Revolutionary Letters

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

‘Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound… To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.’  Jamieson Webster

‘Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.’  Maggie Nelson

‘With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.’  Lidia Yuknavitch

Foreword by Jamieson Webster

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. 

The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text. 

Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. 

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distils a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior and inexpressible.

‘How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.’ – Dionne Brand 

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is everywhere, writers, thinkers, poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

This collection is edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, with contributions from Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al-Nakhala, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny, Houria Bouteldja, Anees Ghanima, Sahar Khalifeh, Laleh Khalili, Lujayn, Mira Mattar, Lina Meruane, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana, Rahul Rao, Nasser Rabah, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri.

Co-published by TBA21.

All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

All My Dead Jesters is an assembly of select poems previously published in de Vries’ first two English language collections—Dark Hour and I Failed to Swoon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018 and 2021 respectively). These old works have been lightly revised for republication, and are paired with poems drawn from a manuscript-in-process to institute an autotelic kaleidoscope of some ten years worth of work in verse. 

De Vries’ poems are spare, terse and epigrammatical—a barroom Bashō—dedicated to the glimmer of a compact glance; the chance, glamour and negative capability of a passing thought; and the slow drip of liquid crystal as colours our present. All My Dead Jesters is a torch song for our ‘poor subjectivity,’  a slow dance with sour times, a ‘[steering] away from [the] gratuitous provocation’ that litters our contemporary outlook. ‘Her competence as a poet lies in her ability to translate visceral vulnerability’ for the page (The Kelvingrove Review / University of Glasgow), as she patchworks a heroic ‘poetry without [a] hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, [...] the map of a world we like to think we know’ [CA Conrad].

Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

The appearance of Firespitter (Nightboat, 2025), a 600-page-plus collected poems, is immensely valuable and long overdue . . . Hers [Jayne Cortez’s] is a voice—both on and off the page—that speaks with authority, curiosity, and an unshakeable faith in the power of poetry to change consciousness and change lives. - David Grundy, Poetry Foundation

Much like Proust’s madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi’s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the massacre by Korean government forces of hundreds of students taking part in the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artefacts commingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired in part by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a ‘magnetic field of memory’, proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Don Mee Choi draws on friendships, literature and documentary materials to elucidate the personal griefs we suffer under the assaults of empire. Formally explosive and emotionally harrowing, Mirror Nation is a riveting investigation into the coded images that fuse memories of different times and places.
— Forrest Gander

Writing on the fragmentation of chronic illness, why ‘full access’ isn’t something arts venues should aim for, the complexities of receiving gender-affirming care while living with chronic illness, the realities of constantly having to ration your energy, an interview with musical artist Dead Gowns, abortion access and bodily autonomy, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.

Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Vida Adamczewski, A/Bel Andrade, Amy Berkowitz, Khairani Barokka, Jax Bulstrode, Sarah Courville, Jen Deerinwater , Amy Dickinson, Mizy Judah Clifton, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Dead Gowns, Sergey Isakov, Theo LeGro, Elias Lowe, Cathleen Luo, Jameisha Prescod, Olivia Spring, Leigh Sugar, Oriele Steiner, Emerson Whitney, Chantal Wnuk, Caroline Wolff, and Emma Yearwood

SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.