What The Fire Sees

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. — Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. — Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad. 

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century. 

At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips 

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

"Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst." — Jamieson Webster

While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study, set in the France of the 1960s, of the of the relationship between subjectivity, nationality, and time and space.

With a foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz

Translated by Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly

Cover image by Mike Kelley, Untitled 1975

Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

The Romance of Happy Workers swaggers through a world of cowboys, conquistadors, comrades, and housewives with mock-Russian lyric sequences and Keatsian swoon. Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:

"Mix a drink of stock lot:
vermouth and the water table.
And the bar will smell of IBP.
And you will lick my Laura Ingalls."

In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.

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. 

Alain Brossat est ex-militant de la LCR ancré dans une lecture anti-impérialiste de la politique. Houria Bouteldja est la cofondatrice du QG Décolonial et une figure de l'antiracisme politique. Dans cet entretien exigeant, les deux penseur·ses et militant·es clarifient leurs divergences et leurs convergences autour de la religion, du racisme, de l'État, du fascisme et de l'impérialisme. Alors que ces questions clivent celles et ceux qui luttent pour l'émancipation, rendant parfois les discussions impossibles, les deux auteur·ices reviennent sur leurs parcours politiques et philosophiques, sans pour autant feindre le consensus de leurs héritages politiques. Entretien coordonné par Marianne VL Koplewicz.

Why sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology.

Consider sublimation, conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around), even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, "What is sex?" rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists of the unconscious."

Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

Matters of Feminist Practice, edited by Poupeh Missaghi and Karla Kelsey, brings together scholars, writers, poets, and artists of different identities and backgrounds to confer on the urgent topic of “feminist practice” through seven topics: the body, the quotidian, hybridity, language, documentation, environment, and conflict.

In the twenty-five scholarly and creative-critical pieces included in our introductory volume, each contributor brings unique visions, insights, approaches, voices, and forms to launch the conversation, which will continue to unfold online at mfpjournal.com. 

Contributors to the inaugural issue include: Alexis Almeida, Mary-Kim Arnold, Mildred Barya, Teresa Carmody, Julie Carr, Serena Chopra, Caroline Crumpacker, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Marcella Durand, Jennifer Firestone, Yanara Friedland, Carla Harryman, Madhu Kaza, Petra Kuppers, Jean Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Megan Madden, Saretta Morgan, Lida Nosrati, Adrienne Perry, Frances Richard, Kat Savino, Celina Su, and Rachael Guynn Wilson.

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.