Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology, luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey, Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book.  

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Published Oct 2020

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

One part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, TGSM is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body at a given point in time. TGSM raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history, when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces, more liberated than before? 

Drawing its source material from chance encounters, wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms, to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.

Hannah Baer runs the meme account @malefragility on instagram, and studies clinical psychology in new york city.

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves.

An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.

At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.

By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

The story of a dangerous man seduced by peril, Querelle deals in a startling way with the Dostoyevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation.

It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder. Georges Querelle, its protagonist, is a bisexual thief, prostitute and serial killer who manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel formed the basis for Querelle (1982), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film.

A Hypocritical Reader is your emancipation, reader. Want to lose yourself in your favourite genre? This book is for you. Want to question the influence of modernist experimentalism on the short story form? This book is also for you. Want to explore that unspeakable Barthesian dictum? Okay? You want to psychoanalyse the (female) writer? Hmmm. Follow the book's emotional arc, or pick your own path by choosing which pages to turn to. Hell, you can even clip out the individual words and collage your way into exciting new worlds. Just don't tell the author. This book is Calvino, with an attitude.

Rosie Snajdr is an author, editor, and academic. Her work has appeared in The Cambridge Literary Review, Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and is forthcoming in TOTAL CANT (Cant Books).

A conversation about performance, genre and cinema in the subversive work of Brice Dellsperger.

In this conversation between Dellsperger and Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual) identity as products of a cultural construction informed by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish an image of it and its (normative) framework. Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he, starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies for subjectivity.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Marie-France Rafael (born 19984 in Munich) is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She holds a PhD in art history; she studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. She is notably the author of Reisen im Imaginativ: Künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Travel in the Imaginary: Artistic Situations and Displays, 2017) and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Music on Display (2016).

Published Oct 2020.

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris.
'finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot'
--from Dusty Pink

Written with the hope of achieving a "dreary distant banality," Jean-Jacques Schuhl's first novel is a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris, a city that slips into the background but never disappears, hovering on the verge of its own suppression. An elegiac and luminous cut-up, Dusty Pink brings together race wire results, editions of France-Soir, the lyrics to well-known British songs, scripts from famous old films, pharmaceutical leaflets, fashion ads, and strips and scraps of culture in which the avant-garde and academicism blur in an overview of the cultural scene. This world of atmospheres, portraits, and dazzling associations of ideas creates a plane of shimmering surfaces.

Published in French in 1972, Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Dusty Pink became a cult classic. This is its first translation.

Cult author Jean-Jacques Shuhl won the Prix Goncourt in 2000 for his novel Ingrid Caven, which sold over 235,000 copies in France. It was his first book since Dusty Pink was published in 1972.

Composed between destinations, in airplanes, trains, museums, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff's Vzszhhzz captures the slight intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restauranteurs, philosophers, wine-makers and boxers whose lives are conducted almost entirely in a second language. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, Vszhhzz - like Michèle Bernstein's All The King's Horses, the Bernadette Corporation's Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg's Surveys - couches Graff's sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, Vzszhhzz says everything about the relation to time, cities, weather and smog that has become the lingua franca of a creative and transient life.

Writer and curator Jeanne Graff was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and lives in New York. She is a columnist for May Revue (Paris), works in a vineyard, and teaches at HEAD art school in Geneva. In 2014, Graff founded 186f Kepler, an art space without walls. She has organized numerous international exhibitions, and performs with her band Solar Lice. Graff recently completed a writing residency at Villa Noailles in Hyeres, France.

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad.

This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from medical imaging to pornographic visualization, from impersonal sexual publics to domestic erotic intimacies, Jagose traces the career of orgasm across the twentieth century.

Along the way, she examines marriage manuals of the 1920s and 1930s, designed to teach heterosexual couples how to achieve simultaneous orgasms; provides a queer reading of behavioral modification practices of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at transforming gay men into heterosexuals; and demonstrates how representations of orgasm have shaped ideas about sexuality and sexual identity.

A confident and often counterintuitive engagement with feminist and queer traditions of critical thought, Orgasmology affords fresh perspectives on not just sex, sexual orientation, and histories of sexuality, but also agency, ethics, intimacy, modernity, selfhood, and sociality. As modern subjects, we presume we already know everything there is to know about orgasm. This elegantly argued book suggests that orgasm still has plenty to teach us.

Over the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading Sedgwick reflect on Sedgwick's many critical inventions, from her elucidation of poetry's close relation to criticism and development of new versions of queer performativity to highlighting the power of writing to engender new forms of life. As the essays in Reading Sedgwick demonstrate, Sedgwick's work is not only an ongoing vital force in queer theory and affect theory; it can help us build a more positive world in the midst of the bleak contemporary moment.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Ramzi Fawaz, Denis Flannery, Jane Gallop, Jonathan Goldberg, Meridith Kruse, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Chris Nealon, Andrew Parker, H. A. Sedgwick, Karin Sellberg, Michael D. Snediker, Melissa Solomon, Robyn Wiegman

how to become a motherfuckinelegist est une revue créée par un collectif de gouines & féministes à Paris. Elle publie les recherches menées pendant les workshops d’écriture & traduction : How to become a lesbian. Ces ateliers sont gratuits et se déroulent toutes les deux semaines à Paris, en non-mixité (pas d'hommes cis).

