Worms For Luncheon

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

My Dead Book is a novel composed of nonlinear vignettes and fragments about a queer man approaching his fiftieth birthday who is haunted by insomnia and his past. In the dead of night, he remembers his friends who died in the late 1980s and 1990s, his years as a teenage throwaway and sex worker, and ruminates on working class survival, queer aging, AIDS, and whether he has outlived his place in the world.

“What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?”— Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot

“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

A brilliant novella from a legendary figure in American fiction.

A young woman drifts through dimly lit bars and rented rooms, reporting from the erogenous zones of New York and Europe. Encountering increasingly bizarre sexual situations, she turns her curious, comic, and fierce eye onto the contemporary world of sex and desire.

The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, preen, and fall hopelessly in love. In the narrator’s deadpan portraits, we see young women indulging their freedom through hope and disappointment, and young men wearing various guises of masculinity.

This novella surprises with unlikely fucks, disturbing fucks, outlandish fucks, and some truly weird fucks – all written with the smart, elegant, and tough style which could only be that of Lynne Tillman.

From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, Paying Attention is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.

Paying Attention gathers more than fifty of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.

Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in Frieze, and magazines including Aperture and Artforum, these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Partie sur les sites de la dernière briqueterie artisanale de Riemst et de la recyclerie de briques d'Alexander van Mosselaer, Juliet Mérie en ramène un récit poétique qui explore notre rapport à la matière vivante et questonne le cours de la vie. 

Loin d'être un documentaire, ses photographies créent un rapport ambigu entre la perception des espaces visités et l'allégorie qui s'installe. La possière se soulève pour dévoiler les lieux de vie et de mort des briques qui dessinent le paysage belge. 

Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu is a poem that distrusts solitary authority even as it passes through a single voice, moving from the lyric “I” toward a collective utterance grounded in labor, history, and shared breath. 

Producing the first collaborative translation of Alturas de Macchu Picchu is not incidental but consonant with its deepest claims. Attentive to Neruda’s unique lyric pressure, this new English version resists the tradition of singular, authoritative renderings by allowing meaning, rhythm, and decision to emerge through dialogue and negotiation. 

In this way, the translation does not merely transmit Neruda’s poem but enacts its insistence that voice is a collective achievement, not a solitary possession.

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

This publication brings together two original screenplays for yet-realized video works by Robinson along with a collection of research material presented as a retrograde calendar. The screenplays, / Imagine Prompt: Catfish Monogamy and The Jealousy of Sagittarius A*, both deal with contemporary life and creative labor as they intersect with digital culture and current anxieties regarding AI. In addition, the screenplays are followed by A Faggot is a Unit (Homage to Hanne Darboven), a collection of archival photographs, scanned objects and ephemera, as well as stock imagery and graphics from the internet collected by Robinson over the course of seven years (2015–2021). The imagery further splits the disorienting narratives presented in the two screenplays to offer a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable way of reading stories while functioning simultaneously as visual companion and counterpoint to the scripts.

Writing and editing is central to Robinson’s published and film work, inquiring into queer histories and the contemporary economy of the image, not as novelty subjects in themselves, but as forms of knowledge integral to questioning histories of perceived liberation. We are committed to representing diverse voices and perspectives that challenge and build upon our vision of bringing material from the fast-paced digital experience to the book form.

Padraig Robinson is a Berlin-based artist, filmmaker and writer. 

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.