Please join Hagen Blix for a presentation, celebration, and discussion of their new book, Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares, which will surely keep us up at night. Hagen will be in conversation with David Widder.

Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.

Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.

Hagen Blix (he/they) is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.

David Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running. You can engage with him on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago, 2019). He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn. His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR, MQR, Icarus among others. Some of his honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship.   

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 2008. Almadhoun has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic and his poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages. He has created several poetry films, collaborated extensively with artists and scholars, and curated numerous events, readings, and literary anthologies. Adrenalin, translated by Catherine Cobham, came out with Action Books in 2017, and in February 2025, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand will be published simultaneously in English translation by Action Books in the U.S. and Divided Publishing in London and Brussels. Almadhoun currently divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.

A working-class radical revolutionary's tale—penned by a prominent union leader—now available in English.

Paul Buhle says: "Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is one of the most remarkable texts in all of American labor fiction."

Raffi Magarik observes: "At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker."

About the book: Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline.

With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broideoffers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.

Annie Sommer Kaufman is a Chicago organizer who builds antizionist Jewish community by teaching Yiddish and Talmud, and as a member-leader of Jewish Voice for Peace. She worked for a decade in the fashion industry as a pattern maker. As a founding member of Red Emma's bookstore in Baltimore, she was active in the Industrial Workers of the World.

Rosza Daniel Lanf/Levitskiy
cultural worker and organizer. never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone. can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them – outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, essays, meals… raised by red diaper radicals, active since the 90s in jewish left projects and the yiddish cultural revitalization svive. just another diasporist gendertreyf veltlekhe mischling fem who identifies with, not as.

Join us for the last discussion this season of the Gathering Utopias series on Saturday March 1st at 7pm. We will be discussing the afterword to the new edition of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams “When History Wakes,” the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program, and the Young Lord’s 13-Point Program.

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution

Dare To Struggle NYC discussion group

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Join us on Saturday February 22 and March 1. For this session we’ll be discussing Kristin’s Ross’s The Emergence of Social Space, pages 4—25 and the Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists. The reading for March 1 will be announced soon.  Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume VI)

Save the date for Volume Six!! You won’t want to miss out on a night of joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!

with Andy Jiaming Tang (Cinema Love), Alejandro Heredia (Loca), Aida Bardissi, Caroline Giovanie, Vanessa Dos Santos, Michelle Woods, and Alex Rapine

and your hosts

Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School

Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.

Lampback Lit Reading Series

Join us on the third Sunday of the month for the Lampblack Lit Reading Series featuring readings from early-career and established poets, translators, and prose writers from the Black diaspora.

Gathering Utopias is back! In the fall we hosted a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary that focused on speculative fiction. This spring the focus is on historical utopias! Join us on Saturday, February 15th at 7:00 to discuss excerpts from David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. PDF on instagram @artworkersinquiry ✨ or in the store. Subsequent meetings will be on Saturday February 22 and March 1, with readings TBA.  Feel free to attend one or all!

This reading group is happening in conjunction with Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. The concert that accompanies these readings will take place on March 9th 🎩🎀💜⭐️

Love Letters: Video and Poetry Reading

Love Letters Vol.6: Hosted by Mon Mohapatra and Roshan Abraham, Love Letters is an annual reading of letters—personal letters, fictional letters, archival letters—by poets, writers and artists, timed to coincide with Valentine's Day. This year we are excited to hear from Shaira Chair, Tel Mancini, Madison Jamar, Aristide Kirby, Akshwarya Agora, Danialie Fertile, and Fablina Yeaqub. After the performance, we'll sit down together to write letters of solidarity and support to incarcerated people. This year will also be a fundraiser for Palestinian families.

Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir
by Seth Lorinczi

Advance Praise for Death Trip

“Death Trip has the potential to open big conversations about ancestral histories—what we carry, as a family or an identified ‘people’—along with all the things we don’t know. In this moment of what Joanna Macy called ‘The Great Turning,’ the courage to view stories with nuance and compassion, to take them in and let them go, is essential to our survival. We're going to have to repair history if we want a future.”
—Vanessa Veselka, Zazen, The Great Offshore Grounds

“In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and passionately lived memoir of intergenerational trauma, Lorinczi leads the reader on a double journey: Into the harrowing bloodlands of 20th-century fascism and, almost as scary, the miasmic inner life of 21st-century, post-punk manhood. This is a good trip in the most profound sense.”
—Jon Raymond, Denial, Freebird

“Seth Lorinczi’s journey through MDMA therapy takes him into a labyrinth of family secrets and ancestral trauma. The story of what he finds there—and how it changes him—is as gripping and propulsive as a crime novel. I was captivated the whole way through.”
—Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

pleasureis amircale booklaunch

Bianca Rae Meesinger // Nora Collen Fulton // Shiv Kotecha // Mohammed Zenia

pleasureis amiracle

A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet’s body and the world.

In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound—words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation. An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa.

PRAISE

“The way Messinger produces and overcomes space, I want to weep. ‘It’s all right if you don’t return my love’—what an image of grace. In the red interplay of anticipation and knowledge, she shows us bodies as bits of psychic pressure, active, luminous, without guarantees. How green is the valley of syntax, of poems that don’t feel without thinking. ‘she’s gone isn’t it, I will wake up there wont i—.’ Look at what language can do, always more than what we can say, when it sees the struggle inside itself.”
—Benjamin Krusling

“Feel the title in your mouth: a linguistically foreign substance from which something ravishing and graceful emerges. In the lush textures of this luminous new work, Bianca Rae Messinger brings the reader to thresholds of perception precisely where existential and relational vectors collide. The energies generated by the poems’ formal innovations—margins, boxes, bars, syntactical boundaries, verbal mergings, moving screens of simultaneous action—spark the air of each page. Feel the inexorable motion of the world as it slips in and out of reach. This work’s pleasures make a practice of transformation.”
—Elizabeth Willis

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks “The Love of God” (Inpatient Press, 2016) and “parallel bars” (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others.

Nora Collen Fulton lives in Montreal, where she is currently pursuing a doctorate focused on philosophy, trans theory and poetics. She is the authour of Thee Display (Anteism), Presence Detection System (Hiding Press) and Life Experience Coolant, (Book*hug). Nora's poems have been published in Social Text, Homintern, Some Magazine and elsewhere. Her critical and theoretical work can be found in Radical Philosophy, The Poetry Project, Music and Literature and more.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018), and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His criticism appears in publications including 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, frieze, The Nation, MUBI’s Notebook, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. For the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he co-edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of experimental arts writing. He is Co-Chair of the Writing Discipline for Bard MFA—Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Mohammed Zenia is a poet based in Brooklyn. Tel Aviv (Porosity Press) is their first book.

Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together

Dean Spade, in conversation with Morgan Bassichis 

Around the globe, people are faced with spiraling crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back, often dedicating our lives to  collective liberation. But even those of us who long for change seem to have trouble when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Too often we think of our political values as outward-facing positions again dominant systems of power.  Many projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we divest from cultural programming that gives us harmful expectations about sex, dating, romance and friendship?

How do we recover from the messed up dynamics we were trained in by childhood caregivers? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom into step with our desires for healing and connection? Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, so we can stick together while we work for survival and liberation.

All the reserved seats have been claimed, but people don’t always show up and we will try to accommodate everyone, but can’t guarantee space. (If weather permits we will have an outdoor option) And please remember that N95, KN95, KF94, or equivalent masks are required for this event. Bring one if you have one, they will also be available here. If you are feeling sick please stay home and rest up!

