Chronology

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.

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.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

Raphaëlle Milone's first novel, a dive into the heart of desires, acclaimed by Simon Liberati as well as by Jean-Luc Nancy.

Raphaëlle Milone (born 1991 in Riom) is a French writer.

When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often surprised by grief in the oddest corners, the poet takes us through rooms, routines, and rituals of bereavement, the memory of love, a shared life and separation. A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints, Stephenson has written a remarkable first book, moving and, despite everything, a hopeful record of a gay relationship. It is also a landmark elegy collection.

Paul Stephenson studied modern languages and linguistics. He has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). In 2013/14 he took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and the Aldeburgh Eight, before completing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with the Manchester Writing School. In 2018 he co-edited the ‘Europe’ issue of Magma (70) and currently co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. He is a university teacher and researcher, and lives between Cambridge and Brussels.

In its very first issue, Bebe Magazine offers a broad constellation of possibilities for queer understandings, beyond identity-based reduction. Using the prefix trans- (across, beyond, through), each of our eight co-curators chose a term and formed mini collectives to destabilise its accompanying pre-established, societally accepted, conceptions—from transversal lines to transactions.

Exutoire: Paul-Antoine Lucas, Bùi Quý Sơn, ba-bau: Đinh Thảo Linh, Kiều-Anh Nguyễn, Cao Việt Nga / Evgeniia Skvortsova, Zip Group + Borya Pospelov, Slaystans Collective / Ina Schürmann, La Bouche Cabaret, represented by Leo, 90mil radio, Queer Analog Darkroom / Bích Đào, Myrto Vogiatzi, Laia Ros, Queers on the Move / Teodora Roșu, Stol Collective: Ioana, Marco, Anio, Mara / Martina Lattuca, Vittoria Torsello, Chiron Floris / Bernadetta Budzik, Rachel Rouzaud, Tomasz Burek / Henellis Notton, Anita Kodanik, Bohdana Korohod, Greta Štiormer / Silvia Bicelli / Elizabeth Patiño / Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdous / Ákos Boros / Lucile Claudia Eerie, Babbyccino / Madonna Lenaert, Joppe De Campeneere / Mayim Frieden

Bebe Magazine is a publication born out of the Ghent-based collective Bebe Books, focusing on collaborative and experimental approaches to cultural production. It provides a space for contributors to work together in exploring fresh perspectives and questioning established norms.

With a strong emphasis on collective creation, Bebe Magazine brings together curators, artists, and thinkers to navigate complex ideas and reflect on the shifting boundaries of contemporary culture. Each issue is shaped by the diverse voices and shared efforts of its contributors, making it a dynamic and evolving platform.