Feminist, Queer, Crip

Invitation au voyage à travers l’œuvre littéraire de Monique Wittig, ce livre nous embarque dans une passionnante exploration de ses textes de fiction, de L’opponax à Virgile, non. Il rend compte de la lutte amoureuse qu’elle livre au langage – matériau brut qu’elle travaille au corps pour faire advenir dans la réalité ce qui n’y a pas (encore) droit de cité. La convocation malicieuse et grave des grands récits du passé, les nombreux emprunts aux auteurs anciens, la pratique de la citation font des Guérillères une formidable épopée féministe, du Corps lesbien un Évangile selon Sappho, du Voyage sans fin le combat drôle et tragique d’une Quichotte féministe et lesbienne.

En soulignant la cohérence des textes et leur fragmentation, Catherine Écarnot met en évidence la passion poétique qui habite ces livres que Wittig concevait comme des « chevaux de Troie » : des machines de guerre destinées à fissurer la réalité pour y inscrire une subjectivité mouvante, échappée du continent noir de la féminité, rétive aux assignations de genre. Uniques et radicalement disruptives, les fictions ainsi créées ouvrent grands les chemins qui relient littérature et lesbianisme.

Publié pour la première fois en 2002, cet ouvrage, le premier consacré en Europe à l’œuvre witigienne, reparaît dans une nouvelle édition remaniée, actualisée et enrichie de nombreuses références aux études publiées depuis sa parution.

Mangled diction from the cusp of childhood. 

Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt."

Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, and performance writer who has collaborated with multiple visual artists and composers on bodies of work. Her work has been translated into several languages, including French, with her writing represented in more than 30 national and international anthologies. She has received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), the Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), the Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among additional grants and awards from the Fund for Poetry.

Harryman was a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1979-1986). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale.

Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.

knot body was shortlisted for the QWF First Book Prize. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs (Metonymy Press), won the 2022 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal.

“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on how to love each other in all our dignity. Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.” – David Chariandy, author of Brother (Penguin Random House)

“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.” – Amber Dawn, author of My Art is Killing Me (Arsenal Pulp Press)

“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.” – Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House)

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer Arab poet living in Tio’tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory (Montreal). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. They participated in the Banff Centre’s ‘Centering Ourselves’ BIPOC residency, and they were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their second collection of poetry, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in 2021.

A new edition of Anzaldúa's classic text.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border' is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.