A Feeling Called Heaven

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices. 

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring "possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity."

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

A hymn to perversity, a lyric pledge to desire and risk, Glove Money pages through the canon to “seed its sugar in your dreams.”

In this joyful and irreverent exploration of the role of poet-as lover, Sophia Dahlin plays Sappho, O’Hara, romantics and troubadours, assembling a self seaworthy of romance. With humor and a light touch, Glove Money dismisses bioessentialist gatekeeping and expands the lesbian imaginary.  

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha's invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

"These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. . . apparitions (nines) deserves to be read—for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out." - Lou Selfridge, Frieze

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.” - CAConrad

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out.

From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

From its situation in Ancient Greece through the various rewritings and commentaries and interventions of the last 2500 years, there is certainly no book being transmitted in the anything-but-unbroken and often comic transmission of The Phaenomena, a long didactic poem enumerating the constellations and their movement through the skies. There is certainly no origin apparent in such a transmission, even as the layers of compaction that this text attempts to unfold are themselves arguments about origin, plaintive debates about the irresolvable contradiction of a “first copier.” But what does it mean to give up the constellation, the relation, the durability that relation promises to guarantee, without being able to retreat into the security of origin or determinate meaning? What do you do then? This is to rephrase the question: what do we – “we,” obstinately – fail to see when we see the shapes of the stars so well?

Thee Display is a collection of poems written during an engagement with this ongoing transmission. It is a book about this, and a book about the horizon of communism, and a book about transition, and a book about a companionship characterized by a weird and sad kind of cheer.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. Thee Display is her third book of poetry - she is also the author of Presence Detection System, from Hiding Press (2019), and Life Experience Coolant, from Bookthug (2013). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.