Andrew Brooks and Kay Gabriel discuss their two books out from Rosa Press. Other topics include the relationship between communism and poetry, formal aspects of their works, love as a transformational force, argumentation in poetry vs. the essay, pleasure and its relationship to struggle, gender liberation, abolition, and sensuous experience.
Rosa Press, established in 2020 in Sydney, Australia, is a collective that publishes pamphlets, posters, books, and miscellanea. The Press is committed to communism and its poetics.
Even in the depths of Hell, there’s an exit strategy, if only you can find a pal and something to jimmy the locks. Inside every version of the world that is burning down from the misery and appetite of capital, there is another world that is burning down from the love and rage of an assembly. This book, which reimagines Dante’s Hell in an age of raging bushfires and endless bureaucratic violence, suggests a way to get from one burning world to another. You need love, kimchi, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the promise of the other side. Brooks writes with a disarming breeziness, picking up embers and changing their course.
A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm – one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).
Andrew Brooks
Andrew Brooks is a writer, artist, and teacher. He is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and a member of the Rosa Press publishing collective. Homework, a book of essays co-authored with Astrid Lorange, was published by Discipline in 2021. Inferno was published by Rosa Press in 2021.
Kay Gabriel
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021) is her first collection.
