Grunts Rare Books is pleased to announce Final Hot Desert and Three Poets, featuring John Knight, Pol Wah Tse, Graham Wiebe, Jobe Gemmel-Hughes, Ed Roberson, and Mami Takahashi, and curated by Arnold J. Kemp.

Final Hot Desert and Three Poets, curated by Arnold J. Kemp, opens Saturday, February 14th, 1-6pm.

Originally founded in the Utah desert in 2018 as an off-site, roaming gallery model, Final Hot Desert is a constantly evolving alternative space run by Marina Moro and Benjamin Anderson now from their flat in East London. Anderson says, “The name obviously made a lot of sense to people when we were in the desert. It’s the final report on the hot desert grazing management system from a historical bookstore in Utah. It’s essentially a manual about how to move through the desert and use it – in this case for livestock without depleting it. It’s an informational story on how to live and collaborate with the desert, which has its own parameters on how to exist. So of course, there’s this direct connection between this and off-site exhibitions. Everywhere you go there are different rules. Could the off-site shows we’ve done in the desert ever work in London?”

Final Hot Desert and Three Poets changes the rules by bringing three artists who are currently working with FHD, Knight, Tse, and Wiebe, into conversation with three Chicago-based literary minds, Gemmel-Hughes, Roberson, and Takahaski, who will present their work at in a reading on March 1st, 2026.

Presented at Grunts Rare Books, Final Hot Desert and Three Poets takes place within both gallery space and bookstore-concept. As a venue that privileges Chicago-exhibition history, small-press publications, artist-led practices, Grunts offers a context in which Final Hot Desert’s artists can operate conceptually anew. The bookstore’s public-facing intimacy foregrounds the March 1st poetry as integral to the exhibition, which will remain on view until April 1st.