Sex Goblin

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha's invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

"These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. . . apparitions (nines) deserves to be read—for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out." - Lou Selfridge, Frieze

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.” - CAConrad

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

If Aurora Mattia is a switchboard operator, then Unsex Me Here is her call log. Please hold. There’s someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.

Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney's daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived briefly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

A vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.

Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell, and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Mo0on/IO with Lindsay Choi.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

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.

Regions surface often in this issue—across arts, tales, and gatherings of individuals and meanings—as a possibility to bypass the borders of nation-states and the meta-geographies of colonial modernity.

Slavs and Tatars; Hera Chan on Stephanie Comilang; Stephanie Bailey on Ho Tzu Nyen; Drifting into the Atmospheric by Sohrab Mohebbi; Lauren Cook contributes nine newly commissioned note-like fiction pieces; Asad Raza on Édouard Glissant; Mira Dayal in conversation with Shanzhai Lyric, TJ Shin, and jina valentine; Temporary Communities, Four Points on Radically Public Institutions by Elvira Dyangani Ose; A Signature Truer Than the Name by Dani Blanga Gubbay; tidbits: Ruoru Mou by Amy Jones; Virginia Ariu by Brit Barton; Bagus Pandega by Harry Burke; Ceidra Moon Murphy by Alex Bennett; Oshay Green by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi; Shafei Xia in conversation with Danielle Shang; books by Christian Rattemeyer; Guest Design: Lamm & Kirch.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Mousse is a bimonthly contemporary art magazine. Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism, visual arts, and curating today, alternated with a series of distinctive articles in a unique tabloid format.

D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.

Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.