great reads, under 100 pages

Moving through queer intimacy, memory, and displacement, the poems in this collection trace what it means to be pulled off-course—towards others, towards language, towards fleeting forms of belonging. Fragmentary and tender, Lateral Sway offers an account of how connections survive across bodies, borders, and time.

“Dear Reader, you have in your hands a gorgeous tumult of verse. It’s a tonic. A balm. A much-needed reprieve from all the wrong kinds of chaos.”
— Sina Queyras

“Lateral Sway explores the lyrical intricacies of human/girl relation and the beauty of the complexities that emerge. Seeking to make the lives of queer others in Poland visible alongside hers, Karpinski in the end is permitted to share only her own desires, leaving open the search for answers: how can we make space for others, when their stories are not ours to tell?”
— Erín Moure

Hannah Karpinski is a lesbian Canadian poet from Tkaronto/Toronto. Diving into intimate personal archives and collective memory, she writes about queer friendship and queer desire. You can find her poems in Commo Mag, Voicemail Poems, Ghost City Press’ My Loves: Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems, and elsewhere. Lateral Sway is her first book.

This book is a novella filled with the pastiche of Americana and ending in the end of it. Breaking out every now and then. 24 hours in Los Angeles in minute details by two writers that have never been to the USA, but watched enough movies to dream of it. "If ever someone knew how to write sunsets, soft drinks in softer colors and the epic beauty of catastrophe." "A tour de force through screen-shots from Hollywood classics turned European teenage fan fiction of American dreams."

Cover by Robert Hawkins.

This essay explores the little-known history of the witch hunts in South Limburg and situates them within broader processes of misogyny, social unrest, early capitalism, and changing ideas about nature and knowledge. Drawing on local histories and thinkers such as Silvia Federici, it connects early modern persecutions to contemporary forms of marginalization. At the same time, it explores the fascination with magic, folklore, and alternative forms of knowledge.

The first major poetry collection by Jesse Feinman, a graphic designer known for his work on numerous books and album covers, founder of the photography publishing house Pomegranate Press, and a remarkable poet.

God Emptied My Glass is the first expanded collection of poems by Jesse Feinman. Written over a five year period, the 44 pieces in the book explore the nature of forgiveness, togetherness, and separateness in adjacency to the graceless passing of time.
Taking visible cues from the likes of Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, and other poets of the New York School, the work serves as an elongated love-letter to "searching," and speaks to how beautiful (or painful) it can be when the desperate quests to uncover a certain truth reveal an entirely new discovery altogether. Throughout God Emptied My Glass, Feinman makes frequent references to various places across the American Landscape and the countless anonymous people that populate them. It is in this quiet culmination of settings that he attempts to create and embed a gentle universality— one that suggests these unraveling, complicated emotions actually find all us at some point in our lives.

The morning approaches. It engulfs everything, filling the precincts and flooding the valley with sound. The sky and the air seem to be speaking, reporting every moment. The hearts are lit up and flee.

One night, I rose, and retreated into the dream. A vehicle welcomed the cold, and quietly rose. Inside the dream you were floating cut off, down along the coast. I thundered for your name.

Verity Spott is a poet from Brighton whose books include The North Road Songbook, Hopelessness, Click Away Close Door Say and Prayers Manifestos Bravery. Verity established the poetry and performance event Horseplay in Brighton in 2007 which is now in its nineteenth year. Alongside Kat Addis they facilitate the Hollingdean Wednesdays poetry project.

Moving through time and across oceans, Sam Moore takes us on a poetic journey of self-discovery through queer history, pop culture and (auto)biography in this deeply personal encounter with queer identity a generation after the AIDS crisis.

Examining the violent political legacy of right-wing governments, the search for liberation through art and the endless quest for self-discovery, All My Teachers Died of Aids serves as both eulogy and rallying cry, asking us to mourn the dead while lighting a torch to help guide us through grief towards a brighter queer future.

