Front and centre of my New York bookstore’s self improvement section – in between Secrets of the Southern Belle and The Essential Wayne Dyer Collection – is a small blue hardback with YOKO ONO stamped on the cover. It is a copy of Acorn, a collection of enigmatic aphorisms, such as ”Take your pants off before you fight”, by the 80-year-old avant-garde artist and widow of John Lennon.

This new collection of conceptual instructions by Ono, published nearly 50 years after its predecessor Grapefruit, was initially created for a website event. ”Now it’s being published in book form,” Ono writes in the introduction. ”I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the old ways! Great!”

Read the full article at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Yoko Ono, now 80 years of age, has been busy. The past year has seen her To The Light show at the Serpentine, her retrospective Half-A-Room in Frankfurt, her book, Acorn, her curation of this year’s Meltdown and her opening performance there, and now her new record, Take Me To The Land Of Hell, produced by Yoko, her son Sean Lennon, and Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda. Billed once again as Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, this iteration sees contributions from Cornelius and Cibo Matto, tUnEyArDs, Questlove, Nels Cline and Andrew Wyatt. Her music continues to aim itself at what she calls “the society”: the global war machine, the political consensus on suffering, the difficulty of change. “We, the expendable people of the United States, ask to stop the violence, stop all wars,” she intones in ‘Cheshire Cat Cry’, before unleashing a howl of need and demand so gigantic it draws tears.

In conversation as in her work, she permits herself to make mistakes, to contradict herself, and to enjoy both. Grounded in the neo-Dadaist political techniques of the Fluxus movement, and with life experience of gigantic, tectonic loss – her family, her daughter, her husbands, who, she confesses in ‘Moonbeams’, the album’s opening track, “both left me housebound” – Ono has arrived at a moment of trust in herself. Though often accused of naivety or whimsy, hers is a confidence founded, she argues, in work, experience and difficulty rather than instinct. The distinction is important: while so many are dismissive about her, hateful towards her, her best response is her radical state of openness, her refusal to repeat herself. How ridiculous, she implies, to hate something that keeps changing, keeps moving – something that’s already next, already gone.

Read the full piece at The Quietus.

Algonquin Books announced that it will be publishing Yoko Ono’s Acorn, and will rush production to meet a November 19 publication date, making the title available in time for the holidays. The book is a follow-up to Ono’s Grapefruit, published in 1964, and will reflect “her compelling philosophy of positive thinking.” It is Ono’s first solo book in 50 years.

Read the full piece in Publishers Weekly.

As a young artist I was first inspired to call myself “conceptual” by learning about the work of Yoko Ono. What specifically struck me about her pieces was the fact that she loved to engage the viewer on more than a visual level by inviting them in. My favorite piece of hers was the Telephone Piece, installed at various places including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A phone would sit in a gallery and ring at random and whomever was walking by the phone in the museum at the time would pick it up and say hello and Yoko would be on the other end, calling from wherever she happened to be in the world to speak with this stranger. What I loved about this, and other pieces of hers, was the way it explored the ideas of two people interconnecting who might never connect otherwise and the elements of discovery and surprise that were brought into seemingly ordinary lives by the existential chemical reaction caused by the exchange. In my own art, I am too fascinated by the idea of forcing humanity to engage with itself in spontaneous situations that are beyond the comfort zone of our ordinary lives. In this place, the potential for creativity and magic is endless and that is what steers life into the realms of wonder, reflection and the amazement of the deep and inner soul.

Read the full review at Newtopia Magazine.

Acorn is like its predecessor, Grapefruit, only…

Read the illustrated review at The Rumpus.

“But Ono’s more purely conceptual games have a lovely directness. She routinely evokes sky, earth, and details from the natural world and then juxtaposes their scale with the ordinary human experience of shoelaces and beds, cups of hot chocolate.

She’s at her best proposing lyrical, fantastical actions like this one:

Tape the sound of the moon fading at dawn.
Give it to your mother to listen to
when she’s in sorrow.”

Read the full review at Arts Fuse.

For a small book, Yoko Ono’s new collection of instructions, “Acorn” (O/R Books: 216 pp., $16 paper), has been in the works for a long time: almost half a century.

“It’s been nearly 50 years since my book of conceptual instructions, ‘Grapefruit,’ was first published,” the 80-year-old avant-garde icon writes in a brief introduction to the project. “Some years ago, I picked up from where I left off, and wrote ‘Acorn’ for a website event. Now it’s being published in book form. I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the old ways!”

“Grapefruit” remains among the unsung artworks of the 1960s, an encapsulation of Ono’s aesthetic in the form of aphorisms. Originally released in 1964, it predates her relationship with John Lennon, suggesting just how much the former Beatle learned from her: a sense of openness, of the universe as inherently creative, even positive, if only we imagine it as such.

“Nature itself is very positive,” Ono insists on a recent weekday morning by phone from her New York office. “When things are not positive, they die.”

Read the full review on the Los Angeles Times.

On a recent summer evening, on the second-floor suite of the Refinery Hotel, in midtown, Yoko Ono, who is eighty but looks sixteen, was perched on the edge of a couch wearing very dark black sunglasses, a military-style black denim jacket, and a fedora jauntily cocked to one side. She was about to walk into a party celebrating her new book, “Acorn,” a hundred haiku-like instructions (“Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.”) accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page.

Read the full article at the New Yorker.

Although the intent is never made clear, the path of the writing provides for a complete and total recognition of the universe.

Read the full article at Autostraddle.

“One woman shouted ‘Feminist icon!’ while she was speaking,” says a spy, who adds Yoko was whisked out after 20 minutes.

Read the full article at New York Post Page Six.

