Meet Me There

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power. 

This poetry collection views the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization. Drawing from sources such as Sigmund Freud, James George Frazer, H.D., the Situationist International, seventeenth century narratives of Dutch sailors shipwrecked on the Korean peninsula, the rise of K-pop and the “Korean Wave,” and a zoo-breaking gorilla named Bokito, Festival features kaleidoscopic poetic sequences aiming to show that if anything universal is to be found in lyric poetry’s “I,” it is the result of centuries-long entanglements and contaminations, and of the bodies made to bear these exchanges, to give birth to this century’s globalized subject.

“FESTIVAL is an ode to both beauty and misery. Mia You’s ingenious poetry will have you laughing through your tears. Do NOT miss out!”
— Yael van der Wouden

"She reanimates the form-of-life which is a poem with a feminist skepticism, without foreclosing her robustly idealist commitment to poetry’s continuance"
— Lisa Robertson

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

The theme for each issue of Worms tends to emerge steadily as gathering clouds. Often there is a nebulous sense of something that we want to explore, unripe fruits plucked from things we have read and heard and pocketed without much thought for later examination. It’s only when our pockets grow heavy, when ideas amass into something worthy of a second glance, that we start to name them. In the case of this one, our eleventh issue, its theme has its roots in the previous. The Love Issue—released in July 2025—explored love in all its guises: radical, complex, beautiful, violent. But in our study of the heart’s infinite mysteries there lurked an undercurrent of something else. Faith, close to love, was a persistent reoccurrence. Devotion, strength, clarity, refuge – these emerged as dimensions of love that can also be mapped across a search for something beyond the material. Worms 11: Faith & Worship began here.

FEATURING: Lamorna Ash, Clare Carlisle, Fanny Howe, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Kazim Ali, Fiona Alison Duncan, Lauren J. Joseph, Olivia Laing, aja monet, Charlotte Northall, Arpan Roy, Noura Salahaldeen, Sarah Schulman, Michelle Tea.

CONTRIBUTORS: Temperance Aghamohammadi, Alaa Alqaisi, RZ Baschir, Sarah Burgoyne, F. Tibiezas Dager, Giulia De Vita, Helena Geilinger, Misha Honcharenko, Courtney Ann LaFaive, Ozziline Mercedes, Nicko Mroczkowski, Evie Reckendrees, Charlie Stuip, Clár Tillekens, Phoenix Yemi.

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Antonia Adomako, Eve Delaney, Jen Dessinger, Isabel Maccarthy, Britteny Najar, Katarzyna Postaremczak, Honor Weatherall.

ILLUSTRATORS & ARTISTS: Clara Esborraz, Eric Hesselbo, Lily Makoski, Samantha Rosenwald, Ivy Shepherd-Barron, Mary Watt, Shu Hua Xiong.

EDITORS: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod, Arcadia Molinas.

Proof Reader: Annalise June Kamegawa.

DESIGN: Caitlin McLoughlin & Clem MacLeod.

RUNWAY JOURNAL SUPPLEMENT

Contributors: Wassila Abboud, Anna Carlsson, Alexander Cigana, Bree Turner, Amelia Zhou.

Editors: Debris Facility, Ena Grozdanic, Victoria Pham.

Runway Supplement Design: SM Studio (Safiye Gray & Molly Cranston).

Cover Credits: Photo of Fanny Howe by Lynn Christoffers, Illustration by Mary Watt.

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

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.