October

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

What do we do when the world breaks our hearts? Racial capitalism in the age of pandemic continues to crush ever more lives and spirits. Yet, we are told repeatedly to master, to overcome, to be resilient. Beneath this fragile pretence of coping, many of us have grown used to living with profound and fathomless sorrow.

In graceful prose, Gargi Bhattacharyya navigates collective grief and how it mingles with personal tragedy. Alongside love and joy, perhaps grief is what makes us human―and while its pain scrapes our wounds, its presence can help us renounce that which exists and build anew. 

Heartbreak is the class consciousness of our times. So, it is up to us, the heartbroken, to learn again to heal—and remake the world.

"We, the Heartbroken reckons with loss and grief’s fullness and its surprising abilities to make us alive to one another … entranced by one another again. We are called upon to do this work, to allow for heartbreak to engender capaciousness and collectivity."
— Full Stop

Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in London. Their work includes writing on racism, racial capitalism, austerity and war.

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Curious Affinities unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

In rousing poetry and incisive prose, Sophie Chauhan reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life and wonders how they might be reimagined.

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converge around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

Presence Detection System is a collection of presence detection systems written between 19015 and 19017 by my mother’s daughter. Its composition was marked by the many things we came to violently disagree about, and it was thought, back then, that an abandonment of comparison could be the only way out. For example, we disagreed and disagree about whether to call what we call ourselves ‘misprisions.’ We disagreed and disagree about where to drape our lone antimacassar, how to clean it, who made it, etc. We disagreed and disagree about what is and isn’t an instance of gambling, which itself is, my mother would joke, “a kind of wager labour.” We even disagreed and disagree about love, even though we experience it, talk about it, act upon it and theorize it in exactly the same way.

Nora Collen Fulton is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

"Joseph Matick is a former poet, now bird. He flies over pastures and eats chemtrails as his karmic sentence for spending so many years without flying. (You still have time, kids). Remarkably, he wrote this book in Paris with Jack before his transformation into Frank 0' Hara for the front cover. This book is dedicated to his father and his son. And to all the gum chewing geniuses of the lower canal. He wrote this in the 9éme and was inspired by baseball, flowers, and getting money so as not to die. These are his simplest and most penetrating words."

KATE FOR AVEC JACK VERA INTL

Joseph Matick is an American poet and filmmaker based in Paris. He grew up on a farm in small-town America, moved to Chicago, and eventually to Paris, where he stayed. He studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University — of which he has said: “that place ripped the rug from under my feet” — and has been writing ever since. He is the author of four books: three published by Far West Press — The Baba Books (New American Babble, Post Meridiem Seasick Fuzz, Animal My Soul), Cherry Wagon, and Good Looking Pomes (March 31, 2026). His work appears in King Kong Magazine and is held in the collection of the American Library in Paris.

Translated to English for the first time. 

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.

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

A fragmented reflection on movement, absence, and the unraveling of identity within the shifting landscapes of departure and return. Tarren Johnson explores the tension between private longing and public expression, where moments of love and vulnerability emerge in transient encounters.

Tarren Johnson grew up in North County San Diego, where she began dancing and writings a child. She continued her studies at CalArts in Los Angeles before moving to Europe, where she built a decade-long career in the performing arts. Her debut book of poetry, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, also serves as the foundation for the stage work of the same title.