She said that the book was written for the Internet era, a time which she said has changed how people absorb media. The meditations from the book were originally generated from an Internet project that Ono worked on in the 1990s. (This is the first time that they have been collected into book form.)

She said that nowadays people can’t read a book from beginning to end because they are so used to Internet communication. “That is not a tragedy,” she explained. “A book will change its form. Acorn has already changed that.”

Read the full story at Galleycat.

“She was there to promote Acorn (OR Books), a small book that is a strange compendium of both imagistic poems and instructions. Ono originally wrote Acorn in 2008, on the recommendation that she try her hand at blogging. For those familiar with her book Grapefruit from 1964, it’s not that dissimilar in tone. Ono says she was inspired to write when she learned about the fading attention spans of academics in the digital age. ‘These days they can’t read a whole book,’ she said. ‘Their brains aren’t set up that way.’ Acorn, she claims, is easier on the eyes. “It’s a kind of reading material for the future because you don’t have to read ten paragraphs,” she said. ‘It explains the universe in those short lines.'”

Read the full story at Vogue.

“Acorn, a book of 100 ‘instructional poems’ and drawings that will be published on July 15, goes back in time, according to the widow of Beatle John Lennon, because it is something she originally created for the Internet in the 1990s.

Each day, for 100 days, she communicated a different idea for people to explore. She has now compiled them in a book.”

Read the full story at Reuters.

Acorn is Ono’s gentle command to count blessings large and small. Where these sentiments can seem hackneyed, her dot drawings undulate with a depth that the text lacks: each image is imbued with motion and figured with a Möbius texture that makes a fitting illustration of Ono’s oscillations between the microscopic and the cosmic.

Read the full article at For Books’ Sake

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As well as working on Meltdown, Yoko has just published a new collection of instructional poetry and art, Acorn. Simple, evocative images are accompanied by short poems that Yoko hopes will encourage readers to think about how they relate to one another and to the planet they live on.

Read the full article and see the slideshow at British Elle

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The book is a follow-up to her 1964 work, “Grapefruit,” and like its predecessor, is part meditation, part artwork, sprinkled with her signature statements of peace and tranquility and an assortment of psychedelic dot drawings. “Whisper your dream to a cloud,” she suggests, “Ask the cloud to remember it.”

While “Acorn” veers in the direction of feel-good mantras, it’s still a tantalizing slice of Ono’s life views, packaged into a tiny, black and white paperback that’s as whimsical as her Twitter updates.

Read the full article and see the slideshow at HuffPo

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Visions of the future come in all shapes and sizes. If you like your sci-fi more hopeful than apocalyptic, then Yoko Ono’s take on our fates should be up your street. As part of the Southbank’s Meltdown festival she is launching her new instructional poetry and art book, Acorn, with a series of events and talks. The follow-up to her famous “instructions” pieces offers a 100-part collection of friendly commands to enable a more optimistic look at what’s on our horizons. There’ll be the chance to see Yoko herself in conversation, plus group enactments of her instructions and visions of the future from the likes of gamers, mathematicians and death experts.

Read the entire article at The Guardian

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This new book (‘You could call it poetry in action’) is a sequel to Ono’s 1964 conceptual work Grapefruit. The dreamy ‘instructions’ will also be familiar to her millions of Twitter followers. Take City Piece V: ‘Imagine painting all the buildings in the city the colour of light.’

Read the full story at Metro

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You’re also putting a book of drawings, Acorn – your follow-up to 1964’s Grapefruit – out this month.

Yes, yes. I’m so lucky that I can put out Acorn now, again, because I just forgot about it. Then I read it, and I said ‘Oh my God, it’s so great, we have to put this out,’ you know? It’s very interesting to see what I was thinking. Well, I think Acorn is, if anything, maybe just as good as Grape was, and Grape was very successful, and Acorn will be, probably.

Read the full interview at Rolling Stone.

Yoko Ono, the artist and former wife of John Lennon, is coming out with a book of “instructional poetry,” according to OR Books. She explains, kind of: “It’s something I originally created for the internet. For 100 days, every day, a different instruction was communicated. Now it’s being published in book form. I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the old ways! Great! I added my dot drawings to give you further brainwork.” At least it sounds less weird than her menswear line.

Read more at NPR.org.

Artist Yoko Ono inked a deal with OR Books for an “instructional poetry” book entitled Acorn. The publisher plans to release this title in June 2013.

OR Books described the Acorn manuscript as “an extension” of Ono’s 1964 art book, Grapefruit. Ono has collaborated with other writers on books, but this is her first book published by herself in nearly 50 years.

Read the full announcement at GalleyCat.

Yoko Ono is returning to her roots. In June, the 80-year-old avant-garde icon (and widow of John Lennon) will publish a follow-up to her 1964 book “Grapefruit”: “Acorn,” a collection of 100 conceptual instructions which function as Zen-like incantations for how to live a mindful life.

“Grapefruit” is one of the great books of the 1960s, a work of subtlety and elegance that frames the world itself as a canvas for art. It was this sensibility that first drew Lennon to Ono when they met at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966.

Read the full piece at the Los Angeles Times.

“Poetry in action with participation,” is how artist and musician Yoko Ono describes her new book of “instructional poetry” – the first she has published solo in almost 50 years.

Acorn, according to New York-based independent publisher OR Books, is an extension of the “intricate strands” Ono first wove together in Grapefruit, the “book of instructions and drawings” she published in 1964. The book, which comes out in June, is “classic Yoko”, said the publisher, “full of intriguing and surreal exercises [which invite] the reader to uncover profound and often complex truths, in words and imagery that are playful and accessible”.

Read the full story at the Guardian.