Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Lesbian Visions

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive.

In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters.

Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale.

To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers; literature the wink that slips into a wince.

Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous "legs" of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the "foot" of a bed. Quintilian's "thirsty" crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes' compassed "wings" of a house. Augustine's "piscina" in which no fish are to be found (and only humans drown). With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.

Featuring Will Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, César Dávila Andrade, Martine Bellen, Stanislav Belsky, Anselm Berrigan, David Buuck, Garrett Caples, Sam Cha, Logan Fry, Lawrence Giffin, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, E. Tracy Grinnell, Karen Holman, Elise Houcek, Andrew Joron, Inna Krasnoper, Carlos Lara, Jonathan Larson, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Michael Leong, Douglas A. Martin, olga mikolaivna, Sheila E. Murphy, Ann Pedone, Sal Randolph, Martha Ronk, Jonathan Simkins, Christophe Tarkos, Edwin Torres, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Wendy Xu & John Yau

Tout geste est renversement – Every gesture is reversal is a publication by artist Laurianne Bixhain comprising an imahe captured and silkscreen printed by Bixhain and a text written by Chloe Chignell. The work addresses the potential for mutual transformation between language and materials, whether human or non human. How does language traverse the body? What are its resonances? How does it shape physical presence, gestures or thoughts? 

A2 silkscreen printed poster
Designed by Morgane Le Ferec.
Printed in 300 Copies. 

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover. 

INTERVIEWS Dave Eggers by Jim James Jun Kaneko by Mark Mack Lotus L. Kang by Lara Mimosa Montes Reverend Joyce McDonald by Katherine Cheairs Rodney McMillian by Dave McKenzie Ruth Ozeki by Hannah Tinti Samora Pinderhughes by Jason Moran Debra Priestly by Nancy Grossman Elaine Reichek by Sabrina Gschwandtner

FICTION Isabelle Fang, Yuri Herrera, Claire Vaye Watkins
NONFICTION Shaan Sachdev
POETRY Adedayo Agarau, Elena Alexander, Kelsey Day
PORTFOLIO Shraddha Ramani and William Villalongo
COMIC Margaret Barry
EDITOR’S CHOICE Reflections on new works from Horse Lords, Valeria Luiselli, Nicolás Pereda, Julian Radlmaier, and Paul Yoon and a monograph on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

On the cover: Detail of Rodney McMillian, shaft, 2021–22, latex, acrylic, Flashe, ink, and paper on canvas, six panels, 80 × 4 feet diameter. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Petzel, New York City.

BOMB Magazine is a quarterly of artists in conversation begun in 1981 in New York. BOMB publishes interviews across disciplines like visual art, literature, performance, music, dance, film, and is founded on mission of delivering the artist's voice. Publishing print seasonally, BOMB also publishes interviews, flash fiction, studio visits, excerpts, and essays five times a week on our website.