130 x 195mm, 160 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2020

‘There is no tool to make noise, only a happenstance wrong wielding of an awkward implement. I hear noises but they are mainly alarming. Take me to a sound that grows bolts and leaves and lanterns. It must be this silence of his sleeping that houses something I have yet to hear.’

Guitar! describes the contours and conditions of writing – interrupted, in flashes, or in restless moments through the night. A narrator listens; as a child learns to speak there is a re-acquaintance with the strangeness of putting a feeling into words. There is a yearning for meeting, and an idea of love or companionship as a sense of being met. Reading is punctuated by a series of black and white images of buskers, photographed by Francis McKee in Glasgow. Cover artwork by Ciara Phillips.

Complementing Guitar!, Sarah Tripp’s THE SELF-ILLUMINATING PEN, ISBN 978 0 9931424 6 8, is also new. With cover artwork by Ciara Phillips, it comprises five letters, five writing exercises and over 100 blank notebook pages. Published by Glasgow-based MAP Editions it is available free of charge. The texts can also be read alongside five specially commissioned films by Isobel Lutz-Smith on mapmagazine.co.uk.

Sarah Tripp is an artist, writer and lecturer based in Glasgow. Previous Book Works publications include You are of vital importance, 2014, and ‘Aide-Mémoires: As if’, published in The Happy Hypocrite – What Am I?, issue 5, 2010, edited by Maria Fusco. Her writing can also be found in F.R. DAVID (Berlin), 2HB (Glasgow), and Space Poetry (Denmark).

Published by