Books

You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

An homage and reimagining of the classic German Bildungsroman, Schernikau paid tribute to the form even as he challenged stylistic, sexual, and political conventions. Written in all lower-case, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows b, a teenager navigating politics and queer desire in a small, West German town. When b—who is interested in communism and knitting—falls in love with leif, a popular jock, b’s life at school is very predictably upended.

“A mighty, slender record of the provocative intelligence of a queer teenage mind.” —Eliot Duncan

Ronald M. Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).

Lucy Jones is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.

PRAISE

“This slender book is a fierce account of queer teenage imagination: provocative, haughty, coy, insolent, and wild. As angsty as it is intelligent, Schernikau’s prose also feels protective and sweet. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is the book, the friend, I wish I had in high school.” —Eliot Duncan

“…an earnest, seemingly offhand account of a brilliant young man growing up in a small town and realizing that his queerness and his communist politics will come to structure his life. (…) the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society." —Ben Miller & Nicholas Courtman, LARB

Writing on navigating the workplace as an ambulatory wheelchair user, how sex work can be a means of survival, re-imagining 'Christina's World', the boundaries of our bodies, an interview with Caren Beilin, poetry, artwork, book recommendations, and much more.

Essays, features, poetry, art, interviews & more from Laura Baliman, Caren Beilin, Amy Berkowitz, Leah M. Bowie, Kaitlin D'Avella, Lindsy Davis, Katherine DeCoste, Yining Fang, Emily Freeman, Maria Gray, Bec Mackenzie, Ariana Martinez, Chloe McGreal, Ryann McKinney, Iyla Owens, Emily Pinkerton, Marin Scarlett, Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh, Anna Stiles, Maeve Sweeney, & J Min Wang.

SICK is an independent, thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability, founded & edited by Olivia Spring and designed by Kaiya Waerea. Founded in Norwich, UK in 2019, we are currently based in Maine, USA and London, UK. We typically publish one issue per year.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

An inscription of time at the coast, singing crows, albatrosses and seagulls. STOP. Extracted from the earth a whole alphabet. The waves uplifted countries and washed mountains until the storm came undone. The plantation of tobacco was maintained among the meadows and cafes flourished as the core of erudition, the power was theirs - you could see it in cinema- the actors spoke feverishly with enthusiasm, rather than breathless, meticulous and austere. The scars healed on mysterious skin that came out of the shadow to cross the day.

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents and electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. 

The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

This book offers a visual and thematic journey through avant-garde, concrete, visual, and experimental poetics as they appeared in ephemeral little magazines and small press publications from the 1960s onward. This book serves as an exhibition catalog for After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 from April 23rd to July 26, 2025, at The Grolier Club exhibition in New York City.

Small presses include: 7 Flowers Press, Agentzia, Anabasis, Asylum’s Press, Ayizan Press, Beach Books Texts & Documents, Beau Geste Press, blewointmentpress, Burning Press, C Press, Chax Press, Coach House Press, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Edizioni Geiger, Expanded Media Editions, Fleye Press, Goliard Press, Grabhorn-Hoyem, Granary Books, Druckwerk, Hawk’s Well Press, Heiner Friedrich, The Hermetic Press, Hermetic Gallery, John Martin, Joseph Melzer Verlag, Kickshaws, Kontexts Publications, Letter Edged in Black Press, Luna Bisonte Productions, Membrane Press, Milano: East 128, New Wilderness Foundation, Nietzsche’s Brolly, Nova News, Open Book, Openings Press, PANic Press, Phenomenon Press, Poltroon Press, Renegade Press, Roaring Fork Press, Scorribanda Productions, Seedorn Verlag, Seripress, Siglio Press, Station Hill, Tarasque Press, Tetrad Press, Visual Poetry Workshop National Poetry Society of London, Wild Hawthorn Press, and Xexoxial Editions.

Little magazines include: “before your very eyes!”, A: An Envelope Magazine of Visual Poetry, Abracadabra, Alcheringa, Anti-Isolation, Approches, AQ, Assembling, Blank Tape, Bulletin From Nothing, Cenizas, Diagonal Cero, E pod, Fruit Cup, Ganglia, Geiger, Gnaoua, Industrial Sabotage, Interstate, Journeyman, Kaldron, Klacto 23, Kontakte, Kontexts, Kroklok, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Libellus, Life Begins with Love, Lines, Lost and Found Times, Lost Paper, Mini, New Wilderness Letter, Pages, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse., Rawz, Revue OU, Rhinozeros, Sammelband Futura, Schmuck, Shi Shi: Concrete & Visual Poetry, Signal, Soft Need, Sondern, Spanish Fleye, Stereo Headphones, Taproot Reviews, The Acts: The Shelf Life, The Difficulties, The Improbable, The Insect Trust Gazette, The Marrahwanna Quarterly, The San Francisco Earthquake, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, Toothpick Lisbon & the Orcas Islands, Unarmed: Adventurous Poetry Journal, UNI/vers(;), WhiteWalls, Xerolage, and xtant.

