Nowhere Near

A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.

What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange’s first chapbook, opens with a social media advertisement marketing a probiotic as an alternative to the “nuclear bomb” of antibacterial acne medication. As Strange investigates the treatment of the human body as a landscape submissive to medical intervention, they ruminate on the contemporary relationship between microbes, gut-directed medical technologies, and capitalism’s encroachment on life. Drawing on the vernacular of social media marketing, they deftly oscillate between instructive and personal registers, stretching the private across a nexus of microbial interminglings. Strange Biology reflects on the semiotic science of the gut: how the language of medicine defines the mutating edges of the human body. 

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is a volte-face of the neoliberal market economy’s construction of isolated, individual safety. In her debut book of poems, Mascarenhas lingers in the question of risk as it arises in daily life and intimacy. Through a close study and partial translation of philosopher-psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s Éloge du risque (2011), her poems posit risk as a fissure, through which we might imagine yet-unknown futures.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Bush Award.

Alisha Mascarenhas (b. 1989) is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021). She has contributed writing to Pamenar Press, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse, Peripheral Review, and The Felt, among others. Alisha was a 2023 resident at La Baldi Artist’s Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she now lives.

There is a body lying across Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk. Here is a book of generosity and perdition, that could not anticipate the death of its author, the one these works are addressed to, written for, dreamt by, in a stream of proximities. A strange dismantling of time occurs as a result of quiet reversals in which light is diffracted across belated syntaxes, reaching past life to the living. Though A Catalogue of Risk is “running past the flowers,” it is a slow text that grieves the day’s illuminations. It is a lesson in transmission in which we, readers, are the apprentices of grace, at the edge also of drowning. Here is a book that has been “hungering to be emptied.” So, too, is it a book of promise.
— Nathanaël

A Catalogue of Risk is a book of luminous attention. Alisha Mascarenhas gives us the language of a mind tracking both internal and external weathers, tuning and returning herself to beauty, fear, grief and desire. Attending a cascade of emotions, the poet dwells in questions, knowing that to keep open to difficult questions is to keep open to desire. That she risks such openness, thinking always with others, through pain and love, is an astonishment. 
— Madhu Kaza

A Catalogue of Risk poses an evocative challenge, one of prismatic nuance: to pursue multiple angles of intimacy along the life-death continuum of how risk holds, unfolds, and makes one whole. “The definition” of what risk is “is shaded in questions” and runs a gamut of desires and sensations at once libidinal and cerebral. Alisha Mascarenhas risks risk itself with this generous offering of exquisite phenomenology and experiential trace in the form of a full-saturation poetics glowing in amplitude and intensity.
— Brenda Iijima

Born in Flames – the publication – is the complete authorised graphic translation of Lizzie Borden’s mythical 1983 film Born in Flames. Kaisa Lassinaro’s post-facto screenplay captures all the political energy and visual brilliance of Borden’s film, which describes a futuristic society (eerily similar to our own) where the achievements of a past revolution are threatened by reactionary sexist forces. 

The published version of Born in Flames allows for a frame-by-frame analysis of the film’s complex plot and soundtrack, with songs by The Bloods and Red Crayola. Included is an interview with Borden conducted by Lassinaro, in which the filmmaker looks back on the making of her film.

Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image.

A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications.

O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.

Edited by Aruna D'Souza

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

Afternoon Editions no. 2: text and drawings by Chrysa Parkinson titled Weaknesses. Between January and March 2019 Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine was presented as a solo-exhibition at Index Foundation in Stockholm. During this period Chrysa Parkinson was invited as a guest writer for Afternoon Editions. Weaknesses is a leap in memory.