Books
Books
in random order
of sirens, body & faultlines
of sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear.
While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.
"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible. Originally published as a series of home-made pamphlets that seemed to come as much from post-punk zine culture as from avant-garde poetics, it's good to see them gathered here in one place for the first time and as a body of evidence of a culture of struggle. These poems do not merely comment on that struggle, but emerge from within it. They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity." – Sean Bonney
I am Welton Santos.
I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.
Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.
Shifting the Angle of Shine
Quinn Chen, Kira Simon-Kennedy and 1 more
This publication spans a decade of resilient artists and collectives in, around, and about China and the greater Sinosphere. Composed of essays, images, conversations, and projects, Shifting the Angle of Shine documents innovative tactics of artists and collectives as they weave relationships of mutuality and solidarity to thrive through the cracks.
Shifting the Angle of Shine explores how artists experiment with practices ranging from idiosyncratic business models to counterfeit and mimicry as tools for cultural change, from DIY collectives searching for stability to artists developing new ways to dance around the restrictive pressures of a capitalistic mainstream, and much more. In bringing these artists together to speak and lay compiled in this book, we ask ourselves: what kind of spaces are necessary to incubate productive conversations in an art world prone to creating destabilizing conditions?
Spanning the art nonprofit's decade of existence, a lot of the work has been documented in fragmented ways over the internet, on social media accounts, and in the memories of those there in person. Through materializing this project, this publication hopes to not only shine light on the work of some artists and collectives we admire, but also to archive their stories, processes, and methodologies that should be passed on.
Le Chauffage #3 - Day Job
Francesca Percival, Felix Rapp and 1 more
The third issue of Le Chauffage is an inquiry into the relationship between the practices of artists/ writers and their day jobs. This subject stems from a question fundamental to the existing mandate of Le Chauffage: 'how do you keep warm?' and subsequently, 'how do you pay the bills?' As these perennial concerns occupy our everyday lives, we ask artists/writers to consider the influence that their day jobs, side hustles, creative or non- creative forms of employment have on their respective practices.
This issue tries to account for the significant ways in which complex economic realities come to shape the art we produce, look at, and discuss. How do we deal with limited time and resources? How do we reclaim and steal time back? How do our day jobs shape and influence what we make? How do we subvert the means of production of the workplace? Can the constraint of a day job also be a way to alleviate the pressure of professionalising?
With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Nathan Crompton Pippa Garner, Chauncey Hare Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Garrett Lockhart, Jannis Marwitz Reba Maybury, Tiziana La Melia, Dan Miller, Ragen Moss, Jean Luc Moulène, Jean Katambayi Mukendi Paul Niedermayer, Sophie Nys, Megan Plunkett, Chris Reinecke, Jacquelyn Zong Li Ross On Gabrielle L Hirondelle Hill Margaux Schwarz, Eleanor Ivory Weber James Welling, Werker, The Wig.
Catflap Issue 05
catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.
A4 review N°4
Gorge Bataille, Marc Buchy and 2 more
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: Gorge Bataille, Marc Buchy, Samy Manga, Elke de Rijcke.
When My Body Was A Clinched Fist
"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.
Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.
WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina
Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).
Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990
D’eux, il ne reste que les mots de celle qui a croisé leur route. Le crissement de pneus qui sifflent avant un malheur qui tarde à se produire. Sanctification plus que célébration, Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une tentative de communication au-delà de la matière physique de l’énonciation, un dialogue interne qui convoque « par moment le frère, par moment l’ami parti », toujours la ruine, la consommation de la séparation avec le tout. À travers quatre parties qui font écho à la structure des éloges funèbres de la Grèce antique, Romane Constant réouvre la poésie des plaies larges et profondes que les vers lapidaires d’Hélène Bessette – sur qui l’autrice mène un travail de recherche – ont laissé dans l’histoire moderne de la littérature, et signe un texte bouleversant sur la difficulté des choses qui ne (se) passent pas, la force de celles que l’on voit suspendues par le cou au bord d’une paix impossible à trouver. Oraison funèbre pour Zelda1990 est une douleur croissante, avec écoulement et rougeur.
Romane Constant vit et travaille à Paris. Elle explore à travers différents supports les questions relationnelles, d’intimité, du corps et du genre. Attachée aux Ardennes où elle a grandi, elle s’intéresse également à l’héritage de la classe ouvrière et aux traumatismes intergénérationnels.
Jeu des Arbres
Op 28 mei 2025 tekenden 500 mensen hun favoriete boom in het Josaphatpark in Brussel. Deze 52 uitgelote tekeningen vormen nu samen een kaartspel.
Le 28 mai 2025, 500 personnes ont dessiné leur arbre préféré dans le parc Josaphat à Bruxelles. Ces 52 dessins tirés au sort constituent désormais un jeu de cartes.
