Books

Constance DeJong’s long-neglected 1977 novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It is science fiction. It is a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s Lower East Side. It is a first-person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150-year-old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion; like an experience, it accumulates as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.

An important figure of downtown New York’s performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print on the 40th anniversary of its original publication.

Constance DeJong is an artist and writer who has worked for thirty years on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. Since the 1980s, DeJong has collaborated with Phillip Glass, Tony Oursler, and the Builders Association on performances and videos at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York, at The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. Her books include I.T.I.L.O.E. and SpeakChamber, and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987); and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).

TIME by Spencer Longo is a collection of printed work depicting government raids, religious visions, environmental catastrophe, and extremist fundamentalism tangled together in a narrative web of salvation, annihilation, and transcendence. Using pen plotter graphics directly on uncollated pages of Time magazine, Longo explores the conspiratorial trope that messages are secretly embedded in mass media, coaxing our millenarian anxieties out through an additive printing process using graphics from survivalist publications, end-times evangelical cartoons, and marginalia from the borders of underground occult material, all sprinkled with ecstatic bursts of star-spangled clipart. A must-have for your fallout shelter's library.

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness."

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.    

Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power cannot undo his revolutionary birthright: like his mother and grandmother before him, Shahed is an undercover rebel.

When a general arrives at the Sufi institute looking for help with a military assignment, Shahed accepts, all while concealing his own plans for resistance. The mission takes him behind the walls of a prison town, inside a secret army barracks in the Sinai desert, and deep into the murky waters of the past.

As he wades through his mother’s repressed memories and the state’s repressed histories, Shahed grapples with the traumas of the revolution and the weight of authoritarian rule, searching for new ways to revolt for freedom.

Mohamed Tonsy is a queer Egyptian writer and ceramicist. Formerly an architect and a triathlete representing the Egyptian Triathlon Federation, he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Mizna and Epoch Press and was shortlisted in MFest’s 2021 Short Story Competition. You Must Believe in Spring is his first book.

‘Kamer I - Oesters’ is een kort verhaal geschreven in het kader van het kunstproject Beste Anna,. Hierin fungeert de figuur van de openlijk lesbische Rotterdamse schrijfster Anna Blaman als motor voor vragen, gesprekken en correspondenties rondom feminisme, schrijvende vrouwen en de canon, anders zijn, eenzaamheid en vriendschap.

Ook verkent Katinka met dit onderzoek Anna Blaman als personage voor een toekomstige roman. In ‘Kamer I - Oesters’ betreedt de hoofdpersoon Anna’s met een rolkoffer vol boeken van andere schrijvers, fluistert ze hun woorden in de kieren in Anna’s muren en verleidt ze Anna met een pauwendans.

Anna Blaman (1905-1960) was openlijk lesbisch, in die tijd een groot taboe, maar zag zichzelf niet als voorvechter van een beweging. Een belangrijk thema in haar werk is de vraag of we een ander werkelijk kunnen kennen. De personages in haar romans zijn vaak alleen en verlangen naar een ander, die altijd onbereikbaar blijft. In 1948 publiceerde Blaman de roman Eenzaam Avontuur, die erg veel stof op deed waaien vanwege enkele (homo-)erotische personages die in het boek voorkomen. 

A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

The author of eleven novels, three works of criticism, a collection of plays, and an autobiography, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) is well-known as one of the prime proponents of the New Novel, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon. Among her books are Do You Hear Them?, Martereau, Portrait of a Man Unknown, Between Life and Death, and Tropisms.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume 4 by Kevin Killian, selected by Ted Rees & David Buuck, with introductory words from Kevin edited by Dodie Bellamy. Curated from the over 2500 reviews that William Hall has lovingly archived, this latest edition showcases Kevin’s incomparable mix of wit and sincerity, pleasure and playfulness, his deep love of popular culture, and his unique critical voice.

A legendary choreographer’s personal and practical guide to the art of dance-making. 

Yvonne Rainer was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, a 1960s New York artists’ collective that championed ordinary, spare movements and spontaneity. Rainer’s decades of creativity—in dance and in filmmaking—have inspired generations of avant-garde, political, and feminist choreographers. Her many works include the iconic dance Trio A and the film Hand Movie. 

In this book, Rainer dancer and choreographer Emmanuèle Phuon helps Rainer gather teaching notes from her dance classes and workshops, passages from her creative journals, and her newer thoughts on movement and art, opening a window on to the life’s work of a transformative artist. With fifty prompts for improvisational movement (“39. Travel a long distance as fast as you can while making regular changes in your means of locomotion”), sly illustrations by Pascal Lemaître, and an illuminating interview with Phuon, this workbook makes Rainer’s friendly, humorous, and down&-to-earth creative practice available to everyone. Because, as Rainer says, if you can move, you are a dancer.