Les Diaboliques Parlures rassemble trois textes qui nous font découvrir une voix contemporaine majeure de la poésie et du théâtre queer. Ces œuvres, à la croisée du poétique, du politique et de l’intime, explorent le désir, la vulnérabilité, la marginalité et l’identité masculine et queer. 

L’Ardeur déploie une langue brûlante pour interroger le désir, la passion et la communauté des outsiders, transformant l’ardeur en force vitale et émancipatrice. 

One Night at the Golden Bar offre une écriture intimiste où le romantisme kitsch devient vecteur de poésie et de réflexion sur la vulnérabilité, l’amour et la monstruosité de l’humain.

Analphabet, quant à lui, questionne le langage, l’expression et les limites de la communication, confrontant le lecteur à la puissance de la langue et à sa capacité à révéler l’identité.

La sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse.

La satisfaction de parler contient en soi une clé de la satisfaction sexuelle (et non l'inverse) – une clé de la sexualité et de ses propres contradictions. Alenka Zupančič aborde la question de la sexualité comme un problème proprement philosophique de la psychanalyse – celle de Freud et de Lacan – et non celle des praticiens cliniciens tels que décrits par Lacan « orthopédistes de l'inconscient ». Que se passe-t-il, comme l'affirme Lacan, si nous pouvons obtenir exactement la même satisfaction que le sexe par la parole, l'écriture, la peinture, la prière ou autres activités ? Il ne s'agit pas d'expliquer la satisfaction que procure la parole en indiquant son origine sexuelle, mais bien de souligner que la satisfaction de parler est elle-même sexuelle.

Alenka Zupančič soutient que la sexualité est à la limite d'un « circuit court » entre ontologie et épistémologie. La sexualité et le savoir sont structurés autour d'une négativité fondamentale qui les unit au point de l'inconscient. L'inconscient (en tant que lien avec la sexualité) est le concept d'un lien inhérent entre l'être et la connaissance dans leur négativité même.

Alenka Zupančič est une philosophe lacanienne, spécialiste renommée de Nietzsche, professeure à l'European Graduate School / EGS et à l'Université de Nova Gorica, Slovénie. Elle est également research advisor et professeure à l'Institut de philosophie du Centre de recherche de l'Académie slovène des Sciences et des Arts. Avec Slavoj Žižek et Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič est l'une des figures les plus incontournables de l'Ecole de psychanalyse théorique de Ljubljana dont les travaux s'intéressent aux relations entre sexualité, ontologie et inconscient, à la critique de la théorie du sujet et à l'exploration théorique du concept lacanien du Réel.

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.

Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.

"Like the Elizabeth Bishop painting “Interior with Extension Cord,” Kelly Clare’s helical, light-filled Universal Product Code delicately traces a bewildering infrastructure. This incantatory song, “busy in green,” points its reader to the disturbing beauty in stripey checksum barcodes, to arrays of imported figs at the grocer, to words like cloud or lime that now mean too much. Humorous, musical, perspicacious, this chapbook rocks."

- Katherine Gibbel, April 2026

Includes 3 poems by Dre Roelandt.
Published as part of Paraphernalia and Addenda 2.2 of Tabloid Publications.

Afternoon Editions no. 3: Language is a map of failures. Messy thoughts on reading, writing and dressing up by Runa Borch Skolseg.

In May 2019, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine relocated its base to the Oslo Biennale headquarters in Myntgata, with a room of its own and ongoing activities. Runa Borch Skolseg visited the space at several occasions before its final closure, in 2021. Her invitation to write for the Afternoon Editions bridges the move from one room to another, and is a reflection on how fashion can be a world of fantasy, and drama, a language we all communicate through. With a personal narrative she makes readings of clothes, literature and writing, and how they merge and enrich each other.

Emil Lime collects various materials that nurture and give shape to Esther Gatón’s artistic practice, including collages made with her phone pics, sketches, sporadic notes and drawings, together with the writing of authors that have been influential on the work: Fredy Massad, María Fernanda Ampuero, Darya Diamond and Cory John. 

Everyone is layered is a scrapbook zine and a collection of poems made of the do’s and don’ts sections of a fashion magazine.

Layering is a great way to play with cowgirls-gone-wild.

They're perky, edgy pretty with a tank peeking out under a sense of humour

their thongs hanging out

after a few hours something

just feel silly floaty, jus-past-your-waist

shapes are miserable,

shapeless ones hourglassy.

WHERE’S HER BUTT?

Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.

kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil. 

kathy wu is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program.

