Time

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

An extraordinary collaboration by an award-winning duo—poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed–that bears witness to the genocide in Gaza.

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media—including their own—in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, this book will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

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.

Chickens have a collective soul. Heaven is full of the skateboarders you kissed in middle school. If the algorithm is its own hell, Lauren Cook, author of the critically (and uncritically) acclaimed Sex Goblin, stands in front of it fully armored. I Love Shopping invites its readers to inhabit a world just like ours, reflected through a big, benevolent funhouse mirror.

First published in a limited edition, this is the first trade edition of the cult classic.

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.

The Great River—Translating the Beats into Arabic traces the literary encounters of Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), an Iraqi poet who was part of the vibrant literary scene of late 60’s San Francisco. His life was marked by a period of restless traveling, that he would later describe as an attempt to pursue a poetic imaginary. This project continues to map his proximity to the Beat poets, his short-lived Bay Area poetry journal, Tigris, and his other English language publications. 

This publication includes a facsimile reproduction of Tigris, featuring a long poem “Jebu” by Boulus’ good friend Etel Adnan.