Advance Praise for Love in a F*cked Up World:

“Dean Spade has written a pragmatic, timely book to help us navigate our most intimate relationships with a collective mindset; release romance myths and approach love as a practice; and cultivate discernment and freedom where we are trained towards judgement and ownership. He teaches us with gentle, relatable clarity and questions that allow us to reflect on how we are loving each other in this fucked up gorgeous world, and how to hold on to each other as the changes come.” - adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections, Pleasure Activism, and Emergent Strategy

“Everyday we have the chance to be the change we want to see in the world in how we treat each other. And yet, it is often in our intimate relationships that we fail to live our values - in often very painful ways. In Love In A F*cked-Up World, Dean Spade helps us love better, care better, build better, and even break up better so that we can come together (and apart) in ways that keep our communities and movements intact.”  --Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want To Talk About Race, Mediocre, and Be A Revolution

We Keep Each Other Safe: N95, KN95, KF94, or equivalent masks are required for this event. Please bring one if you have one, they will also be available here. If you are feeling sick please stay home and rest up! We are on the ground floor with no stairs. The bathroom may be a challenge for wheelchairs (alternative is across the street), please call us with any access questions and accomodations we can make.

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume V)

Joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!

Volume FIVE!!

Gina Chung
Tonee Mae Moll
Javeria Hasnain
Aditi Bhattacharjee
Max Fischer
Kindall Grant

Hosts

Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School

Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.

Please join us for a power-trio as we celebrate the publication of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel with special guests Stacy Skolnik and Claire deVoogd

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS is a poet and translator whose most recent novel is Participation (2022, Coffee House Press). Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They, We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and various others. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY.

The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love

The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.

“A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, Via represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd’s poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the “undertow and marvel” of language and history. “Words extend around worlds” and we go on.”
—Susan Howe

“There’s a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd’s poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between “a cathedral of every pink” and “a moss so green it bleeds real blood” she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams.”
—Lisa Jarnot

“Near the end of Via, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. Actually, I’d already been struck by lightning a million times while reading Via, and DeVoogd’s worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. Via is the closest experience I’ve ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire’s addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much.”
—Anselm Berrigan

Claire DeVoogd is a poet and teacher in New York City. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of a chaplet Apocalypses 1-12 (Belladonna*, 2021). Other recent work can be found on Montez Press Radio, in Prelude, The Brooklyn Rail, Pfiel, and elsewhere. She co-edits Terrific Books, a pamphlet press.

Political Film Screening and Discussion
with For Our Liberation

An amazing night of poetry that you won’t want to miss!

“Here are the layers of an exquisite desire, bared to the world, teeth and all. Blood and all. Queer as in: the death of narrative, the death of feeling as an explanatory framework. Long live our pleasures, our unruly beauty rendered illegible by inherited patterns of wanting. Long live the possibility of pleasure as a pathway towards an expansive sense of being, made and unmade at the site of skin against skin. Because we know our arrival is not a point on the horizon, but an endlessly renewable life force within us, between us, for me, for you. "One cannot know what one wants until one knows what wanting is," Cawley writes -- this is a collection of coming into life and living, even in the presence of death. Even in the presence of a void left by diminishments and binaries and a world intent on foreclosures. Reading this book, I came to understand "the future didn’t have to look like anything."
—Kazumi Chin

“The journey of these poems had me on the edge of my seat and always on the brink of seeing the world in new ways! “If there was a hole in the center of the forest / I knew I would be dragged into it.” Here is a book we want in our lives, poetry to return to again and again! Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers is absolutely brilliant!”
—CAConrad

“Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers is a book that builds soil / earth as viscous porosity. It’s refusal and it’s more generous. It’s a study of entanglement. A collision / a coalescing of memories, thoughts, experiences, edges rustling and shining amongst wildflowers / so close to the highway you can brush against them, pull on a seed. “Life on earth is about applying pressure / without understanding what it might do,” says Cawley. “At this juncture, I unhinge myself from time, gender, cheekbones / How embarrassing, to admit I don’t care about plot, just images of water and a somber face, or, / barring that, a savage, intelligent, feminine interiority,” says Cawley. You bring intentionality to the poem, your life, your politics / and yet / it can still get away from you / get wild.”
—Carrie Lorig