Découvrir la collection complet:
https://een-twee.be/tous-les-arbres-1
Love's Work
Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.
Gillian Rose (1947–1995), who is now recognized as one of the most important and influential critical thinkers of her time, was a British philosopher and writer. For many years she taught at Sussex University, drawing large numbers of research students, before she accepted a chair in social and political thought at Warwick University. Her major works, which ranged from Continental philosophy to Judaism, include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Judaism and Modernity, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso.
Homie
Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.
Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.
& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war
—from “my president”
Monument Zero
Niloufar Nematollahi, Jose Rosales
Monument Zero emerges from International Women’s Day on 8 March 1979 in Iran. The archival materials that form the starting point depict six days of protests, sit-ins, and conferences that began on this day in Tehran. These historical objects have been preserved by the mercy of their creators, who were present during the 1979 protests, and are scattered across personal and public holdings worldwide. By bringing together the materials that depict this forgotten history, Monument Zero counters historical erasure and explores the preservation of political struggles through collective artistic practice.
Intelligent Life
Comprehensive and previously unpublished documentation on the American composer's unproduced magnum opus.
Had it been produced, Maryanne Amacher's media opera Intelligent Life would have represented the summation of the composer's concept to date. As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the opera's patrons—Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar, in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps—she would have at last had the support to "communicate the finest of my thought to others." Amacher's serial, intended for broadcast, sought to transmit her evolving ideas about perception, listening, and composition to a broader public—shifting music away from "nod and tap recognition" toward a transformative practice that could awaken intelligence to "unrecognized and new perceptual modes."
Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the "listening mind" or the "sophisticated perceiver"—capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual.
Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms—she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations—she continued designing "treatments" for the opera for much of her career. This volume makes the most complete of these working documents—including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot—available to the public for the first time.
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.
École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon
Initiales #05 — Andrea Fraser
Claire Moulène, Emmanuel Tibloux
Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).
Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.
My Death
A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.
But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?
Bastards
Nate Lippens, author of the acclaimed novels My Dead Book, a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Ripcord, a New Statesman Book of the Year, completes his Wisconsin trilogy with Bastards, a book of losses, memories and survival.
A full-on breakdown, wouldn’t that be fabulously dramatic? Instead, I ended up in green gripper socks, sweatpants, and a T-shirt, a look like a California cult member or a suburban schlub (same thing) on a seventy-two-hour hold—a crack-up fortnight—until I started acting like myself. Well, not myself, because how would they know who that is? A facsimile of normal. I mimed coherence, the continuity of a person moving from room to room. I performed my sadness convincingly, pimped memories of Rudy, flensed my crazy down to thimbles of death, an understandable loss.
You win. I say it all the time to people. You win. You won. You’re the winner. Congratulations. I said it when a boyfriend told me he didn’t love me. I said it on the ward. I said it when I got evicted. You win. Good for you.
Recently sprung from a stint on a psychiatric ward, the narrator of Bastards works hard to perform at being a person while questioning the concept of identity and what it means to be an aging working-class gay man when the word queer has become so elastic and gentrified it’s used to conservative ends. Struggling to survive, pay rent, and navigate a hostile world, he takes solace in art and his friends and measures what makes a life.
Borrowing from the tropes of fragmented lyric essays, New Narrative, autofiction, and transgressive literature, Lippens is a bricoleur who creates a confected new form in his short novels. Queer pessimism in the age of affirmation. A search for something honest. An old queen’s cackle.
“What a gift to encounter such intelligent homosexuality!” Robert Glück
“His bracing novels represent an honest reckoning with the post-AIDS era and its effect on life and imagination.” The Nation
a queer anthology of wilderness
Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.
Sexe 2
Confession sur le désir (l’action et l’objet du), les liens de mutualité et de résistance, Sexe 2 alterne prose et versification en 27 fragments numérotés à l’adresse plus ou moins dure, plus ou moins sincère, plus ou moins formulée car plus ou moins éloignée du Toi et du Je. Camille Kingué s’attache à révéler, à voir quelque chose à travers son image réelle et virtuelle, agrandie et rétrécie, droite et renversée, déployant une recherche des principes de l’amour (l’amour comme amour, pourquoi est ce qu’il y a de l’amour) où la métaphysique et la compréhension de soi – donc de l’autre – n’ont jamais été aussi sexy.
Claire Star Finch, dans la magnifique préface qu’iel signe au début de l’ouvrage, écrit : « Après avoir lu tous les livres de Kingué, je ne sais pas si je crois en “l’amour”, que ce soit en tant que substantif absolu ou en tant que proto-résidu de tout ce que “le sexe” peut signifier. Mais je crois définitivement qu’il faut l’écrire. » Définitivement.