She Will Last as Long as Stones has the inter-genre brilliance of asking where materials originate, and following that question until writing becomes a kind of listening with stone, with metal, for magnetic reverberations, for the thinking at the back of the cave.
— Bhanu Kapil

There just might be currents coursing through landscape, language, software, and labor—presences that escape extraction and will not be denied. She Will Last as Long as Stones looks into the multiple temporalities and operations of many things: material place, mining, social and scientific documentation, computation, migrant women's work, and mother-daughter relations, constellating them into a poetics of wondrous design and resonant beauty. 
— Kimberly Alidio

She Will Last as Long as Stones is a subtle circuit that conducts a charge but (paradoxically) remains open. wu's intricate parataxis offers readers fertile resistance, while simultaneously leading us to grounded revelations about the intertwined materialities of technology, language, and memory.
— Allison Parrish

La nouvelle catastrophe subie par le peuple palestinien est pire que la Nakba de 1948. C'est le premier génocide perpétré par un État industriel avancé depuis 1945, avec la participation des États-Unis et la soutien de l'Occident, France incluse. Chercheur franco-libanais spécialiste du Moyen-Orient, auteur de nombreux ouvrages traduit en vingt langues et contributeur régulier au Monde diplomatique, Gilbert Achcar dévoile le processus historique qui a mené à ce génocide et mène une réflexion rigoureuse et documentée sur ses conséquences pour le peuple palestinien, les peuples de la région et pour l'ensemble des relations internationales.

In collaboration with Laurent Poleo-Garnier, NIGHTNIGHT is an archive of images and texts from different sources addressing the theme of the night. Over the book as a party that degenerates with fatigue, alcohol and other stimulants, images and layout deteriorate, the subjects get tired, the vision is cloudy...

First edition of the Engagement Arts Zine.

Published May 2019

Confession sur le désir (l’action et l’objet du), les liens de mutualité et de résistance, Sexe 2 alterne prose et versification en 27 fragments numérotés à l’adresse plus ou moins dure, plus ou moins sincère, plus ou moins formulée car plus ou moins éloignée du Toi et du Je. Camille Kingué s’attache à révéler, à voir quelque chose à travers son image réelle et virtuelle, agrandie et rétrécie, droite et renversée, déployant une recherche des principes de l’amour (l’amour comme amour, pourquoi est ce qu’il y a de l’amour) où la métaphysique et la compréhension de soi – donc de l’autre – n’ont jamais été aussi sexy.

Claire Star Finch, dans la magnifique préface qu’iel signe au début de l’ouvrage, écrit : « Après avoir lu tous les livres de Kingué, je ne sais pas si je crois en “l’amour”, que ce soit en tant que substantif absolu ou en tant que proto-résidu de tout ce que “le sexe” peut signifier. Mais je crois définitivement qu’il faut l’écrire. » Définitivement.

A philosopher’s path towards embodiment through Tai Chi and psychedelics.
This book proposes different forms of embodiment that are not necessarily leading to production of subjectivity or territorialized identities but rather putting the “self” at risk allowing us to be emancipated from the mandatory illusion of self-realization. This can be facilitated by a daily commitment with a set of body altering practices that disjoint us from the ordinary accustomed experience of reality and provide us access to “other” layers of the real. These practices grant access to the primary control centers of the body that regulate frequencies of energy and consciousness in a deeper way and enable the body to unfold in different dimensional spaces of experience: rendering sensible the multi-layered energetic body.

This story was written by a Chinese activist/writer about her arrest and detention during the waves of resistance in China in late 2022. To evade censorship, she disguised it as a translation—told through the voice of an Iranian Kurdish woman amid the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising happening at the same time. 

After fleeing China, the author reclaimed the story through footnotes—uncovering hidden meanings and restoring its Chinese context. What first read as an Iranian story became, on re-reading, a coded Chinese narrative. Iran stood as both real and metaphorical—a displaced symbol, through which the interconnected struggles in different movements echoed.

The two waves of reading, months apart, became part of the story’s form. This “non-nonfiction” reveals a paradox: in China, truth must appear as fiction or elsewhere to be told—making the fiction more real than reality itself. 

Two years later, the piece was translated “back” into Persian by an Iranian Kurdish activist. And now, it arrives here, in this zine of tripped, layered languages. 

Author: Wu Qin
English Translation: Aaris WOO and Yixi
Farsi Translation: Somayeh Rostampour
Visual & Layout: Maoyi, If A, Hu Jiamin
Interior illustrations: Hu Jiamin
Published by Tofu Stand (Tofulogy 002)

Translated from the French by the author.

“From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.” — from the Foreword by Jalal Toufic

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985.

Featuring work by Sara M Saleh, Joni Prince, Shatr Collective, Carlos Soto Román, Petra Kuppers, Diane Ward, Dianna Settles, Mayra Santos-Febres translated by Seth Michelson, Elena Gomez & Chelsea Hart, Noah Mazer, Daniel Borzutzky, Ash(ley) Michelle C., Ghazal Mosadeq, Darius Simpson, Mohammed Zenia, Mario Payeras translated by Dan Eltringham, Ferreira Gullar translated by Chris Daniels, Christophe Tarkos translated & read by Marty Hiatt, Andrew Spragg on Tom Raworth, Matthew Rana on Ida Börjel, & Paisley Conrad on Harryette Mullen