chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer

This publication is based on a project by Despina Vassiliadou that ran from 2015-16. It presents a collection of photographs taken during the period, accompanied by fictional short stories.

Writing on the fragmentation of chronic illness, why ‘full access’ isn’t something arts venues should aim for, the complexities of receiving gender-affirming care while living with chronic illness, the realities of constantly having to ration your energy, an interview with musical artist Dead Gowns, abortion access and bodily autonomy, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.

Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Vida Adamczewski, A/Bel Andrade, Amy Berkowitz, Khairani Barokka, Jax Bulstrode, Sarah Courville, Jen Deerinwater , Amy Dickinson, Mizy Judah Clifton, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Dead Gowns, Sergey Isakov, Theo LeGro, Elias Lowe, Cathleen Luo, Jameisha Prescod, Olivia Spring, Leigh Sugar, Oriele Steiner, Emerson Whitney, Chantal Wnuk, Caroline Wolff, and Emma Yearwood

SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.

Dead Minutes is a storytelling game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.

The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.

The second half features an essay by Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author Chris Beckett, and a letter from Selma Selman.

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

A collection of twenty-six abécédaire missives by Sharon Kivland, written and sent daily to the editors (MS & AWL) between Friday 7 February and Tuesday 4 March 2025. Interjected with melancholic ‘Mes horizons’ postcard erasures and an insert of abcedminded replies by Matthew Stuart titled ‘A Letter Always Suggests a Word’, this publication is both a standalone edition and precursor to BFTK#8, which focuses on letters (alphabets) and letters (correspondence). 

‘These are Addressed to You’ addresses what it means to be addressed and to address, to write with love and scorn, to seal with a kiss and conceal impressions and hair within a letter’s folds, to inscribe with ink and thread, to speak with and to those we admire. Drawing on / from Freud and Lacan, Joyce and Carringdon, Camille Corot and many more, these letters are about writing and reading, about language falling and bumping you on the head.

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."

Nhã Thuyên’s đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness contains eight poems excerpted from the forthcoming book vị nước (taste of water). To read this work is to be wrenched out of oneself and into the opening and closing world of language: a world in equal parts vegetal, liquid, human, stone, at once bordered river and open sea, enclosed maze and open field; a labyrinth, but a labyrinth of the utmost clarity; a rising or collapsing building made of words that’s not a ‘dwelling’ so much as a refusal to dwell, which is its loneliness and bereftness and consolation and strength, all at once. “Steps here pulled forth by some line of poetry out of time”, such work “fabricate[s] a bed out of sea, build[s] a house out of tremendous immensity”. It’s the result of a lifelong investigation of the Vietnamese language, deep, joyous, scrupulous and sometimes painful; of a lifelong investigation of the whole deep field of history and time as it’s lived deep within the person and in the field beyond the personal that poetic language affords us. This is a realm, not of simple freedom, but of the struggle for the fullest record and the fullest measure towards which a poet can strive. Don’t hide the madness. Don’t be at peace. [D.G.]

NHÃ THUYÊN secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and totters between languages. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing) (2008), rìa vực (edge of the abyss) (2011), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), and bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-] vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019). Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is waiting to see the moon. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow, and learning to quietly speak up with care.

KAITLIN REES is a translator, editor, and public school teacher based in New York City. She translates from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên, with whom she co-founded AJAR, the small bilingual journal-press that organizes an occasional poetry festival. Her translations include moon fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019), words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and the forthcoming book of poetry taste of water.