Sonhoras

sonhoras was born from our perception of a need to return to certain formats for the dissemination of poetry. without ignoring the call of experimental and object poetry, we would like to take up the responsibility of publishing radical voices being heard beyond the page. and we want to do this precisely in the form of books, disregarding the question of notions and languages, always using the original tongue. embedding truly radical writing into the established canon of the classics. isn’t it true that it is radicality what has to be put in crisis, at a time when postmodernity and the avant-garde have become the greatest of all academies? a book is not just text, though it is its unitary container. a book is a machine. sonhoras will publish a minimum of three books per year. we propose a shared publication mechanism, where each poet will be edited by another poet working in the same vein. bicephalous books, written by two. in this way we seek to avoid the egocentrism of capitalism, and expand the text into a common terrain. the issue-books will be projects equally involving writing, visuals and matter. they will be selected, and the books physical made, using slow techniques. we reject anthologies, and opt for the book as an artistic object per se. we will never use mass printing mechanisms: we will combine artisan techniques with pure mechanics. we will stay as far away as possible from the desert of the digital. we want to open up and defend plurality in linguistics and language. for this reason, we count on the priceless support of paper makers, binders, screen printers, risograph printers, spinning around in the inked printer of l’automàtica as the constructive nerve centre. sonhoras wants to lay out an imaginative strategy for distribution, acquisition and fabrication that is nonetheless not at all novel, set against the increasingly homogenous circumstances that the book industry faces. all sonhoras book-issues are printed with the highest craft values possible, feeding into an existing know-how that intensely involves the body and all its capacities, both its individual and its extended ones. this will allow for a greater control of the affective processes of printing, an attitude of complicity with marginal technologies, and an expansion of material possibilities. producing carefully, with strength, with commitment, in favour of a job well done, treating the author and the material producer with an equal degree of importance. the initial run of each issue will be 30 copies, and new copies will be printed on request. there is no warehouse, just as we will not have a conventional distribution. sonhoras will not be found in bookstores, or in other commercial spaces. sonhoras is not conceived to work as a business. the book-issues will be received by hand in the sonhoras actions of l’automàtica that will take place monthly, as well as in special events, surprise encounters, spaces where experimental poetry takes place, or by regular post in your mailbox at home. sonhoras is a project of gerard altaió, martín bakero, eduard escoffet & eugenio tisselli with the complicity of many more. we know that all collective projects should have a determined time frame, and for this reason should have a previously-established expiry date. and even though in this case we cannot yet establish a date of death, we want the whole collection of books, once sonhoras is gone, to be a record of all those striving to open up and move poetic language into paths where things really matter.