The Unseen Book Club

Our Death is the final book of poems by the late, great, communist poet Sean Bonney. Published in 2019 shortly before his passing, Our Death is a series of prose poems, translations, and odes to fellow travelers of bohemia, insurrection, and the militant avant-garde. It is a book of ghosts, lost time, despair, and its corollary, a recurrent sense of possibility. Alternately elegiac and blunt, Bonney calls on his predecessors –among them Pier Paolo Pasolini, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Greek anarchist poet Katarina Gogou– and haunts the rapidly gentrifying streets of Berlin in a series of unsettling, and unsettled, poems. We are joined by our friend and returning guest Joe Albernaz. Joe situates Our Death in Bonney’s body of work and talks us through how Bonney’s poems open a crack into the edifice of time we are stuck in, giving us a glimpse into another, the time of revolution and possibility, inhabited by the dead.Sean Bonney:https://www.blogger.com/profile/01249091680381502755Joe Albernaz:https://www.josephalbernaz.com/https://alienocene.com/2025/04/04/notes-on-cleft-calendrics-sean-bonney-and-the-lines-of-time/Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

The Secret Life of Saeed: the Pessoptimist (1974)  is a masterwork of tragicomedic narrative by Palestinian writer, poet and politician Emile Habibi (1922-1996). It is a monumental expression of Palestinian self-hood, in particular for the Palestinians who made lives under occupation in the decades following the Nakba and and the creation of the state of Israel.The Secret Life of Saeed reads as a feverish, impassioned eruption of rage and affirmation for the impossible contradictions that defined Arab life in Israel. It follows the misadventures of Saeed, a man who returned to his home city of Haifa from a brief exile during the Nakba. His only opportunity to survive is to become a collaborator with the Israeli state. The narrative unfolds as a series of brief episodes in Saeed’s life.Habibi himself was elected to the Israeli Parliament as a member of the Israeli Communist party, a role that, according to Habibi, contained all the contradictions embodied by Saeed the character. Many of the episodes in the novel are events Habibi himself experienced as a young man. The social history of these decades are illuminated with grave clarity by Adel Manna’s in Nakba and Survival. We relied extensively on this supplemental text to understand Habibi and Saeed.Nakba and Survival, Adel Manna: https://luminosoa.org/books/144/files/f10b8467-2730-4c5e-99cd-c9d97027ca0c.pdfEmile Habiby: I Stayed in Haifa (dir: Dalia Karpel, 1997): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143234/Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

The Death Ship was the first major novel by the legendary, anonymous anarchist novelist, B Traven (188? - 1969). Traven’s adventure novels of the ‘20s and ‘30s document proletarian struggle, as outcasts and downtrodden workers confront the absurdity and agonies of capitalist exploitation, borders, and statecraft. Most of his novels are set in Mexico, and are uniquely concerned with Mexico’s rural and indigenous proletariat.The Death Ship stands out in Traven’s oeuvre primarily for its setting. It follows an American-borne sailor whose lost passport leaves him both jobless and stateless. Through landlocked European misadventures, he eventually finds work as a coal-drag on a broken-down steamship whose owners’ relentless drive for profits lead to the barest condition of life for the ship’s polyglot crew of luckless proles. Through his unnamed protagonist, Traven mocks the border regimes and bureaucracies, the petty caste systems that emerge amongst workers, and the innumerable insults of life as a forgotten debt-slave. He also searches, relentlessly, for connection, solidarity, and a contradictory affirmation of life through common struggle and shared labor.We also discuss B Traven’s remarkable life.Traven biography: B._Traven:_The_Life_Behind_the_LegendsOutro Music: Lord Creator - John BSign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

Hannah Black’s superb novella Tuesday Or September Or The End (Capricious, 2022) is a science-fictionalized account of 2020 and its twinned world-making events of the pandemic and riot. The novella is caustic, hilarious, and written with both an unflinching eye for this world’s stifling and tragic conditions and a wide-open heart for its undoing and rebirth.https://capriciousfoundation.org/publications/tuesdaySign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship, surveillance, diaspora, and time. On and Off-Screen Imaginaries: https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/Tiffany Sia: https://www.tiffanysia.com/HTHQ Workshop: https://hq.creativetime.org/calendar/sonic-literacy-with-tiffany-sia-and-jordan-lord/Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spiritual life, edited from a series of interviews with 1000 Voices Collective.We speak with Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uesseler about the process of creating Full Circle, and Morea’s fierce dedication to revolutionary living.Full Circle: A Life In RebellionOur review of Full Circle will be appearing in print in the upcoming issue of Heatwave Magazine. Check out their first issue online.Sabu Kohso’s writings and translation about the Japanese ultra-left can be found here and here.Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show.Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitants speak a uniquely place-based, relational, and physically gestural language. The narrator is on a quest for meaning, understanding, and connection, but everything, even the buildings themselves, evade her.  Gladman is especially interested in language, architecture, and meaning; Event Factory echos Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice.Review of The Commune in Jacobin MagazineMikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly ReviewSign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack

Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through decades of hope, aspiration, repression and ultimately defeat for the country’s Left. A unique and unclassifiable novella, The Commune charts the state of Chakkas’ psyche through a dense sequence of memories, dreams, and imagined bureaucratic procedures. He reflects on his youth as communist militant during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/Unseen Book ClubTwitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclubInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcastArt by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/Sign up for our newsletter!BuzzsproutInstagramMusic by Ex-OfficialArt by Eli Mack