Oval

Delving into the center of the endless webs of repression against our bodies, desires, politics, and imaginations, are those whose actions and motion cut away at the systemic limitations of society–this collection of poems was written with the inspiration and work of these people in mind.

As a working class queer poet, Conrad has had to fight through different stratifications of oppression his entire life. His poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. Deviant Propulsion is dedicated to the elimination of fear. The title refers to the idea that those who are deviant propel the world forward at top speed. The poems that emerge from this life-long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.

CAConrad is the author of nine books of poetry and essays, including their latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals and While Standing in Line for Death, which won a Lambda Book Award. A documentary about their work, The Book of Conrad, is viewable online on their website.

A horror story of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's The Formation of Calcium is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected.

Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she's grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.

Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.

A bracing novel that asks how far we would go for the ones we love—and what we would do to destroy the ones we hate. 

Lisa has lost custody of her young twin boys. Caught between the French legal system’s sluggish bureaucracy and her sinister, scheming in-laws, she’s alone and lost, an Argentine migrant in rural France picking grapes for a pittance, only allowed to see her children in supervised visits once a month. Scapegoated and outcast, destitute and desperate, Lisa decides to take radical action: early one morning, she sneaks into her in-laws’ farmhouse, takes back her children, sets the barn ablaze, and makes her escape.

What follows is a white-knuckled road trip that explores human beings pushed to the edge. Clearly, Lisa is not in her right mind, and as Harwicz deftly mingles a chorus of contradictory voices into her very unreliable narration, the reader comes to regard the protagonist with an unsettling mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Written in savage, chiseled prose, Unfit shoots off, a gripping chase that questions all our assumptions—and points out our hypocrisies— about motherhood, custody rights, love, violence, anti-semitism, and migration. The latest novel by the acclaimed author of Die, My Love (soon to be adapted to a film starring Jennifer Lawrence), Unfit is addictively terrifying, savagely sophisticated, and shockingly brilliant.

Translated from Spanish by Jessie Mendez Sayer

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

A partly autobiographical novel that the German surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn (1916-1970) wrote for her ten-year-old daughter in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English.

Unica Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.

About Unica Zürn 
Nora Berta "Unika" Ruth Zürn, originally known as Ruth, was born on 6 July 1916 in Berlin. Raised in Berlin, Zürn had a contentious relationship with her mother, while she idolized her absent father. While at school she published her first short stories in magazines for young people, and in 1933 she began to work at the UFA film studios in Berlin (acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 until the end of the Nazi era). In 1942 she married and had two children, Katrin and Christian. Shortly after, she lost the custody of her children. For the next few years she survived by writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays. After the war, she became part of the Bohemian group of Berlin and began to call herself Unika (after her aunt Unika Pudor). She frequented the artistic milieu revolving around the DADA-surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne ("The Bathtub"). In 1953, Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer, best known for his disassembled dolls in unconventional poses directed at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, and became his muse. They lived together in Paris for many years, albeit in a conflictual relationship. Zürn concentrated on producing poetic anagrams supplemented by drawings, thus developing her own multidimensional surreal style. From the late 1950s, she suffered from forms of anxiety, later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material while in psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. From 1956 to 1964, Zürn had four solo exhibitions of her drawings, and her work was included in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. The exploration of the unconscious dimension would increasingly lose its liberating, positive aspect and turn into a fixation on a narrow space, one in which the self is tormented by distressing visions. Her psychological difficulties inspired much of her writing, especially Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, published in English in 1971). Other published texts by Zürn include Hexentexte (1954) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, 1967). Zürn died on 19 October 1970 in Paris, throwing herself from the sixth floor.