“I love Stephanie’s mix. It’s been killer for me since day one. Science fiction-y, mundane, dyke, smart, droll, dirty, surprising. As poems they just drop out, in a true 21st century way. This is the path & I’m on it. I say yay.”
—Eileen Myles

Dawn Lundy Martin’s dark brilliance subsumes in the “tissue / breath that heaves, into a depth so black we cannot reach it—” echoing William Kentridge’s meditations on the artist’s dedication to the image via Géricault’s renderings of many decapitations. Martin mines in “a sewn language” where “defeat is inevitable,” and “freedom” is “near total alienation,” revealing hope in Instructions for The Lovers—a “subjectitude,” Martin’s singular voice, gesture, art: “fragrance like sun or metal—the I’s sublime coma— .’’ This is an incredible masterpiece.”
—Ronaldo V. Wilson

“I gladly and gratefully take instruction from a mind as fine and darting as Dawn Lundy Martin’s. Her new book of poems—a spinning, aloft creation, akin to Mallarmé in its suspension and hovering—is filled with randy, tender, radical, and history-making observations. She keeps shifting the angle of vision and articulation, so the reader can always be surprised and enlightened by how this alert litany, this poetic construction, this fragmented manifesto, arrived at its final form. This book is a sieve through which the future might be said to fall, with a sound like salvation.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum

"The experience of reading Jameson Fitzpatrick’s absorbing new poetry collection, Pricks in the Tapestry, (Birds, LLC), feels like tracing a map of exquisite points—the parts of us that are most tender when pressed. Fitzpatrick’s poems regard the sites and sources of hurt, desire, and disturbance with evocative candor. These poems pricked my own exquisite points, in the way that our deepest loves and most brutal hurts (sometimes one and the same) so often do."
—Alina Pleskova

"I tried to undress a mystery,” testifies the speaker of R E D as this haunting literary performance—somewhere between neo-Gothic burlesque and formal experiment in queer auto-theory—begins. Erasing Bram Stoker’s Dracula all the way down to its psychoanalytic minimalia, Chase Berggrun unearths a narrative not only of gender transition, but of the uncanny political and metaphysical transitions entailed by the metamorphosis of individual into chorus as well. By the end of this adventure in appropriation as self-disclosure, we learn that the “mystery” was self all along: “A detail in a pool of blood / the body gathered in an awkward kink / I dress myself in easy anything.” Rapt and unsettled, we readers find ourselves, too, both saturated and implicated in the sanguinary affair of desire, “drenched to a scarlet with want."—Srikanth Reddy

“I violate limitation” says the speaker in Chase Berggrun’s R E D and how can I help it, I love her to no end. This is a book that celebrates, no, reifies the power of erasure to usher in (re)creation. There are echoes of Hélène Cixous who, in Coming to Writing, says: “In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings. When you have come to the end, only then can beginning come to you.” The gifts of transition. The gift of a body becoming “a determined echo hammering away.” How my own body needed these “hands full of sound.”—T C Tolbert

Unfortunately Ariel Yelen needed to reschedule her reading. Check back here for more information.

fag/hag nyc book launch

with Max Fox and Madeline Lane-McKinley

— Dear M, Love M

The heart of this book is a series of letters exchanged between two friends in 2020. Fox and Lane-McKinley found themselves unable to work on a book left unpublished at the death of their other friend, Christopher Chitty. Chitty is the author of the posthumously published Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, and was a committed organiser and comrade. In avoiding one book, Fox and Lane-McKinley came to write another through their conversation as it unfolded amidst Californian wildfires, the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the fascistic flares of white nationalism. And, of course, grief. Remembering Chitty became a way for the two friends to make sense of the sexual politics of the long 1990s, that interminable decade in which they both came of age, both became imprinted by intimacy and its prohibition. The fag/hag emerges in their letters as a relation, at once a promise of love outside the privatised family unit and something vulnerable to capture when made to sequester anxieties about sex, gender, and the future. Before and after the letters, there are two essays, one by each author, which chart the prehistory of their friendship and their respective entries into the fag/hag relation. Together the three pieces speak to each other, as Fox and Lane-McKinley do in their epistolary register, and as they both speak to Chitty, the beloved and staunch subject of the book’s apostrophic address. 