'Sam Moore addresses what it feels like growing up queer and British in the 1990s when most of your teachers are either dead, and-or American. An important and evocative personal essay on archival absences and erasures, and, in Moore's own words, refusing to die of ignorance even though that's what so many wanted.' - Isabel Waidner

‘Aaron Fagan's colloquial voice—by turns mordant, enlightening, despairing, but always witty—not only describes a deeply compelling, interior emotional atmosphere, but a world we've made together, and how best to live in it. An astonishing collection.’ — Hilton Als

‘Tight, heady, and beautiful: Aaron Fagan’s sonnets obey an invisible procedure that lends his lines a sculptural, haunted equilibrium. Reading these finely wrought poems, I felt like I was being massaged inside a hall of mirrors, and the masseurs, many-handed, were legendary poets of the past. Pretty Soon is wisdom literature, comfort food, night school, Socratic candy, and high-wire elegance.’ — Wayne Koestenbaum

‘What most distinguishes Aaron Fagan's poetry is its range and capacity for surprise, as well as its velocity. From careening, free-form meditations, to homage, to Algren-esque realism, sometimes a blending of all of the above, it makes for invigorating reading. A highly individual American voice.’ — August Kleinzahler

‘The sonnets in Pretty Soon dance in beauty like the light: compression, abstraction, impossible ideas lucidly expressed, political and personal truths lucidly slipped out as if in somebody else’s dream, woven through the even-seeming but subliminally jagged surface of the words. Reflections reflect metamorphic awareness, words slide into different words, phrases arouse recollections of other voices. All gathered in, turned to ethical account. Measured and forceful, ‘casual but final’, these poems stand by their words, and in them.’ — Ian Patterson

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973, and is the author of Garage (Salt, 2007), Echo Train (Salt, 2010), and A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, 2020).

Art is charged with what cannot but hide and yet wants to be known! Like the city, it is defined by a feature that is shared but invisible.

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors.

This issue presents texts by : Amandine André, Gary Farrelly, Fanny Garin, Michael Strunge.

Queer, érotique, afrodescendante, la poésie de soto labor rebondit sur des zones insoupçonnées du langage pour faire jaillir l’imprévisible. Dans ce recueil à la fois tendre et turbulent, le poète-performeur joue, déplace, décale, ouvre des horizons d’imaginaire. La musique de ses textes emporte, dans d’infinis fragments d’histoires, des concentrés de rencontres et une galerie de personnages mouvants, futures figures légendaires.

soto labor nous parle de race, de colonialité, de mouvement et de relations  – affectives, sensuelles, politiques. A l’intelligence du détournement et de l’oralité se mêle un examen vagabond des modes d’être au monde et à l’autre. Avec mordant, radicalité et drôlerie, en pleine conscience de l’instant, en hommage à l’hier, et avec la fougue des futurs incertains c’est là que se trouve Comme un vase sentimental.

These proverbs were originally published in 2018 in Vancouver by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. With permission from the author the text has been styled into a bootleg and risoprinted in medium blue ink.

“Menopause, Gardanne said in 1821, is the loss of the signs of female reproductive ability. ‘Huge dangers’, he warned, ‘precede, accompany, follow the cessation of this function’. The illustration on the cover of his book shows a broken ceramic pitcher. Gardanne was at the forefront of what now would be called the ‘medicalisation of menopause’, which is to say, its treatment as an ailment, both physical and psychosomatic, of the female body.”

Proverbs of a She-Dandy elaborates on a persistent theme in feminist art and literature over many past decades: a skeptical yet desirous exploration of the flâneur as a figure of agency for women. Robertson finds in Charles Baudelaire’s dandy a tangible presence for old women in public spaces.

‘Bodywork for the hybrid body of an institution’ traces the visible and invisible dynamics within self-organized spaces. This publication is not guided by instructions, but offers glimpses into shimmering moments of dissent, togetherness and re-doing the anatomy of institution by including its entangled ecologies. It is an invitation into the visceral sensation of bodywork through the very act of reading.

