New Lesbian Writing

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

241. Laura Buccieri: Songbook for a Boy Inside
240. K. Lorraine Graham: from Feed
239. Marta López-Luaces: Reminiscences of Echoes
238. Montana Ray: Mirroring
237. Yumi Dineen Shiroma: A Novel Depicting “The” “Asian” “American” “Experience”
236. Anaïs Duplan: 9 Poems/The Lovers
235. Serena J. Fox: Night Landing
234. Orchid Tierney: Blue Doors
233. Aditi Machado: This Touch
232. Iman Mersal: الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); translated by Lisa White
231. Abdellah Taïa: 99 Names
230. Javier Zamora: Revising into the Right? Form…Hopefully?
229. Aracelis Girmay: MOTHER MOTHER YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
228. Christina Barreiro, Lindsey Hoover, Fatima Lundy, Rupert McCranor, Kayla Park, Chrissy Ramkarran, Asiya Wadud, Rachael Guynn Wilson: Out-Of-Office
227. Baseera Khan: Be Careful What You Wish
226. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Alphabet of an Unknown City
225. Göksu Kunak: I thought this would

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

The Posttraumatic is a newspaper created by creatives and artists. [eng, cast, cat]

Why a newspaper? The project believes that a newspaper is an important link between our social reality (built over the centuries by three-headed monsters and the occasional fairy godmother) and the individuals who live in it, because it is an essential communication element and because its content is a fucking drama almost always.

When Ulrich Beck, a literate man, assures us that “the media does not respond to the inspiration of the enlightenment but to that of the market and capital” we can only read the news with a distrustful and defenseless frown. Uncle Sam manipulates us to his likings and we satisfy our appetites by feasting on his words as if they were cocaine-coated cookies that only serve to fatten the need to win over arguments at our neighbor’s dinner-table conversations. We do not know if the information we swallow is invented, bought, if they are news clippings curated by a 4channer´s paranoid imagination, or if it is an objective, absolute, eternal truth.

Based on these fatalistic, dramatic and somewhat depressing theories on news and their consumption, 39 artists were contacted and each one was granted with a space, a sort of an article, to do whatever they wanted with it. It has not been intended to generate any specific ideological discourse and there is no gift flag.

With Contributions by: Escif, Ampparito, Aida Gómez, Mas Siedentop, Jofre Oliveras, Flavita Banana, Helen Bur, Michael Beitz, Biancoshock, Milu Correch, Luce, Marta Aguilar, Jan Vorman, Igor Ponosov, Ana Vilamú, Vas Ban Wieringen, Gigi Ei, Vlady, Val Rovatti, Octavi Serra, Nicolás Garcia, Valentina and the Electic Post and Others. 

Published 2021

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)