‘At once sprawling and compact, fag/hag illuminates the contradictions that inhere in the promise of gay communism: the ways in which queer resistance to the family-form doesn’t simply lead to its negation, but reproduces its limits in unexpected ways.

From within these contradictions, Fox and Lane-McKinley develop a gorgeous theory of friendship in the wake of its foreclosure, then shred it to pieces before beginning the analytical process over again. This is a work of avoidance — of work, of family, of mourning — but it is precisely through that avoidance that they conjure new forms of intimacy. In a time of generalized and uneven immiseration, fag/hag offers us a model to think with, not just against, our endless mourning.‘ — Dominick Knowles

Max Fox is a writer, translator, and a founding editor of Pinko Magazine.

Madeline Lane-McKinley is the author of Comedy Against Work (Common Notions, 2022), and Dear Z (Commune Editions, 2019). She is also a co-editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry

Along with Gréki’s poetry Radhika Singh, a science fiction writer will read from a manuscript that, like Gréki's poems, offers thrilling visions of a liberated future and David Iaconangelo will read a translation of at least one long poem by Miguel Hernández referenced by Gréki.

November Sun

That morning the sun
Used its public crier 
Voice

What does it say and want
In the thick of burst
Shadows

It screams that it has plenty of love
To give and plenty of blood
On its hands

It shouts from the roofs
Of Algiers the White of Algiers
The Red

The humid joy of the day
And the cheerful bitterness
Of life

Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Gréki is co-published by Pinsapo Press and Lost & Found, translated by Marine Cornuet, and introduced by Ammiel Alcalay.

"Anna Gréki was a particularly inconvenient pied noir—not loyal enough for the French colonists and too compromised for the Algerian nationalists—and so she was shunted to the margins of Algerian literary history. Nevertheless, it’s time she takes her place at the center of that narrative, and these accomplished translations constitute a necessary English-language introduction to this secret garden of Maghrebi poetry. Gréki’s poetry is electrified by the heady heights of the war of liberation, but arguably it finds its truest expression in her paeans to the wild hills and impregnable peaks of the Aurès mountains, where she was born and where she found a sense of peace which otherwise eluded her in her brief life."
—André Naffis-Sahely 

“‘Nothing happens here but everything burns.’ From the prison where she was tortured by French authorities in 1950s Algeria, Anna Greki stays in touch, feverishly, with ‘this world of vulnerable flesh.’ Addressed to her friends and comrades in struggle, to the land and the leaves and the birds, these poems defy ‘the war, this male ax,’ invoking the future with ‘a trust so total / I can almost touch it.’ Marine Cornuet’s translation deftly conveys Greki’s intimate language of the senses, to ‘transcribe with words what is done without them.’”
—Omar Berrada 

"How fitting that a bilingual edition of Anna Gréki’s poems should be published now: a French poet born in Algeria, anti-colonialist (imprisoned for that) as Algeria battled for independence, writing in French, like Kateb Yacine, to show her freedom from French hegemony, but also her freedom as a woman writer to forge a transcendent and engaged poetics."
—Marilyn Hacker

Foregoing the bad crowing puns to welcome Oliver Baez Bendorf, Jenny Johnson, Urayoán Noel, and Yesenia Montilla for an amazing night of poetry that you won’t want to sleep on.

Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster’s crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.

Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

“In poem after poem [Bendorf] builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more.” 
—Natalie Diaz 

“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside.” 
—Ross Gay

Joy in the Soft Apocalypse Literary Salon (volume IV)

Joy, laughter, fun, pleasure, beauty, excitement, and awe!

