Perverts

An anthology of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.

With texts by: Andrea Abi-Karam, New York City Sam Ace, South Hadley, MA Bahaar Ahsan, Berkeley, CA jasper avery, Philadelphia, PA Ari Banias, Berkeley, CA Jo Barchi, Chicago, IL Joss Barton, St. Louis, MO Levi Bentley, Philadelphia, PA Jessica Bet, Baltimore, MA Rocket Caleshu, Los Angeles, CA Ching-in Chen, Seattle, WA listen chen, Vancouver, BC Faye Chevalier, Philadelphia, PA Cody-Rose Clevidence, Arkansas Miles Collins-Sibley, Easthampton, MA Valentine Conaty, New York City CA Conrad, Philadelphia, PA Jimmy Cooper, Rochester, MI Maxe Crandall, Oakland, CA José Díaz, Boston, MA Aaron El Sabrout, New Mexico Ian Khara Ellasante, Lewiston, ME Caelan Ernest, New York City, NY NM Esc, San Diego, CA joshua jennifer espinoza, Los Angeles, CA Logan February, Ibadan, Nigeria Ray Filar, Brighton, UK Nora Collen Fulton, Montreal, Canada Kay Gabriel, New York City Callie Gardner, Cardiff, Wales Jesi Gaston, Chicago, IL Harry Josephine Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland Aeon Ginsberg, Baltimore, MD Caspar Heinemann, Berlin, Germany Kamden Hilliard, Greenville, SC Stephen Ira, New York City Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, New York City Peach Kander, New York City Jayson Keery, Western, MA Evan Kleekamp, Los Angeles, CA Noah LeBien, New York City Ty Little, Richmond, VA Zavé Martohardjono, New York City Amy Marvin, Philadelphia, PA Natalie Mesnard, New York City Bianca Rae Messinger, Iowa City, IA Liam O'Brien, New York City Xandria Phillips, Madison, WI Rowan Powell, Santa Cruz, CA Nat Raha, Edinburgh, Scotland Holly Raymond, Philadelphia, PA Jackie S, New York City Trish Salah, Toronto, Canada Raquel Salas Rivera, Philadelphia, PA Mai Schwartz, New York City Kashif Sharma-Patel, London, UK Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Oakland, CA Charles Theonia, New York City Jamie Townsend, Oakland, CA Nora Treatbaby Laurel Uziell, London, UK Rachel Franklin Wood, Boulder, CO Clara Zornado Akasha-Mitra xtian w. and Anaïs Duplan, NYC.

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1 (BOAAT Press, 2017), the recipient of fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Poetry Project, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton University.

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions), attempts to queer Fanon's vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Andrea's first book, EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror.

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

An atmospheric rumination on gendered violence, cosmic collapse, and colonialism.

From deep inside a black hole, comes Nothing at All—the space where everything collapses: form, genre, gender, and being. Olivia Tapiero’s poetic  and essayistic fragments overflow with lyric beauty as they explore how colonialism, illness, and desire intertwine amidst personal and collective suffering. Generations, geographies, and desires mingle, contaminating one another in these anarchic, insubordinate texts. Here, the written word disrupts foundations and nations, claiming its own survival.

Olivia Tapiero is a writer, translator and musician. She is the author Les murs (Robert-Cliche Award, Prix Senghor finalist), Espaces (2012), Chairs (2019), Phototaxie / Phototaxis (Nightboat Books, 2017 / 2021, Lambda Literary Awards finalist), and Rien du tout (2021, Grand Prix du livre de Montréal Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Awards finalist). She is editor-in-chief for the literary magazine Moebius, and has contributed poems and essays to various publications in Canada, France, and Korea. She has also translated works of contemporary authors such as Roxane Gay, Anne Boyer and Billy-Ray Belcourt. She lives between Marseille and Montréal.

Foreword by Anne Boyer.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. - Benjamin Krusling

Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.

Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut. 

The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”

Edited by Evan Kennedy & Jason Morris

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience).