community-centered publishing & curation
live from Amsterdam
Join us in celebrating Maurice Moore as the winner of this year’s Amsterdam Open Book Prize for their manuscript, Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1, and Kristen Case as runner-up for her poetry collection Daphne.
Read MoreIt’s here! The 2022 Amsterdam Open Book Prize shortlist! An absolutely stunning group of writers and works—
Read MoreAnd as much as the packages were showing up for y’all, it was showing up for me too. Something else I hadn’t anticipated. So much happened this year. I moved houses, quit my job, went back to school, celebrated my son's 10th birthday, cared for my partner when he contracted and recovered from COVID. Mourned the loss of folk too numerous to name. In the chaos, VERSO / became ritual, a meditation, an accumulation of energy.
Read MoreBoth Zeefuik and Solano signal to the vigilance required to dismantle oppressive and racist institutions and systems, and to places of rest, gratitude that feed resilience and joy. As such, B (Ruby) and Somi enact a watch, keeping time to the minute and allowing Zeefuik to wield her craft as a storyteller in a delightful invention of what she, as the writer, wants to revel in. In Solano’s faces and frames, we are beseeched by a sense of memory and grief, by song and by light, by the language of her imagery, and in an art activism we can understand as “a practice aimed at generating a/effect: emotionally resonant experiences that lead to measurable shifts in power”.
Read MoreThe prompt that I like to give to others is to watch that video a gazillion times and then try and enact the first 30 seconds of it. In your own body, right? However you can do the movements - you could do them with your hand if you like, with your eyelashes, if you want, whatever - but actually try and bring that, the action that you see, into your own body. And then write from the memories that will emerge.
Read MoreWe challenge one another; we excite one another with another text. We talk books and get nerded out, right? Like, with how many people can you really be like, yo, like, what do you think about that Octavio Paz? You can't break that out at every dinner party, right? So those kind of conversations and walking the streets of Berlin and singing Erykah Badu Green Eyes song with another poet, like that just doesn't always happen but it does in these circles in which I have run.
Read MoreAs we head into the final months of packages of our pandemic-adapted VERSO /, the question of whether or not we’ll go back to a live form soon is growing more emphatic, at least in my imagination. The longing to assemble our bodies around poetry and art, to be bodies together in space, to share a glance over a glass of wine…
Read MoreThis fall we launch the second call. This time around, we all felt a need to share the process with more people, partially because of the enormous workload but more importantly because we want to expand the conversations about writing, art, community, and publishing.
Versal has always worked through collaboration and is a participant in conversations around art, writing, editing, publishing, economies, education, performance, etc., as a collective, but also individually as editors. We have experienced this as an act of support and self care. Like with mycelium rich terrain, when the collaboration is holistic, it gives back to the whole.
Read MoreEach classroom opens directly to the outdoors and pre-pandemic, lunchtime was already an outside activity. There is a sense of stillness even when things are in perpetual motion, and a sense of movement even when things are still.
Read MoreEngaging with the two zines and writing this letter was a way for me to process my own thoughts as I moved through the multiplicity of the works, breathing as slowly as I could to slow time and stay grounded in one place.
Read MoreThis month’s editorial is a translation of a piece by Lieke Marsman, the Netherlands’ poet laureate. She posted it on May 21 at the height of frustrations around the government’s handling of the corona crisis, and at, presumably, a peak when her social media accounts were being bombarded by trolls. Rather than paint a rosy picture of the Netherlands like her predecessors, marketing our country to, let’s be honest, our country (because who else cares?) in sweeping lines of unearned flattery, our current poet laureate is speaking out, and speaking loudly.
Read MoreAs a child of migration. Of long histories of migration. Of roots that are untethered. Of Jewish people, of the Armenians. Coming from lineages that have violently been erased, scattered, undone. I wonder what it means if all we have left are these memories. If the physical traces are gone. If my grandfather is gone, another piece is untethered. If Nagorno-Karabakh is occupied by Azerbaijani and Russian military forces, another piece gone. What will happen to the house in Cheldran?
Read MoreI don’t know what you believe in but I wonder if saying yes to our multitudes and fucking with the the grays isn’t only resistance but also a kind of sacred practice. I am more and more interested in how we vibrate collectively toward what’s on the other side of binaries and normativity, towards the magic that makes us all stardust.
Read MoreBreaking is dangerous. Becoming rigid and still has protected me well. Healing feels like entering a process of un-repair. Yet here we are. The act of disassembling and reassembling cannot be achieved alone but through connection and collaboration. It is through packages of care, like this one, which was carefully curated to amplify and resonate the ideas crafted within. When we break the seal on the envelope, we take a shard into our hands, we feel, we mend.
Read MoreA compass point for this season of VERSO / is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, in which she suggests some of the work of Black annotation and Black redaction as “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see.” If when presented with annotations and redactions, we try to really see instead of becoming dismissive and defensive, “other kinds of perception are not only available, but inevitable” (-Toni Morrison, quoted via Sharpe) in ourselves and in our art.
Read MoreThere’s a reclamation happening in both of this month’s pieces, a reclamation that I am trying to meditate on (I am not very good at meditating), maybe better said spend time with, not only as an editor, but as a woman, queer, and mother who recently experienced what I experienced.
Read MoreAnalog VERSO / is a gathering. So much is possible when we gather. When we circle round ourselves and each other. When we hold us at the center of our gaze. When that gaze is loving, amplifies, gives breath, is the wind at our backs. It's in the gathering that we find each other, always each other, it’s in the holding that we're made whole.
Read MoreWeeks after that text message I agreed to join the team on a virtual call to discuss the design of Fee’s book. Most of us had our videos off, the call was heavy with tension and grief. The rest of the team had suffered through their own versions of 2020: hospital visits, family drama, lost work, and wildfires. We were a long way from the team we had been in February. We had all been changed.
Read MoreWe are building a list of local actions in the fight against racism here in the Netherlands, aimed especially for those of us who are white.
One concrete way to do the work is to donate, if you can, to local organizations at the front lines. The following is a developing list.
Read MoreBritish poet Fee Griffin has won the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Award with her collection “For Work/For TV”, and Zimbabwean poet Tanatsei Gambura has been chosen as our runner-up with her collection “Things I Have Forgotten Before”.
The Versal team will begin production of our inaugural title “For Work/For TV” in the coming weeks. It is a welcome undertaking in this time of disquietude. We hope you will join us in congratulating these two writers, as well as our finalists!
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