Mamma Rassise No.3

In this interview, Palestine solidarity activists form the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran in January 2026, comparing notes about resistance to various forms of authoritarianism.

The occasionally-published broadsheet Civilization was founded in New York in 2018 by Richard Turley,  Lucas Mascatello, and Mia Kerin. Its origin was as a response to New York City life, but has now transformed into an art project that gathers language, overheard conversations, secret recordings transcribed by rapid-capture software to produce a dense, rhythmic assemblage of texts from both public and private spaces alike. As a result, Civilization’s design texture has found fans in the fashion world, leading to collaborations with Calvin Klein and Junya Watanabe. 

The publication has also enjoyed contributions from a wide array of artists, writers and personalities including: Aaron Maine, Alis Atwell, Amos Poe, Amalia Ulman, Aria Dean, Alicia Novella Vasquez, Bill Drummond, Biz Sherbert, Babak Radboy, Carly Busta, Darcie Wilder, Echo Wu, Ella Plevin, Eric Johnson, Honor Levy, Iris Luz, Mel Ottenberg, Isabelle Rea, Joey LaBeija, Jordan Barse, Lovefoxx, Maddie Quinn, Patrick McMullan, Rachel Rabbit White, Sybil Prentice, Thom Bettridge, and Zans Brady Krohn.

Hechtmappen bieden geen soelaas is wat overbleef na een vakantiejob waarbij de taakinhoud vooral bestond uit het verwijderen van nietjes uit verouderde documenten. Deze weken waren de bron voor fascinaties voor ongemakkelijke stiltes, gesprekken in liften, de diefstal van fluorescerende pennen en een ontplofte ventilator. 

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.

Car archiver nos écrits et nos paroles n'a jamais été aussi important, car il faut rendre compte de nos existences, de ce moment, pour nous et pour les futurs queers en recherche de repères oui, nous avons écrit, donc oui vous pourrez écrire aussi ! oui, nous avons existé, donc oui, vous existerez aussi ! car oui, nous sommes toustes poéte·sses ! car nos vies sont des poèmes et être queer est de la poésie car touxs mes queers sont des poéte·sses! 

Because preserving our writings and our words has never been more important, because we must bear witness to our lives, to this moment, for ourselves and for future queers in search of guidance yes, we have written, so yes, you can write too! yes, we have existed, so yes, you will exist too! because yes, we are all poets! because our lives are poems and being queer is poetry because all my queers are poets!

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and place. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs. Her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. They invite us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience. 

Fatemeh Shams is the author of 88 (Gardoon, Berlin), Writing in the Mist (H&S Media, London), and When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, Washington D.C). Her poems and translations have been published in Poetry magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, and elsewhere. Fatemeh grew up in Mashhad, Iran and is an Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars, published by Tin House (US) and Corsair (UK). His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

An inscription of time at the coast, singing crows, albatrosses and seagulls. STOP. Extracted from the earth a whole alphabet. The waves uplifted countries and washed mountains until the storm came undone. The plantation of tobacco was maintained among the meadows and cafes flourished as the core of erudition, the power was theirs - you could see it in cinema- the actors spoke feverishly with enthusiasm, rather than breathless, meticulous and austere. The scars healed on mysterious skin that came out of the shadow to cross the day.

Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. - Benjamin Krusling

Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested—the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations; the result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays; incidental excavations of persona and place.

Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.

Help brilliantly extends Steven Zultanski’s current phase of writing—looser, more documentary, more situational. In setting up explicit objects of inquiry and conversation—love, death, childhood—the book shows that to know these things is to also know our friends and ourselves. Sustained by an orchestration of relation and memory (and thus reality), affect here is modular, the product of what happens when we transform things by talking about them. A careful and astute experiment in writing and living.
 — Jennifer Soong

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. Each of the four Yellow Songs books reckons with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision. Art book quality printing in full color with felt paper inserts.

Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie's "China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.