Life Is Everywhere

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice. 

In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth—and as twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialize, and discipline creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance. 

A buoyant melding of popular culture and literary criticism, The Slicks is a captivating and unexpected assessment of two iconic female artists by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.

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”

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume? 

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings — in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries — represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.

Edited by Lucy Ives. 

Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.

Benjamin Krusling's Glaring is the winner of our 2019 Open Reading Period, and was selected by guest judge Lucy Ives.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

What do you worship? What claims your time, your faith, your silence? What are the icons you carry, the relics you protect, the devotions that define you?

For our inaugural issue, we invite you to reflect on the objects, ideas, rituals, and obsessions that shape your devotion. Worship is not confined to temples or texts, it flickers in longing glances, whispered prayers, silent routines, and fervent beliefs. It can be sacred or profane, communal or solitary, chosen or inherited.

We encouraged our writers and artists to interpret this theme freely, critically, emotionally, playfully, or abstractly. Whether they explored worship through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, visual art, or hybrid forms, we were looking for work that comforts, commands, or consumes.

This issue features art and writing from: Triinu Silla, Michel Krysiak, Anna Tracey, Antonina Anna Kubicka, Ari Wentz, Jonathan David Sijl, Renacuajo Sánchez, Florence Hutchinson, Marta Calero Segura, Eden Ridout, Artémis Toumi, Simone Viola, Zoe Pappouti, Laura Soto Sánchez, Autumn Anderson, Woodkern, Cathal McGuire, Nena Pawletko, Ignacio Aguilera, Marine Victoria Lobos Garay, Andreea Luță, Isabel Ferreras González, Rafael Torrubia, Emilia Tapia, KC Willis, Simon Jin, Jacky Weerman, Róisín Gallagher, and Rin Anishchanka. 

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

New Infinity is an experimental novella that follows a woman as she lives and dreams her way through the philosophical implications of autoimmune disease. Met by a labyrinth of closing doors, she searches for meaning and connection among fragmented realities and failed relationships, finding infinitude in the healing process of bibliomancy.

Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a glittering cross-genre debut. Weaving surrealist stories with meditative poetics, Hladík invites you into a dream world of degenerative illness, left disordered by the failures of ableism, medical professionals, and late-stage capitalism. Here, everything runs on sick time. Where physical health and financial resources grow scarce, the restorative possibilities of queer love, divination, and self-reclamation grant a defiant, yet often tenuous, abundance. Alive with Hladík’s boundless insight and wit, New Infinity is a powerful addition to the collective body of disability literature.

“I have been waiting for a book like New Infinity for years: a story of disability that oozes over the edges of ‘personal narrative’ into the surreal logics of bodies that will not be made useful under capitalism. Bára Hladík’s prose delights me with its 21st-century metamorphoses, its waiting-room dream logics, and its mystical invocations of a body in pain. Her poetry is a channel to another dimension, but one that is grounded inside our everyday sensoria—’cracking, pushing, pulsing’ like a spine writhing with snakes. Here, embodiment is never extractable from the institutions and economies whose profits are predicated on the question ‘do I matter if / I am only a pulse’? New Infinity insists upon a different kind of mattering, in which missed connections, improper fusions, and fleeting moments command the careful, caring attention that is too often denied them.” – Liz Bowen, author of Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press) and Sugarblood (Metatron Press)

“New Infinity is the most incredible fiction. It explodes the boundaries of this form so as to get to the heart of important truths about the phenomenon of physical pain and of human existence itself. While Bára Hladík’s story draws from a personal experience of survival through a struggle unlike any other, it is an entirely universal tale. In taking us into the most intimate spaces of suffering and narrating a story of a woman navigating a true labyrinth, Hladík shows us a way to face life, with the uncertainties it presents to us all. This novel is at once a profoundly moving story, a brilliant act of creativity, and an existential philosophy. It’s a book I will keep close, so as to revisit— for the thrilling inspiration of its liberated uses of form and style, as well as to learn from Hladík’s honest language, her resilient sense of humour, and her ability to capture the surreal beauty of being alive at all. I felt like I was reading Franz Kafka crossed with a fully unconstrained Anne Carson. I haven’t been so impacted by a book in a long time. It has changed my ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about what it means to be alive.” – Molly Lynch, author of The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult Books, 2023)

“Bára Hladík’s debut book is a blend of poetry and prose that seeks to make sense of a world that is flagrantly hostile and impatient with bodies that neither perform nor conform to the manic impatience of capitalist acceleration. An honest, vibrant, and very real account of a young writer finding a voice.” – Sina Queyras, writer, editor, professor, curator

“Bára Hladík’s New Infinity is a stirring pedagogy, philosophy, and witness. This offering of sick hybridity coils in a long, calm, and exhilarating breath while asking, ‘Do the doctors know how to breathe?’ Yes, Hladík’s prose and poems prompt, pain cosmologies are at once funny and incantatory. Each of New Infinity’s oneiric turns reads the body as an oracle and mirror, reminds us we are atmospheric. I would rather live here in this book, relearn how to breathe, than return to the ‘impossible crank’ of normal.” – Jane Shi, writer, poet, editor, organizer

Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer, editor and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she began her literary studies in the Creative Writing program at Capilano University in 2011. After studying Technical Writing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Communications from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Briarpatch Magazine, THIS Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s microchapbook Book of Mirrors was selected for the 2019 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and her collaborative artist book Behind the Curtain (Publication Studio, 2018) was an honourable mention for the Scorpion and Felix Prize (2017). New Infinity is Bára’s first book. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, BC.