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book.
I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.

The eleventh issue of Robida magazine, is collection of essays, photographic explorations, visual narratives, art projects, and poetic texts all centered on the orchard as landscape and fruit trees as powerful metaphors and living archives of stories and memories.

Robida is a situated, multilingual cultural magazine published by Robida collective. Each issue explores a topic connected and generated by Topolò/Topolove, the village on the border between Italy and Slovenia where the collective is based.
The chosen topic is thrown into the world and interpreted by people who have never been to Topolò. What people send back after the open call is not only a contribution to the exploration of a defined theme but also a new interpretational tool to explore the collective’s relation to Topolò.

CONTRIBUTORS
Alessandra Saviotti, Alja Piry, Aljaž Škrlep, Alessandra Faccini, Anastasia Kolas, Andrea Martinelli, Andreina Trusgnach, Angelica Calabrese, antonisotzu, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Cassidy McLeod McKenna, Companion–Platform, Danijel Losic, Derek Scott Russell, Dora Ciccone, Eda Aslan, Elena Braida, Elena Rucli, Emmy Elvira Wassén, ERBA, Francesca Farris, Francesca Battaglia, Francesca Lucchitta, Giovanni Aloi, Giulia Bertuletti, Gregor Božič, Greta Biondi, ife collective, Jana Kiesser, Jannete Mark, jean ni, Jennifer Shin, Jessica Hollis, Jip van Steenis, Julina Vanille Bezold, Kristína Mičová, Lalie Thébault Maviel, Laura Savina, Lina v. Jaruntowski, Lindsay Buchman, Luca Vettori, Luca Battista, Ludovica Battista, Luigi Coppola, Luisa Gastaldo, Maria Elena Vecchio, Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, Martina Havlová, Martina Motta, Mia Frances LaRocca, Michael Marder, Nataša Kramberger, Ola Korbańska, Paolo Bosca, Rachele Daminelli, Rosie Ellison-Balaam, Sasha Arutyunova, Serena Abbondanza, Silvia Mascheroni, Stephanie Rebonati-Cannizzo, Teresa Carretta, Terry Cueball, Vesna Liponik, Victoria King, Vida Rucli, Vittoria Rubini

Languages: English (mainly), Italian, Slovene, French, German + local, minoritarian lan(d)guages and dialects from the regions of Benečija, Valchiavenna, Abruzzi, Bari, su Logudoru, Corsica, Gorenjska, Cetuna and the White Carpatians region.

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

An extraordinary collaboration by an award-winning duo—poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed–that bears witness to the genocide in Gaza.

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media—including their own—in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, this book will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 

In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a mentally ill person suffering from gender dysphoria, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.  

Speaking from his own mutant cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.  

Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

The Tlingit artist Jim Schoppert (1947-1992) was among the most accomplished, innovative, and prolific Alaska Native artists of the twentieth century. His whimsical sculptures and large scale painted wooden carvings reconfigure Tlingit visual motifs, and he challenged the binary categories against which Indigenous artists are so often defined, such as traditional and contemporary, historic and innovative, and artist or craftsperson. While known primarily for his modernist interventions in Tlingit visual traditions, Schoppert was also a prolific writer, an eloquent speaker, and an ardent advocate for Alaska Native artists. This publication brings together a selection of his unpublished poetry and writings from the artist’s personal papers. Presented alongside never before seen sketches and studies, this selection bridges Schoppert’s written and artistic practices in a deeply personal portrait of the artist and Alaska Native life that upsets preconceptions about Native art and unsettles the established narrative of Euro-American and Indigenous aesthetic relations.

Jim Schoppert (1947-1992) was a Tlingit multidisciplinary artist and writer. He was a Taku Tlingit Raven of the Ishkahittaan (Inland Frog) clan from his Tlingit mother and half-German from his father and carried the Łingit name Dom-Yetz. Born in Juneau, Alaska, he earned a BFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from the University of Alaska—Anchorage and an MFA from the University of Washington. In addition to his artistic career, Schoppert was instrumental in promoting Alaska Native arts and organizations. He was Director of Arts and Crafts at the Cook Inlet Native Association, Director of the Alaska Arts in Prisons Program for the University of Alaska Juneau, and organized exhibitions and workshops across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. He was visiting professor in visual art at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and directed its Native Art Center. He sat on the Washington State Arts Commission and on the boards of the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Institute of Alaska Native Arts. His work is held in public and private collections across the United States, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Anchorage Museum, the Heard Museum, and the Newark Museum, among others. His writing and poetry has appeared in The Greenfield Review and Journal of Alaska Native Arts, among other publications.

Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the U.S. criminal justice system. Through interviews, creative non-fiction, and cultural theory, Hatty Nestor deconstructs a range of different prison portraiture.

Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised. It is therefore urgent to understand how prisoners are portrayed by the carceral state and how this might be countered or recuperated. How can understanding the visual representation of prisoners help us confront the invisible forms of power in the American prison system? Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the United States criminal justice system, and the state's failure to represent those incarcerated humanely.

Through wide-ranging interviews and creative nonfiction, Hatty Nestor deconstructs the different roles of prison portraiture, such as in courtroom sketches, DNA profiling, and the incarceration of Chelsea Manning. Includes a foreword by Jackie Wang.

Hatty Nestor is a cultural critic and writer, published in Frieze, The Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and many other publications. She is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London.

The occasionally-published broadsheet Civilization was founded in New York in 2018 by Richard Turley,  Lucas Mascatello, and Mia Kerin. Its origin was as a response to New York City life, but has now transformed into an art project that gathers language, overheard conversations, secret recordings transcribed by rapid-capture software to produce a dense, rhythmic assemblage of texts from both public and private spaces alike. As a result, Civilization’s design texture has found fans in the fashion world, leading to collaborations with Calvin Klein and Junya Watanabe. 

The publication has also enjoyed contributions from a wide array of artists, writers and personalities including: Aaron Maine, Alis Atwell, Amos Poe, Amalia Ulman, Aria Dean, Alicia Novella Vasquez, Bill Drummond, Biz Sherbert, Babak Radboy, Carly Busta, Darcie Wilder, Echo Wu, Ella Plevin, Eric Johnson, Honor Levy, Iris Luz, Mel Ottenberg, Isabelle Rea, Joey LaBeija, Jordan Barse, Lovefoxx, Maddie Quinn, Patrick McMullan, Rachel Rabbit White, Sybil Prentice, Thom Bettridge, and Zans Brady Krohn.

This new bilingual edition of Sebastian Castillo's long-out-of-print first book reintroduces a classic of American microfiction and features a translation into Spanish by acclaimed Mexican author Elisa Díaz Castelo.

Forty-nine pages of unique and surreal micro-fiction, Sebastian Castillo’s 49 Venezuelan Novels is a magical book with a new story on every page. Full of depth and imagination, Castillo uses imagery in a simple yet intense way. From stories of fish markets to spiteful violins, it almost seems that these novels are snippets of family stories long passed down, just now put to paper. With the nature of a born storyteller, Sebastian Castillo provides the readers of this fantastic read with gorgeous stories that define micro-fiction.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is a volte-face of the neoliberal market economy’s construction of isolated, individual safety. In her debut book of poems, Mascarenhas lingers in the question of risk as it arises in daily life and intimacy. Through a close study and partial translation of philosopher-psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s Éloge du risque (2011), her poems posit risk as a fissure, through which we might imagine yet-unknown futures.

Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Bush Award.

Alisha Mascarenhas (b. 1989) is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021). She has contributed writing to Pamenar Press, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse, Peripheral Review, and The Felt, among others. Alisha was a 2023 resident at La Baldi Artist’s Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she now lives.

There is a body lying across Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk. Here is a book of generosity and perdition, that could not anticipate the death of its author, the one these works are addressed to, written for, dreamt by, in a stream of proximities. A strange dismantling of time occurs as a result of quiet reversals in which light is diffracted across belated syntaxes, reaching past life to the living. Though A Catalogue of Risk is “running past the flowers,” it is a slow text that grieves the day’s illuminations. It is a lesson in transmission in which we, readers, are the apprentices of grace, at the edge also of drowning. Here is a book that has been “hungering to be emptied.” So, too, is it a book of promise.
— Nathanaël

A Catalogue of Risk is a book of luminous attention. Alisha Mascarenhas gives us the language of a mind tracking both internal and external weathers, tuning and returning herself to beauty, fear, grief and desire. Attending a cascade of emotions, the poet dwells in questions, knowing that to keep open to difficult questions is to keep open to desire. That she risks such openness, thinking always with others, through pain and love, is an astonishment. 
— Madhu Kaza

A Catalogue of Risk poses an evocative challenge, one of prismatic nuance: to pursue multiple angles of intimacy along the life-death continuum of how risk holds, unfolds, and makes one whole. “The definition” of what risk is “is shaded in questions” and runs a gamut of desires and sensations at once libidinal and cerebral. Alisha Mascarenhas risks risk itself with this generous offering of exquisite phenomenology and experiential trace in the form of a full-saturation poetics glowing in amplitude and intensity.
— Brenda Iijima