In her debut book, Amelia Zhou poses the question, “How do I perform or not perform?” Weaving together poems, fiction, and lyric essay, Repose follows an unnamed woman grappling with the limits of the self on the everyday stage of labor and routine, charting her emergent modes of resistance. She is already steps ahead, deftly shifting between worker and dancer, roving through the haunted space in which a performance has just ended, the ruins of a house, or a skyscraper aflame. Seeking the edges of form—where it exceeds itself, where it breaks down—Repose offers a narrative of girlhood invigorated by the mutual possibilities of dreaming and defiance. 

Amelia Zhou's Repose is the 2022 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Asiya Wadud.

About the author
Amelia Zhou was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, and currently lives in Cambridge, England. Her work as a writer is often interdisciplinary and hybrid in form and media, and has appeared most recently in Fence, Liminal, and Orleans House Gallery. She is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Cambridge, where she is researching the role and politics of photography in largely anglophone life narratives from the 1970s to the present. She is also currently one of Sydney Review of Books' 2024–25 Emerging Critics Fellows. Repose is her first book.

Praise

Real estate agent, surgical patient, ballet dancer, baby raiser... In Amelia Zhou’s layered, lucid, and dream-suffused Repose, performing professionals remind us that the girl’s vocation remains the management of (her) appearances. As “second bodies,” these figures hover and break apart, like a “mouth now wandering away.” Following the paths of their roving weirdness, Zhou’s poetics alert us to some other more sublime task. “To bloom out the ragged bud.” To notice the “furious dignity” in all her/our many scraps and shreds. —Lauren Bakst 

Amelia Zhou’s Repose is a work of measured reflection: it is also a work that is as full of movement and intelligence as the two mediums that Zhou invokes throughout the book, cinema and dance. —Aurelia Guo 

Early on in Amelia Zhou’s Repose, the speaker asks the reader, “Do all lost things live in ruins?” Ruins—as in aftermath, as in refuse, as in the rotting and wilted physical landscape—permeate this deft and roving collection of poems. Zhou’s work rests in the fleeting space of bodies in motion, the friction of bodies troubling and inhabiting spaces across planes and distances. Zhou does not attempt to still this movement. Instead, she allows it to fold and create its own repetitions, logic, and accord. Along the way, Zhou opens up a space for the spectral. —Asiya Wadud

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

Rodrigo Quijano’s An Inherent Tear assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay “A Terrace in Valparaiso,” translated into English for the first time by Judah Rubin. Written during the Fujimori years of the 1990s—a period characterized by the end of the conflict between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgency, the Peruvian army, and the Marxist-Leninist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—Quijano’s bracingly mournful and incisively wry poems insist that we not turn away from the unburied dead. Shifting between neo-baroque hermeticism and a poetics of the conversational, his work destabilizes lyric subjectivity, testing the limits of the structure of metaphor to relay the impasses of the present. Reflecting almost twenty years later from the “city of wildfires,” Quijano’s essay charts the continued landscape of state violence that carries with it the “payroll of bones” Cesar Vallejo evoked nearly a century earlier. In this new, searing collection, Quijano searches amid the smoke and the ashes for “A place to spend the night, / or a language to speak in, / walking through the desert, or drilling into our / insubstantial dreams.” 

About the author
Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, São Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

About the translator
Judah Rubin is the author, most recently, of Antiquarian Historiography (Oxeye Press, 2020). Recent translations can be found in the anthology The Beauty Salons/Salones de la Belleza (Aeromoto/Gato Negro/UNAM, 2021), the journals Firmament and Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum and lives in Queens, New York.

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

Abu Jildeh and Al-Armeet looks at anti-colonial insurgency in Palestine through the story of the Abu Jildeh bandit gang, a group of farmers from the greater Nablus region who rose up against the British colonization of Palestine. From roughly 1931 to 1934, the band resisted both the British occupation and Palestinian feudal landlords, before they were eventually caught and executed by the British army. Their rebellion, amongst others, paved the way for the 1936 Revolt, a mass uprising against the British colonization of Palestine and the planned Zionist colonization outlined by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Although the 1936 Revolt was ultimately crushed, it presented a formidable challenge to the British Empire. Its echoes still reverberate today. 

A historical narrative unfolding through text, drawings, and archival documents, this book, first published in 2017, is now reprinted in a new edition augmented by an English-language translation.

Bilna’es (in the negative) is an a-disciplinary platform that seeks to find new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work. Functioning as an interdisciplinary publishing space with releases ranging from music to video games, exhibitions, publications, and yet-to-be-imagined forms. Bilna’es was initiated by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, Muqata’a, and other anonymous figures as a way to support artistic communities in Palestine and beyond.

Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah invites 38 writers, artists, scholars, and activists to offer accessible reflections on 36 questions to help young Jews—and anyone else who picks up this book—feel grounded in the Jewish radical tradition, unlearn Zionism, and deepen their solidarity with Palestinians, offering the B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for political awakening open to all. Edited by comedic performance artist and activist Morgan Bassichis with artist and educator Jay Saper and writer Rachel Valinsky, with a foreword by seminal scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis, and illustrations by the artist Nicole Eisenman, this essential volume offers an accessible and challenging set of personal and collective responses to critical questions for our time. 

