Permanent Volta

A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.

Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut. 

The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”

Edited by Evan Kennedy & Jason Morris

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men.

This new edition will feature essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis, who adapted the book to music with TM Davy in 2017 for a performance at the New Museum, and activist filmmaker Tourmaline.

An extraordinary collaboration by an award-winning duo—poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed–that bears witness to the genocide in Gaza.

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media—including their own—in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, this book will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

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.

Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR is a book haunted—by empire, by sleeplessness, by Sappho herself. In it, queerness becomes both the agent of terror and its object. “I want to be consumed. I want to disappear twice.” Extending the experiments of Mayer, Lonidier, and Stein, Modeya’s poems are as much about desire as they are about violence. They let us in on a secret: “Logic sometimes is so disgusting.” At once delirious and hyperalert, performance and document of a performance, SAPPHO TERROR disrupts the routines of everyday life from within. “Tending to the eros of writing something down.”

A fist is something that blooms inside a lover, a hand held up in revolutionary camaraderie, and the weapon of bare-knuckle combat. In Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR, the poet probes, in a language that possesses an addictive deliquescence, the body as policy and the devotional as daily, where intimacy is all at once risked, tenderized, and disciplined. We begin in a space of betweenness—between street and bed, between conquest and abandon—and are then submerged into tidal pools of sleeplessness where the poet is overtaken, exquisitely, by forces beyond themselves. Sculpted into vigilant word-reliquaries, these poems exalt the femi-themme of the night while holding fast to danger. Inside this edge-space lives the chasm—the danger that lives in the distance from one edge to another—where sex, politics, and liminal states of consciousness collide, exposing how power is enforced, negotiated, and sometimes utterly undone through the body. —Valerie Hsiung

In SAPPHO TERROR Maura Modeya drifts with eros between the “war intestine,” and a restless dreamscape where desire demands disorientation and the rapture of invasion teeters in tension between queer love and the horrors of militaristic and domestic terrorism. Modeya offers us a vulnerable and familiar sorrow: “Why when I want to speak of love, violence surfaces?” In communion with Sappho’s fragments—those invocations of desire intensified by their historical devastation—Modeya’s poems project that eros is to want is to risk.

Leaning into the “deathless language” of queer love, Modeya allows herself to be haunted by the unreasonable logic of eros and finds herself caught between an insomnia that threatens the poet’s coherence of self, and a sleep that risks waking to the repulsive logics adorning our daily violences.In striking and visceral exhaustion, this book performs the desire of possession—by a lover, by language, by loss. SAPPHO TERROR brings us into the poet’s rapture, one that is profoundly balanced between the paradoxical and perilous forces of eros. —Serena Chopra

What arises out of sleeplessness? In SAPPHO TERROR, all boundaries fall away into ritual. There is a permeability, an eros, a freedom from all structures and institutions, even from our own self. Our human guardrails fall away to a place where we forget the boots on our necks, that our money buys weapons for the state, or even that we are separate unique beings. Is it wrong to forget, or is it a healing? Perhaps both. Modeya says that in sleeplessness, “to submit means to surrender into what is wanted so badly.” In the face of terror, our letting go is a kind of purity. It tells us we can travel beyond repression, not to escape, but to reach the most natural state of our being, even before survival. It is a reminder of life. —Samuel Ace

Maura Modeya’s SAPPHO TERROR takes back Plato’s Cave for the dykes. In these poems eros’ shadows reign sovereign: language is chained and casts haptic forms onto Modeya’s bedroom wall lit by Sappho’s famous fires. These poems join her chorus of “You Burn Me” with the desperate velocity only the insomniac knows. Modeya’s verse is exquisite and relentless, creaking out of the dead of night, bargaining for the possibility of touch. An assembly of aching towardness, SAPPHO TERROR is part elegy, part manifesto, part love letter that sabotages the war intestines we live in order to undivide us from our desire. —Rosie Stockton

Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime. 

Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance. 

Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings. 

“Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.”
Paul B. Preciado 

“This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.”
Rosie Stockton 

“Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.”
Adam Shatz

With texts by Francesc Tosquelles, trans. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem

In 1942, butcher Heinrich Angst started to set up his own business in Zurich. Today, Angst AG operates the municipal abattoir and supplies catering businesses and butchers throughout the canton. Angst is a book documenting an installation with 50 used and framed sausage wrapping papers presented at Fondation Fernet Branca in Saint Louis, France. On the other hand the book is gathering 50 systemically relevant poems surrounding writing, everyday life as a dance with obligation and panic, a society without children, fear as a fundamental quality of life and hopefulness to bury fear together. 

stewarding maps the joyful and embodied ways we can resist oppressive structures that control our food, housing, and socialisation. We begin in an abandoned school, previously the union headquarters for a coal board, which became a legal guardianship, now condemned. We witness acts of communing between human inhabitants, composting worms, microbes in fermentation, and learn working class histories along the way. Here, complex networks emerge between agents, and thrive, disrupting the monolithic power of corporate extraction. Sean Roy Parker’s debut collection of poetry is a generous account of hopeful ways to eat and ways to live.

Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. 

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.