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

In Derek McCormack's home province, farm boys with growing pains enjoy a little-known meal called bed-supper, a hearty bowl of sweet breakfast cereal enjoyed as a midnight snack. Here McCormack has composed a peculiarly salacious bed-supper, where the long secret sweet-tooth of the Marquis de Sade glints as it sinks into the dirtiest of dishes. This useful book will more than stay your appetite until breakfast -- Castle Faggot is also a manual of redecoration, a musical, a puppet show, a theory of cosmetics, a work of poetics, and a glorious celebration of the French decadence. -- Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

Derek McCormack is a writer who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells and The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(e)).

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays--meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems--and not a single image. Hervé Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues--answers, or even questions--about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl." In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how--in writing--he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.
With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful--a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was born and worked in Paris. A noted photographer, he also contributed articles on culture to the French newspaper Le Monde and wrote works of fiction and books on photography.

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life's work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott's multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.

"Holy Terror is good reading, well written and extremely knowledgeable about the subject of magic black and white. In fact, all magic is both."--William Burroughs

"All of us who knew the late Steve Abbott will now be happy that the stone has rolled back, to reveal the amazing accomplishment of Beautiful Aliens, poet Jamie Townsend's masterful take on Steve's multigenre work. Prose, poetry, journalism, the essay, the comic book, the novel: Steve was driven to try his hand at all these categories, excelling more often then you'd think possible. It's time that people knew a genius (of sorts) once lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury." --Kevin Killian

Steve Abbott (1943-1992) was a poet, critic, editor, novelist and artist. Abbott was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska, and attended Emory University where he was an organizer for Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and the gay lib editor at the underground paper The Great Speckled Bird. Abbott moved to San Francisco in 1974 where he became was a frequent contributor to local publications, including The Advocate, The Sentinel, and the Bay Area Reporter. He was also one of the founding editors of the literary arts newsletter Poetry Flash and the publisher/editor of the literary journal Soup. Steve wrote a number of books of poetry and prose during the 1980s and early 90s including: "Wrecked Hearts", "Stretching the Agape Bra", "Lives of the Poets", "Holy Terror", "Skinny Trip to a Far Place", and "View Askew: Postmodern Investigations", a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, and the arts journal Mirage. He was active in various reading series and discussion groups in the Bay Area, including Cloud House and Small Press Traffic, and, in 1981, he co-organized the historic Left/Write conference. Steve was also a respected critic and the first to use the term "New Narrative" to describe the work of contemporaries including Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck. Abbott died of complications due to AIDS on December 2, 1992. His novel The Lizard Club was published posthumously. Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks including, most recently, Pyramid Song (2018) as well as the full-length collection SHADE (2015). An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (2017).

Published December 2019.

In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their lived experience through the expressive nuance and beauty of poetry. In a variety of forms ranging from lyrics to list poems to found poetry to hybrid works, these authors express themselves with the complexity, agency, and honesty that sex workers are rarely afforded. Contributors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia include Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, Summer Wright, and Akira the Hustler. As an antidote to the invasive and often biased media depictions of sex workers, Hustling Verse is a fiercely groundbreaking exploration of intimacy, transactional sex, identity, healing, and resilience.

"With so much scathing insight into human behavior, Hustling Verse is not just about sex work, but about sexual possibility and self-determination for everyone." --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Sketchtasy

"The span of these poems - authored by surviving and commerical sex workers, younger and elder sex workers, racialized and Indigenous sex workers, queer and trans and cisgender sex workers - covers enormous ground while remaining united by an unwavering commitment to speaking the truth in all its painful and healing beauty." --Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love

Amber Dawn is a white queer femme survivor living in unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver. She is the author of four books (the most recent of which is the novel Sodom Road Exit) and the editor of two anthologies. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and guest mentors at drop-in, sex work-driven community spaces.

Published October 2019.

Ben Fama's DEATHWISH drops us back into the beauty and the fantasies teased out in his first book of poetry, FANTASY, re-braiding them through BDSM scenarios, metaphysical inquiries, and the maximalism of the contemporary.

Ben Fama is a writer based in New York City. He is the author of DEATHWISH (Newest York Arts Press, 2019), FANTASY (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and the chapbooks Odalisque (Bloof, 2014), Cool Memories (Spork, 2013), New Waves(Minutes Books, 2011), and Aquarius Rising (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). He is also the author of the artist book Mall Witch (Wonder, 2012). He is the co-founder of Wonder.

Wisrah Villefort’s overarching research focuses on the nonhuman, digital matter, synthetic polymers, prosthetics and their markets.

The ongoing hypermedia work Mercado Livre begun in 2017, is dependent on the viewer performing online, accessing the platform via Instagram. Villefort collects images from online marketplaces based in the Global South, outside of the West, including AliExpress (China) and Mercado Livre (Argentina) for the content. Mercado Livre, besides being the title of the work and the platform, is also the term for the neoliberal principle of the “free market”, in which goods’ prices supposedly regulate themselves.

This book accompanies his exhibition, THE MOUTH OF THE GIFTED HORSE, dissecting Mercado Livre through the eyes of the show, focussing on inter-species relationships and non-human prosthetics, featuring a text written by Villefort during his recent research residency at Pivô, São Paulo, entitled 'Notes on Masks, Gloves and Muzzles: Beyond the Fault of Epimetheus'.