Wittig

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.

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she assembled a selection of her writing from the last thirty years into a single, astonishing work.

Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us. —Kaveh Akbar

This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe’s poetry in a new light, and for those who don’t know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet. —Rae Armantrout

Fanny Howe spoke about “the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms.” In This Poor Book she delineates and shifts between these layers to conjure a bewildering yet ultimately galvanizing evocation of the human psyche. We are being warned every day that robots and software will soon replace us. Howe’s poetry makes clear that such a notion is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words. — Claire-Louise Bennett

This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say: “There is a little trouble in my eye.” The irony and beauty of its final line—“There was no more reason to die”—will be with me for as long as my memory of Fanny Howe herself. — Jericho Brown

In her final act of literary alchemy, Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world—haunted by power, estranged from institutions, yet fiercely open to mystery. There’s a radical humility here, paired with a radiant understanding—that doubt can be a form of faith, and that hope, when unflinching, is the most defiant music of all. This Poor Book is for the ages. — Peter Gizzi

This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. A palimpsest of decades’ worth of writing, assembled here into a long poem as fractured and multitudinous as life itself, Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read: “The structure failed to cohere at the end of the struggle. / It had some music in it.” — Maggie Millner

Through Fanny Howe's eyes we look at life differently. She makes us understand that we are part of a mysterious and complex world; one which we urgently need to be receptive to. Beauty appears in unexpectedness, as in “flowers attract scissors” and “why does an eye evolve in the dark?” Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future. — Celia Paul

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. — Adam Phillips

This gorgeous final statement by one of our most perceptual writers is a work of accrued understanding. ... Fanny Howe leaves us with profound investigations into the capacity of words, of juxtaposition, what a line, a page, and a book can give. — Sarah Schulman

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

Invitation au voyage à travers l’œuvre littéraire de Monique Wittig, ce livre nous embarque dans une passionnante exploration de ses textes de fiction, de L’opponax à Virgile, non. Il rend compte de la lutte amoureuse qu’elle livre au langage – matériau brut qu’elle travaille au corps pour faire advenir dans la réalité ce qui n’y a pas (encore) droit de cité. La convocation malicieuse et grave des grands récits du passé, les nombreux emprunts aux auteurs anciens, la pratique de la citation font des Guérillères une formidable épopée féministe, du Corps lesbien un Évangile selon Sappho, du Voyage sans fin le combat drôle et tragique d’une Quichotte féministe et lesbienne.

En soulignant la cohérence des textes et leur fragmentation, Catherine Écarnot met en évidence la passion poétique qui habite ces livres que Wittig concevait comme des « chevaux de Troie » : des machines de guerre destinées à fissurer la réalité pour y inscrire une subjectivité mouvante, échappée du continent noir de la féminité, rétive aux assignations de genre. Uniques et radicalement disruptives, les fictions ainsi créées ouvrent grands les chemins qui relient littérature et lesbianisme.

Publié pour la première fois en 2002, cet ouvrage, le premier consacré en Europe à l’œuvre witigienne, reparaît dans une nouvelle édition remaniée, actualisée et enrichie de nombreuses références aux études publiées depuis sa parution.

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

"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness."

Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

From artist and activist Derek Jaman, a visual and narrative exploration of his singular, paradisiacal garden, set in a most inhospitable place. Derek Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, horticultural expertise, and ecological convictions to produce a landscape that combined flints, shells, and driftwood to create a unique paradise. 

This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to 1994, the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages at every season. For both gardeners and admirers of this extraordinary man, this 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid, marks three decades of the book as a gardening classic, and the ongoing impact of Jarman's transformative garden—proof of the garden space as one of ideas, philosophy, and myth—more than just a place of retreat.

Dans cet ouvrage, malheureusement son dernier, Mark Fisher revisite des artefacts culturels familiers afin de cartographier les variétés de l’étrange dont ils sont porteurs. Longtemps sensible aux dimensions bizarre et omineuse qu’il devinait, sans les nommer, entre autres dans les œuvres de Lovecraft, les films de David Lynch ou les albums de The Fall, M. Fisher tente ici la synthèse essentielle d’un questionnement qui l’avait hanté, jusqu’à ce livre.

Avec son regard si particulier, celui du critique culturel tout à la fois pop et moderniste, puisant aux sources de la psychanalyse et du marxisme, Fisher se penche sur des objets sensibles pour y saisir les rapports entre présence et absence, entre ce qui devrait être mais n’est pas, ce qui ne devrait pas se présenter mais survient. C’est en compagnie de ces spectres — du titre d’un autre ouvrage — que nous sommes invités à voyager, pour questionner les formes mêmes de nos existences sociales, jusqu’aux frontières de l’étrange.