The Argonauts

Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.

The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die. 

Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.

We can go on like that forever
building paradise from our urges
out of our fetishes our loves our vices
How lucky
We’ll wait for you then
Don’t be too long
Bookmark the page
We’ll be Here
—From “The New Heaven”

Translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk.

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice. 

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume? 

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth—and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialize, and discipline creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance. 

A buoyant melding of popular culture and literary criticism, The Slicks is a captivating and unexpected assessment of two iconic female artists by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

From the author of Confessions of the Fox comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed gives an unrepentant account of all her failures—including her child. 

“Jordy Rosenberg might be one of our most fearless living novelists. There are no half-measures in his work, just big ideas and living characters and gorgeous sentences and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise. Night Night Fawn is extraordinary.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House 

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenberg is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. She has opinions about her smutty late husband, her career as the receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon, her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser, and her failed aspirations to be a film noir actress. But what she really wants to talk about are unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Zionism, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara finds herself in a nightmare from which she cannot escape, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates—or are they avenging nemeses?—once again. 

Part novel, part someone’s mother’s unauthorized memoir—all diatribe, gutter schtick, and deranged manifesto, Night Night Fawn is a ferociously candid account of intergenerational conflict.

‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’ 

On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; García Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles. 

In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life. 

At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them. 

MAR GARCÍA PUIG is an editor and author. From 2015 to 2023 she was a member of the Spanish Congress of Deputies for Podemos, where she served on the Culture Committee and the Equality Committee. Her books include The History of the Vertebrate and This Thing of Darkness.

Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond.

These early portraits of their budding relationship are followed by several playful postcards from Thek in 1960 and his first letter to Hujar in 1962, written while the artist is in the Philadelphia harbor aboard a containership bound for Europe. In the letter, Thek is brimming with joy and new discoveries and exclaims that the world “seems bigger and more gloriously strange than ever before in my entire life.” The two eventually meet in Rome, where they both begin to evolve into the icons we know them as today, and the remaining letters trace Thek’s travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work, and financial ups and downs through 1975. More than fifty letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera, are reproduced in Stay away from nothing and their poetic, quotidian, and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar’s relationship as it wavers with seduction, glamor, tumult, and mischievousness.

Throughout this period, Hujar was photographing Thek in his now-iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios, and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist’s classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek, as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark, and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers, and friends.

An afterword is provided by Andrew Durbin, author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Edited by Francis Schichtel.

Paul Thek is among the most legendary and elusive artists of the post-1960s generation. He burst onto the New York scene with his Technological Reliquaries series, then known as “meat pieces,” which challenged Pop and Minimalism with an idiosyncratic approach that merged earnest posthuman embodiment and a critique of contemporary art trends. In Europe in the 1970s, he created new modes of exhibition-making that involved the creation of elaborate, ephemeral installations composed of sand, candles, newspaper, chicken-wire, Polaroids, and discarded furniture. Upon returning to New York in the later years of his career, he produced his deliberately “bad paintings” while continuing his longest-running series of paintings executed on newspaper, works that poignantly underscore his sustained engagement with themes of ephemerality and the passage of time. Thek died of AIDS in 1988.

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.

A rich and moving epistolary memoir about transgender childhood, sexual trauma, motherhood, and a young queer life in 1970s Argentina.

In these hilarious and heartbreaking letters, Cecilia Gentili reinvents the trans memoir, putting the confession squarely between the writer and her enemies, paramours and friends.

Writing to childhood figures such as her rapist’s daughter, her father’s mistress, her best friend, and her mother, Gentili probes deeply into the bitter cruelty, buried secrets, and delicious gossip of a small town. 

Is she here for revenge, or forgiveness? Both! And more! A story of sex, theft, murder, motherhood, and outrageous fashion choices, Faltas is a beautiful, messy meditation on what it takes to heal, and even grow.