The Argonauts

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.

The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

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.

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”

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die. 

Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.

We can go on like that forever
building paradise from our urges
out of our fetishes our loves our vices
How lucky
We’ll wait for you then
Don’t be too long
Bookmark the page
We’ll be Here
—From “The New Heaven”

Translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk.

An intimate, urgent and riotous account of masculinity, whiteness, queerness and belief in America.

In winter 2018, Gregg Bordowitz performed a three-part lecture series at the New Museum as part of Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Each evening, he explored an avatar of masculinity that was formative to him as he came of age as an outer-borough child of Jewish immigrants, then as an artist-activist in Manhattan at the dawn of the AIDS crisis: the rock star, the rabbi and the comedian. He merged personal and political history, ribald humor and social criticism, performer and persona.

Some Styles of Masculinity is a self-portrait and an essay on upheaval and plague, based on transcripts of the eponymous series, which Bordowitz has reimagined for the page. He asserts that gender can't be separated from ethnicity, sexuality, class or nationality, and he connects these aspects of himself through personal anecdotes as well as reflections on whiteness, diaspora, comedy and Jewish mysticism. Some Styles of Masculinity evokes David Antin's "talk poems," Maggie Nelson's "autotheory," David France's How to Survive a Plague and Wayne Koestenbaum's casually erudite criticism. This book is a winding, intimate, urgent, freewheeling account of thinking and enduring in difficult times.

Gregg Bordowitz (born 1964) is the author of Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018), General Idea: Imagevirus (Afterall Books, 2010) and The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (2004). He was an early participant in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded several video collectives.

Candles and Water is a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival. 

This collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost; and when they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.

Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. His work was in Volume 2 of the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has published eleven books of poetry with small presses. He organised two series of reading and performance nights in Brighton: 'evenly and perversely' and 'WHAT YOU NEED'. He has composed and performed scores for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre.

'Candles and Water risks everything, daring to explore powerful vulnerabilities, yearning, and unabashed hope. Elusiveness and the whisperings of shadows inhabit these pages, always illuminated and burnished by the voice of a poet'. — Thomas Glave, author of Among The Bloodpeople

'Timothy Thornton's Candles and Water is a rare and transformational book, haunting, beautiful and watchful. Writing that follows its brush like Sei Shōnagon.' — David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On

'These radical, scattered shards of life and sensation. . . come to a whole, coalescing like bioluminescence. . . witty, dark, profound, devastating. One long séance with a fellow human soul.' — Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

Tender yet brutal vignettes on a girlhood in Gaza, Palestine, filled with honey and warmth.

Winner of the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye & The New Arab.

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mothers.

With brilliance and grace, Hayek’s vignettes explore the methods of survival nurtured by Palestinian women in the face of colonial occupation and patriarchy—the power of community care, and of loving what’s not meant to be loved. Her reflections reveal the intimate magnificence and quiet devastation of everyday life: a family drive on the shore, waxing for the first time with aunties, or peeling figs while waiting at a checkpoint.

Heba Hayek is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.