We process our lives through riddles, mysteries, ciphers, and enigmas - but we hesitate to share these with friends and family. In times gone by, as for Freud, dreams were considered a key to cosmic secrets. Today, in all sorts of ways – both subtle and not – we are discouraged from sharing the content of our dreams, unless we happen to be indulging in that most anachronistic ritual: lying prostrate on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Anywhere else, an anecdote that begins, “Last night I dreamed . . .” is usually met with a sigh and a defensive glazing of the eyes. In our over-burdened world, any sharing of dreams is always already perceived as over-sharing. Contrary to this, Pettman argues - the more we share tales of our isolated nocturnal journeys, the better chance we have to understand the topography of our collective conundrum.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of philosophical ideas, but they are rarely examined systematically. In this pamphlet philosopher Colin McGinn analyzes the plays to distill Shakespeare’s ideas about ethics. McGinn concludes that the “plays are about good and evil,” and that Shakespeare is “a great moral psychologist,” who expertly stages how his characters are defined by their moral qualities (their naturalistic virtues and vices).

"Between the 8th and the 10th of January in the year of 2019, we became Na Castelloza, she who in Auvergne at the beginning of the 13th century composed a cycle of cansos about—finding—unrequited love. If there exists a lyric subject, we are of her heritage."

A canary flies in Golestan Palace of the Qajars in Tehran, IF, unfolding through fragmented, interwoven narratives that consider the possibility of a bird narrating what it sees: three famines forced upon Iran; the forced unveiling of women; the partitioning of the country between dominant powers; and the nationalization of oil leading to the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh all appear as fragments left unresolved rather than explained, as if the bird were saying: you will not understand me, let’s keep it that way.

This pamphlet is a section of a longer book that moves across a specific historical juncture in Iran, from the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911) to 1953, when a joint CIA–MI6 coup d’état disrupted and set back years of gradual effort toward democracy and independence in Iran. Much like the rest of Mosadeq’s work, this piece is shaped by misunderstanding, distance, and misreading. IF, mirroring the territory it explores, resists a coherent narrative.

How to See Rivers in Cracks, an invitation to read through softness rather than certainty. It begins where attention loosens, where listening lingers, and where small cracks let the world in.

Written as a shifting sequence of notes, exercises, and reflections, the publication moves through Moerwijk, The Hague, Antwerp, and in-between spaces, tracing how soil, sound, and urban surfaces remain porous and in constant transformation. Cracks are not treated as damage but as openings where relation becomes visible~ where matter, bodies, and environments co-compose one another.

The text resists a fixed interpretation. Instead, it unfolds as an instruction that can be followed, misread, or left open. In this sense, it does not hold itself steady. Without the reader, it does not fully take place, remaining dependent on attention, proximity, and the act of reading itself.

Ötza is a 5300-year-old cryodesiccated fan fiction writer from the Neolithic, an advocate for prehistoric literacy and a self-proclaimed connoisseur of post-historical theory-fiction. Locked in a cooling cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, her writings are hopeful yearnings for counterfactual salvation from her fate of archaeological conservation, and an attempt to rewrite the narrative (unfairly) extrapolated from scientific reconstructions.

Ötza is written and performed by artist Levi van Gelder, and created in collaboration with costume designer and stylist Leila El Alaoui.

Edited by Maia Kenney, Aidan Hoyle, Anthony Stephinson

Sea-oath is a catalog of internal and generational mythologies, a procedural formalist poetic experiment, and a transcript of an internal trial between the speaker and God. 

Alter approaches the central theological reckoning of the collection through constructed metrical forms, neologistic indexing, and paratactic syntax in an attempt to articulate and organize memories and histories that had originally been buried by dissociation, self-punishment, and mental and physical escape. 

What kind of God permits and witnesses the cyclical transmission of suffering, and how can I understand my life and my path within my inheritance?

And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal, surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of contemporary Peruvian poetry.

Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing is a biannual periodical by Sticky Fingers Publishing, exploring how and where meaning is produced, maintained and distributed. Through its first three issues, Get Rid of Meaning has become a site for interrogating the material conditions and affective systems of meaning-making, and strategies for surviving an intentionally nonsensical political landscape, through experimental non-fiction. This fourth issue builds on this by uncovering forms and methods of fugitive knowledge, from the heat of the land and the vibrations of the night, to the stoney rumblings of rivers and rock.

Featuring contributions from Alberto Álvarez, e v, Florence Hannah Evans, Lucy Petersen, Mark Sauter, mars k margetson & teresa amrita braggs.

LOOK HERE FOR: BLOOD BOILING, WHAT DEBT DOES, SEEING PURPLE, A PING-PONG BALL BENEATH THE RUBBLE, PSYCHOPOLITICS, ALIEN GOO, A ROD UP YOUR ASS, STONE SUMMONING FORTH, A MIRACLE, & THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

The first English translation of recent poetry by the late Mahmoud Darwish, the most important Palestinian contemporary poet. 

Almond Blossoms and Beyond is one of the last collections of poetry that Mahmoud Darwish left to the world. Composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained Exile cycle, Almond Blossoms holds an important place in Darwish’s unparalleled oeuvre. It distills his late style, in which, though the specter of death looms and weddings turn to funerals, he threads the pulses and fragilities and beauties of life into the lines of his poems. Their liveliness is his own response to the collection’s final call to bid “Farewell / Farewell, to the poetry of pain.”

Mahmoud Darwish, born in 1941 in the village of al-Birweh, Palestine, was the author of over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose. When he died in the summer of 2008, he was mourned throughout the world as a voice of the Palestinian people—author of their official declaration of independence and, most importantly, a poet of the highest invention and beauty. Mohammad Shaheen is a professor of English at the University of Jordan. Amro Naddy has worked as an editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches at the King’s Academy in Amman, Jordan.

Unica Zürn dans La maison des maladies raconte, par un ensemble de textes et dessins, un séjour en hôpital où elle est soignée d’une jaunisse. Elle y écrit et compose ce carnet où le regard qu’elle pose sur son propre corps, les lieux qu’elle habite et les personnages qu’elle rencontre, témoigne d’une sensibilité hors-norme qui tire à la fantaisie, voire au délire.

Pour la première fois en France, La maison des maladies est publié intégralement.

Le texte est traduit de l’allemand par Ruth Henry & Robert Valençay. Un après-propos de Mathilde Girard clôture le livre.

Laminaire est un livre de poésie sur la représentation, c’est-à-dire sur les manières contemporaines de montrer et de percevoir. Le pouvoir, qu’il émane de l’Etat ou bien des grandes entreprises de la Tech, se diffuse sur internet sous la forme de contenus préformatés, et ce dans un environnement médiatique où la production d’images (et notamment de mèmes) est presque infinie. C’est à partir de ce constat que la poétique d’Elsa Boyer, avec beaucoup de virtuosité et d’humour, se déploie. Par leur richesse lexicale, leur capacité à rapprocher des éléments pourtant hétéroclites et le baroque de certaines images, ces poèmes offrent au lectorat un horizon critique renouvelé. 

Laminaire est composé de dix-sept longs poèmes dans lesquels sont tressés vers et fragments de prose. On y rencontre, entre autres choses, un sénateur américain, des contrats de propriété et de location, les dessins de corps féminins et d’organes dans les traités d’anatomie, les vidéos Tiktok d’un président, la vidéo de présentation du robot Optimus de Tesla par Elon Musk, le texte du Schéma national du maintien de l’ordre, ou encore des projets et propositions de loi. 

Elsa Boyer est l’autrice d’une oeuvre littéraire remarquable. Elle a publié, aux éditions P.O.L et aux éditions MF, des récits, des essais, des traductions salués par la critique autant pour leurs inventions formelles que pour la pertinence de leurs sujets. Laminaire est son premier livre de poésie. Comme les autres titres de sa bibliographie, c’est un ouvrage fortement imprégné d’une fréquentation du numérique, des images qui circulent sur les réseaux et de leurs formats.