Questions included range from “What even is a Bat Mitzvah?” and “I’m queer/nonbinary/secular/old/not even Jewish—are Bat Mitzvahs for me?” to “Why are there Israeli and American flags in my synagogue?” and “Why do people plant trees in Israel as a Bat Mitzvah gift?” and “What does the olive tree symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What does the watermelon symbolize to Palestinians?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn thirteen?” and “How do I talk to my family about this stuff?”

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant history and practice.  

After Accountability is an oral history and critical genealogy of this decisive movement concept that gathers interviews with eight transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left conducted by members of the Pinko collective. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take. 

Pinko is a collective for thinking gay communism together. Pinko publishes a biannual print issue and periodic zines, and hosts irregular essays, translations, and archival material on their website.

JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis's essay "The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.

"The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the author’s real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter. At its core, Ellis’ metaphor of the clearing becomes a place of possibility and “momentary, transitory, glimpsed liberation.” He invites us to meet him there."—Claudia Rankine

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by poet, performance artist, educator, and curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, Kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted in a queer, Black, self-defined, and feminist imagination. 
 
This collection of intertextual performance acts captures the ephemeral data often lost or edited out of Kosoko’s live performances. Developed alongside their ongoing, multi-media live art project, American Chameleon, and elaborating on the artist’s unique practice of Socio-Choreological Mapping as a means to explore queer theories of the body and its "hydraulics of grief," this book offers critical-creative frames to consider the fluid identities and lifeworlds embedded inside contemporary Black America. 
 
With an introduction by editor Dahlia (Dixon) Li, and contributions by Sara Jane Bailes, mayfield brooks, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Nadine George-Graves, Nile Harris, Ima Iduozee, Lisa Jarrett, Bill T. Jones, Jennifer Kidwell, Malkia Okech, Ada M. Patterson, Tracy K. Smith, and Jillian Steinhauer. 

J. Taylor Bell’s first chapbook, Hello Cruel World, solicits the reader’s undying companionship while navigating late capitalist dystopia. These poems are a downward-facing dogma set in a world catching more on fire each day; to the blaze, they offer neither gasoline nor water. Instead, they are an elegy to barely getting by, against the arrogance of solutions, and they are extremely in favor of seeking solidarity in Outback Steakhouse’s famed Bloomin’ Onion dish.

To want to reveal; to want to reveal enough; to desire; to desire in the right way, the right amount: in her debut book, Rachel James narrates the desiring subject’s nuanced and entangled intimacies with histories of power. How, in other words, under patriarchy, against misogyny, within capitalist strictures, is knowledge shaped, contained, and transferred? Tracing traditions of theater, pedagogy, and faith, An Eros Encyclopedia offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life—a method to navigate, perceive, and relate against the illusion of separation.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Every Monday in 2017 and 2019, comedic performance artist Morgan Bassichis created a to-do list. THE ODD YEARS is a collection of those lists, which served both as a way to generate material for live performances and as a place to archive the logistical, emotional, and political business that just kept piling up throughout this two-year project. A record of routine and impossible tasks—some completed and others left unfinished—THE ODD YEARS is one response to the oddness of times in which intensified crisis becomes ordinary.  

THE ODD YEARS is the fourth title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.

Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician living in New York City. Morgan's performances include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, New York 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2019), More Protest Songs (Danspace Project, New York, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (New Museum, New York, 2017).

Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.

Benjamin Krusling's Glaring is the winner of our 2019 Open Reading Period, and was selected by guest judge Lucy Ives.

Marking The Occasion represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work? In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency.

Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent.

Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, Marking The Occasion gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi.

The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist's practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.

Foregrounding the slippages between doing and undoing or not doing, speech and movement-based forms of address, and improvisation and the score, Lauren Bakst traces the forms performance takes, be they in our everyday experiences, intimate and personal relationships, memories, or on stage.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Working at the interstices of language and movement, Bakst stages critical phenomenologies of performance. Her video, publication, and performance works have been commissioned by BAM/Wendy's Subway, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and Pioneer Works. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts School of Dance, where she is currently curating The School for Temporary Liveness, to which rile* was invited to participate in its second edition over the spring of 2020.

A character called X journeys through a present that is neither here nor there, but feels oddly proximate. She moves through landscapes of words, ever-shifting to host the groundless present, a place and time driven by her motivated, yet contextless pursuit. Narrative is always under construction. The preferred medium for X's peregrinations: a sentence, as capacious as a three-second video, a ten-year nap, or an unexplored hard drive. In this suspended world, X's sensorium is curious and alert, but also anguished, hesitant, and precarious: she feels around for sympathetic energies and familiar faces along the way. Along what way? A book like a body might be a room for waiting, a machine for memory, a sensuous thing, an image quickly glimpsed...

Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York-based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage.