day pulls down the sky

The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power. 

This poetry collection views the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization. Drawing from sources such as Sigmund Freud, James George Frazer, H.D., the Situationist International, seventeenth century narratives of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the Korean peninsula, the rise of K-pop and the “Korean Wave,” and a zoo-breaking gorilla named Bokito, Festival features kaleidoscopic poetic sequences aiming to show that if anything universal is to be found in lyric poetry’s “I,” it is the result of centuries-long entanglements and contaminations, and of the bodies made to bear these exchanges, to give birth to this century’s globalized subject.

“FESTIVAL is an ode to both beauty and misery. Mia You’s ingenious poetry will have you laughing through your tears. Do NOT miss out!”
— Yael van der Wouden

"She reanimates the form-of-life which is a poem with a feminist skepticism, without foreclosing her robustly idealist commitment to poetry’s continuance"
— Lisa Robertson

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

of sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear. 

While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.

"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible. Originally published as a series of home-made pamphlets that seemed to come as much from post-punk zine culture as from avant-garde poetics, it's good to see them gathered here in one place for the first time and as a body of evidence of a culture of struggle. These poems do not merely comment on that struggle, but emerge from within it. They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity." – Sean Bonney

IONE is a Dream Keeper: a facilitator of dreams. Sharing this intimate part of our being, she believes, can be the start of new ways of being with one another. 

Exploring the reality of the dream and the dream of reality over many decades has led IONE to appreciate the quantum nature of dreams. Weaving science and dream traditions from around the world together with her own memories and the dreams of her friends and community members, Quantum Dreaming shows that as we start practising awareness, our consciousness also deepens.

IONE and Pauline Oliveros’s shared vision of a harmonious, self-sustaining network of artists and dreamers led to the founding of the Deep Listening Institute. Quantum Dreaming similarly seeks a radical shift in our collective consciousness, across all states of dreaming and waking.

Afterword by Sarah Shin
Images by Sammy Lee

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

A collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.

A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, "The Beautiful One," comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson's poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.