Detransition, Baby (paperback)

This latest issue of Worms invites readers into a bold and tender exploration of love in all its messy, political, and transformative guises.

Set against the backdrop of state-sanctioned transphobia in the UK and US, ongoing genocide in Gaza, and a litany of global injustices that see us staggering under the weight of collective and personal upheaval, this issue reckons with thinking and writing about love in a time of crisis. How do we take seriously the seemingly frivolous demands of love, devotion, beauty—in all their myriad and sometimes painful forms—when basic needs and rights are stripped away.

Featuring voices from at home and overseas including Shon Faye, Torrey Peters, Melissa Febos, Constance DeJong, Sarah Aziza, Precious Okoyomon, Carmen Maria Machado and Constance Debré, as well as contributions from rising stars in experimental literature, we ask: How can we continue to love someone who refuses to change? Is writing about sex still strange – or have we done and seen it all? What do you do if you fall in love with your sperm donor?

From the resilience and fierce creativity of trans writers, the challenges and ethics of telling love stories that are not our own, to the guts and gristle of motherhood, pet love, age-gap relationships and getting off on poetry, Worms 10 is a testament to the power of writing, and of love, as acts of resistance, reclamation and truth.

FEATURING: Shon Faye, Jackie Ess, Precious Okoyomon, Constance Debré, Melissa Febos, Torrey Peters, Carmen Maria Machado, Sarah Aziza, Constance DeJong, Sophie K Rosa

CONTRIBUTORS: Caitlin Hall, Zara Joan Miller, Devki Panchmatia, Lu Rose Cunningham, Gabrielle Sicam, Aimée Ballinger, Mimi Howard, Enya Ettershank, Sufjan Bile, MK McGrath, Amie Corry, Dizzy Zaba, 2ly (Molly Cranston, Safiye Gray, Hanako Emden, Sophie Florian, Johanna Maierski), Jemima Skala, Fariha Róisín, Summer Moraes

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Minu, Dozie Kanu, Jen Dessinger, Karla Monroe, Sophie Williams, Ellen Stewar

ILLUSTRATORS: Rifke Sadleir, Chloe Sheppard, Charlotte Pelissier, Leomi Sadler

EDITORS: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod, Arcadia Molinas

DESIGN: Caitlin McLoughlin

“Een thematisch nummer maken over trans*esthetiek riskeert trans*heid meteen als iets aparts te signaleren, als iets wat niet simpelweg kan zijn; hoe stel je ‘gewoon’ een special issue samen?”

Het nummer werd samengesteld door Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer en Sven Van den Bossche.

Met bijdrages van: Ada M. Patterson, Camille Pier, Sven Van den Bossche, Alara Adilow, Nour Helou & Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Mariken Heitman, misha verdonck, Dagmar Bosma, Hans Demeyer, Torrey Peters, Kato Trieu, Valentijn Hoogenkamp, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Lieks Hettinga, Kalib Batta, Kopano Maroga, Hannah Chris Lomans en Nele Buyst.

A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.

Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.