SONNET(S) by Ulises Carrión

In 1972, Ulises Carrión took a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and churned it through 44 typographic and procedural permutations. The result was SONNET(S), a departure from Carrión’s earlier poetry and one of the earliest in a long and influential series of “bookworks.” Soon after its publication, Carrión left Mexico City for Europe and settled in Amsterdam, where he penned his manifesto, “The New Art of Making Books” and founded the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, a hub for mail art activity and the first venue dedicated exclusively to artists’ publications—records, books, magazines, postcards, etc.—a year before Printed Matter opened its doors in New York City.

A pioneer in conceptualizing the artists book in the period of its inception as an art form, Carrión, who died in 1989, has recently been recognized with retrospectives at Reina Sofia (Madrid) and Museo Jumex (Mexico City).

The present republication of SONNET(S) is supplemented by new essays on Carrión’s bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe, and the US: Felipe Becerra, Verónica Gerber Bicecci (tr. Christina MacSweeney), Mónica de la Torre, Annette Gilbert (tr. Shane Anderson), India Johnson, Michalis Pichler, Heriberto Yépez.