MW Collected Texts (Bootleg)
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.
Matières spectrales: Sociologie des Fantômes
Avery F. Gordon, Julia Burtin Zortea
Dans ce livre unique et fascinant, Avery F. Gordon examine l’expérience sociologique de la « hantise » en s’appuyant sur des références aussi bien littéraires que politiques. La hantise désigne un système qui altère l’expérience d’un vécu linéaire et déforme la façon dont nous séquençons habituellement le passé, le présent et le futur. En prenant pour terrain les romans de Toni Morrison ou Luisa Valenzuela et en les confrontant à des sources plus traditionnelles de la sociologie (articles de presse, comptes rendus judiciaires, rapports d’enquêtes), Matières spectrales démontre que les structures sociales héritées du passé influencent plus la vie présente que ne le présument la plupart des chercheur·ses en sciences humaines.
Afin de montrer comment les fantômes hantent le présent, l’autrice passe au crible une partie de l’histoire de la psychanalyse, avant d’examiner des épisodes de l’histoire tels que l’esclavage aux États-Unis ou les disparitions massives pendant la dictature militaire en Argentine, où des lois interdisaient à la population de parler des disparu·es.
Profondément interdisciplinaire et véritablement innovant par son approche, Matières spectrales est écrit avec une puissance à la hauteur de son sujet, et offre une vision nouvelle des intersections complexes de la race, du genre et de la classe.
Bewogen selfies
In Bewogen selfies onderzoekt Obe Alkema de verhouding tussen landschap en herinnering. Wat treft hij aan bij terugkeer naar belangrijke plaatsen uit zijn geheugen? Wat herinnert hij zich niet, maar Google wel? Is er een gedenkschrift te puren uit zijn metadata?
Memoires, rechtstreeks verteld en met omwegen, uit eerste hand en van horen zeggen. Archieven en herinneringen eisen spreektijd, houden het niet meer droog of worden tot spreken gebracht. Wat hebben ze eigenlijk te melden? Ze lopen helemaal leeg, net als Alkema zelf. Een leven zoals zovele, poedelnaakt en geretoucheerd, vol zin en onzin.
BIG JOE
A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a tight-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town.
Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, BIG JOE is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.
Featuring color illustrations by Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler.
Cover illustration by Drake Carr
Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other erotic novels include Equinox, Hogg, The Mad Man, Throu gh the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Shoat Rumblin. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red/Times Square Blue and numerous books of essays; his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. As e-books, paperbacks, or audiobooks, his works are available through his website at: www.samueldelany.com
Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing
A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.
In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.
Worms Issue 12: Tourmaline
"In the three previous issues of Worms, we have plumbed the depths of the mind, unravelled the mysteries of the heart, and traversed the vast expanses of the soul. For this next instalment, Worms 12, we have sought to get back to our roots, to burrow our heads and tails into the soil from which we came. The central tenet of our fertilising mission has always been to champion the best and most experimental writing we can sink our teeth into, to challenge the exclusivity of traditional publishing, and to bring what’s lurking underground to the literary topsoil. We revel in writing that corrupts form, defies genre, and subverts style; work that deals in the uncomfortable, the uncertain, and the untoward. We ask: what can literary form reveal to us about ourselves, our heroes, the global landscape. We don’t need to remind you of the turmoil of our current moment. The frequency and escalating depravity of the bad news that reaches us through the black squares in our pockets says it all. Instead we return to writing to excavate its radical potential; writing as protest, as remedy, as subterfuge, as escape.
While we cast our net far and wide, in putting this issue together a constellation of themes and ideas naturally emerged. From the complexities of history, legacy, and lineage, to the persistence of ghosts, grief, and memory; from the trappings of masculinity to the transformations of parenthood, pregnancy, and birth; from acts of community-building to queer kinship, messiness, and desire." (Note from the publisher)
Worms Editors: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Arcadia Molinas
Featuring: Tourmaline, Namwali Serpell, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jamieson Webster, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sophie Robinson, Missouri Williams, Robert Glück, Bambi Lake, Amber Husain, Mar García Puig.
Contributors: Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Madame Nielsen, Gaye Kynoch, Izabella Scott, Maxy Lury, Lou Ferrand, Tadhg Haran, Chariot Wish, Donna Marcus Duke, R.Z Baschir, Charlotte Pelissier, Anju M Kasturiraj, Vic Brooks, Saffron Morter-Laing, Dove Ginsburg.
Photographers: Michel Delsol, Xavi Permanyer, Alexander Coggin, Robin Christian, Veronika Korjagina, Joseph Hayes, Ciarán Óg Arnold.
Artwork & Illustration: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Rifke Sadleir, Ivy Shepherd-Barron, George Paul, Katya Labowe-Stoll.
Design: Caitlin McLoughlin