Volume FOUR!!

As we sit in the collective heartbreak of genocide, climate crisis and an evolving pandemic, we hold that imagination is a key componet of social justice. The work of writers, artists, and creatives of all kinds provides joy and clarity in this semi-apocalyptic world. Join us in loving community on Thursday, October 24th and leave feeling enlivened and inspired.

With AZ Nowell, Rob Weston, Grazi Ruzzante, Agustina Van Thienen, Mel King, Kat Schmidt, Kristine Chung Salcedo

Hosts

Kate McDonough is a queer non binary trans writer, organizer and performance artist. Their work explores the politics of place v. space and finding radical queer joy in the midst of an apocalypse. Originally from the Bronx, Kate lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA Creative Writing graduate from The New School

Kelby Clark is a poet and fiction writer, based in Brooklyn, NY but born and bred across the Hudson in New Jersey. Currently, she's pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. Her work explores topics of race and Black identity, as well as topics like the myth of suburban bliss. She also enjoys writing about and reading to her cat, Mowgli.

Teach-In on Daniel Jadue

hosted by NACLA and the Solidarity Research Center

Please join us for an in-person presentation and a collective watch party.

Daniel Jadue is a Palestinian former mayor of the immigrant suburb of Santiago, Chile: Recoleta. During his term, he implemented many radical reforms including setting up a people's university, libraries, and pharmacies that sold medication at cost. Sadly, he's the victim of a rightwing attack on his people's pharmacies and has been incarcerated since June 2024. He is currently under house arrest. 

You can read more about his case at the Corbyn project and the international solidarity campaign at the Municipalism Learning Series.

The goals of this teach-in are to bring attention to the radical municipalist initiatives Jadue implemented in Recoleta during his term, to bring attention to his unjust detention and incarceration, and to rally the global municipalist movement behind his case for freedom.

Invited Speakers on a Hybrid Panel:

• Rodrigo Hurtado, Universidad Abierto de Recoleta (people's university established by Jadue)

• People's pharmacy representative

• International solidarity committee representative

• Soledad Varela, Tricontinental Institute

• Lavinia Steinfort, Transnational Institute

• Kate Shea Baird, Fearless Cities

• George Ygarza, Municipalism Learning Series

If you are unable to make the event please watch the event from wherever you are :)

Seminario sobre Daniel Jadue
 
Daniel Jadue es un ex alcalde palestino del barrio de inmigrantes de Santiago, Chile: Recoleta. Durante su mandato, llevó a cabo muchas reformas radicales, como la creación de una universidad popular, bibliotecas y farmacias que vendían medicamentos a precio de coste. Lamentablemente, es víctima de un ataque de la derecha contra las farmacias de su pueblo y está encarcelado desde junio de 2024. 
 
Puedes leer más sobre su caso en https://thecorbynproject.com/news/solidarity-with-mayor-daniel-jadue/ y sobre la campaña de solidaridad internacional en https://municipalism.org/free-daniel-jadue/.
 
Los objetivos de este teach-in son llamar la atención sobre las iniciativas municipales radicales que Jadue implementó en Recoleta durante su mandato, poner de relieve su injusta detención y encarcelamiento, y reunir al movimiento municipalista mundial detrás de su caso por la libertad.

Stories from Rank-and-File Amazon Workers 

In Ibrahim Alsahary’s “The Iron Uprising,” robots and humans come together in common struggle… and in love. Cory Gluck’s “Thalia in Albios” depicts one woman’s journey through a dystopian future, from terrified housecleaner to fearless revolutionary. What could go wrong if scientists tried to artificially enhance the empathy that people have lost in an age of techno-isolation? In Dartagnan’s “Relentless” we find out.

In Anneth Chepkoech’s “Life After Amazon” a young migrant boy dreams of creating an online retail platform that respects and values workers like his father. Pearl Cecil Sigur Ramsey’s “ANYBODY HOME?” presents a podcast from the end of the world, where corporations can even exploit screams of rebellion.

