We are very happy to host Camille Kingué for the launch of Sex 2 – and Sam Riviere, If A Leaf Press’ editor, for the rue Jarry release of his latest poetry book, Conflicted Copy.

Camille Kingué’s Sex 2 (If A Leaf Press, 2024) is a follow-up to her adventures in Sex I (How To Become, 2024), continuing an investigation of the confessional mode, elusive attachment, self-as-other, book-as-self. Over 27 numbered fragments, like a Barthesian desire-dictionary, Sex 2 covers stripping to sad music, Blood Orange, Instagram, being ‘opaque to boyz’… While grappling sincerely with longing and memory, the writing dismisses itself, laughs – but here quickness and grace are also about knowing how to end things.

In Conflicted Copy (Faber & Faber, 2024) Sam Riviere harnesses anxiety about AI only to exploit it for his own extraordinary ends. In this case, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), an open source neural network, is used to produce poems that, stripped of the usual authorial clutter, find themselves nonetheless cohering around a voice that speaks of the uncertainties, fears and desires of a world that is desperately, poignantly and recognisably human...