A Queen in Bucks County

Newly discovered in the author’s archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.

Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession—one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love, Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London’s Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices. 

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring "possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity."

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

A book in two halves, Kissing Other People or the House of Fame opens with a sequence of poems that roam the grotty, sublime streets: patting rats, reading pamphlets, enduring labour, acquiring falafel, waving to friends. Then the book flips on a seam and invokes Chaucer as an unlikely guide through a series of dream-blocks, each autonomous yet resonant with attachments and perversions as they come and go, repeat and echo. The book is as staunch as it is warm - one arm extended in a hug and the other cupped over the mouth to shield a secret (weapon).

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She's the author of A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat Books, 2022).

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.

A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.

Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut. 

The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”

Edited by Evan Kennedy & Jason Morris

If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet's surface, if "words do cleave the producer from the land," then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De'Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy's poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what's different? "Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi," or "everything…that you want from women and gays." Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. "Behold me I'm you now," Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed. — Kay Gabriel

Not a Force of Nature's expertly crafted poems explore the catastrophe we live among and speak through. They form a sort of feminist manifesto addressed to all forms of resistance. But also: here are love sonnets! This book is angrily precise and always a lot of fun. "No, you're a Canadianist!" — Kevin Davies

Not a Force of Nature is the kind of book that becomes possible only after rejecting the "we" evoked so often in contemporary literary culture—sometimes said to need poetry now more than ever, sometimes called community. Amy De'Ath's motley vision of solidarity, of "actual emboldened people," is way weirder, more lively, and possible. Nor do these poems content themselves, like the ghost of Marxist theory past, with pointing towards the contradictions that surround them. Do you remember email? Sonnets? Not a Force of Nature is like that, thrashing inside generic forms and always coming next: after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, after Jane's abortion service, after the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, after Creeley, after Raworth, after Mayer, after the Xenofeminist Manifesto, after Pluto enters Aquarius. "There are still tactics like this roaming free," De'Ath writes. There are still these fervent lyric parries. Be with Not a Force of Nature now. — Stephanie Young

Through slips of verbal acuity, Amy De'Ath scrapes her way out of determinism to a world "made by hands," where our material relations are ours to make and break. History is long and history is short. History is translucent. De'Ath presents the Ferris wheel of capitalist production, where the subject lives once as worker, twice as commodity. Here, in these "concrete trousers," is a "totally liberated" working class poem turning everything into nothing as praxis. — Anahita Jamali Rad