 2024.Nat raha read excerpts from her most recent book apparitions (nines) and Sulaiman Addonia invited simon asencio to read an excerpt from his novel The Seers. the evening concluded with a conversation between the authors.About apparitions (nines)Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.About Nat RahaDr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, amongst others. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.About The SeersSuliaiman addonia’s The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.About Sulaiman AddoniaSulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels, The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019), have been translated into more than twenty languages. Silence is My Mother Tongue was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, as well as the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Enjoy!

For this episode we are excited to share with you the recording of the launch of How to Leave the World, by Marouane Bakhti, which was translated from French by Lara Vergnaud and published by Divided Publishing in 2024. The launch took place at our space in Brussels on the 30th of November last year.About How to Leave the WorldEveryone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.“A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.” Annie ErnauxAbout Marouane BakhtiMarouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.Marouane’s reading is followed by a conversation with Oscar Mathieu.About Oscar MathieuOscar is a cultural worker based in Brussels. He performs, writes, draws, translates, tattoos, researches. His focal points of interest include self-organization, faggotry, and dogs.

For this episode we’re delighted to share with you a recording of Asiya Wadud reading from her latest collection of poetry, Mandible Wishbone Solvent alongside a manuscript-in-progress, titled: Any Want Rings The Circle.The reading took place at rile*books on the 12 of October 2024.Mandible Wishbone solvent was published by the university of Chicago press earlier this year. The poems and prose in the collection engage with migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art— though not necessarily in tha t order. Punctuated by images of Asiya’s own original art, offers an indirect meditation on the concepts of the drift and the isthmus ("An isthmus— passageway, a threshold, a deliverance.About Asiya WadudAsiya Wadud is a poet based in brooklyn and the author of 5 collections of poetry: Mandible Wishbone Solvent from this year, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body 2021, A filament in gold leaf and Syncope both from 2019 and Crosslight for a young bird from 2018. She has also been published Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and Pacific Northwest College of Art.After the reading we opened the floor to questions from the audience. For technical reasons the audio quality of the questions is not ideal but we wanted to anyway include the conversation in the podcast so we hope you can excuse the slight glichtes in the audio towards the end.We hope you enjoy listening!