Several writers chose to remain anonymous. “Forever on the Clock” tells the story of a worker who quits Amazon only to discover the prison where he is being held looks very familiar… In “The Dark Side of Convenience” workers are kept so busy working for Amazon they don’t realize the apocalypse the company is helping to create. After Amazon’s fall, a local ruler uses violence and fear to dominate the island of Zanjara. It’s up to his son to find “The Museum of Prime” and restore the balance.“New Entry” takes us to the far future, where humanity has found the source of infinite energy, but is not yet free from the power of propaganda…

These nine stories are accompanied by an introduction to the project and essays by the coordinating team. Max Haiven writes of the figure of the alien and workers’ experiences of alienation.Sarah Olutolameditates with W.E.B. Dubois on the power of words to change the world. Graeme Webb reframes speculative writing as a form of play that opens the radical imagination. And Xenia Benivolski reflects on how, in both Communist and Capitalist societies, speculative fiction gives rise to subversive dreams.

Max Haiven is a writer, teacher, and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). He led the Worker as Futurist Project, of which this book is a part.

Thanks to everyone that came out for the first two sessions of the Gathering Utopias reading group! Return or join us for the first time Friday Oct 11th at 7pm when we will be discussing N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” from How Long ‘til Black Future Month and Pinko’s “Analyzing the Limits of Accountability” from After Accountability.
⁣
These readings are part of Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. In conjunction with the upcoming Gathering Utopias concerts, we have planned a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary⁣. For more information visit Art Workers Inquiry
⁣
We previously read for session one: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements and for session two: José Esteban Muñoz’s “The Future is in the Present” from Cruising Utopias and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water sections 17.36 - 17.5. All events at The Word Is Change on 368 Tompkins Ave. Attend one or all!

Thanks to everyone that came out for the first session of the Gathering Utopias reading group! Return or join us for the first time Friday Oct 4th when we will be discussing José Esteban Muñoz’s “The Future is in the Present” from Cruising Utopias and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water sections 17.36 - 17.5.
⁣
These readings are part of Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future. In conjunction with the upcoming Gathering Utopias concerts, we have planned a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary⁣
⁣
We previously read Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. The last meeting is October 11 with readings TBA. All events at The Word Is Change on 368 Tompkins Ave. Attend one or all!

Julie & Elizabeth’s Anti-Capitalist Concert Series, which programs music and conversation to envision an anti-capitalist future, presents for the 2024-2025 season “Gathering Utopias.” In conjunction with the upcoming concerts, we invite you to a three-week reading group on the utopian imaginary. Beginning on Friday September 27 at 7:00 we will meet to discuss Ursula Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Evidence” from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Subsequent meetings are on Fridays, October 4 and October 11 with readings TBA. Feel free to attend one or all!

Jessica Pishko and John Ganz in conversation to launch

The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie” of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing. 

How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were “above the law?” What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?  

Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation’s founding. 

Praise for The Highest Law in the Land

“As this nation seeks to make sense of the alarming rise of far-right extremism as well as the excessive power and everyday abuses of law enforcement, Pishko’s latest study of American sheriffs is a startling must-read. As she makes clear, these threats to our democracy are inexorably connected—sharing not just insidious ideologies and ugly practices, but also extraordinary power and popularity. That local sheriffs drive this recent and most pressing danger is something that we overlook at our peril.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy

“Blending superb reportage and indispensable history, Jessica Pishko’s book could not be more timely. The Highest Law in the Land is essential reading for anyone concerned about the unbridled power of law enforcement in 21st Century America. An absolutely fascinating and harrowing read.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove 
 
“Eye-opening account of the modern-day American sheriff”—Linda Greenhouse for New York Review of Books

“It’s an intelligent, compelling narrative assaying the influences of toxic masculinity, gun culture and rural resentment, and the empowerment of sheriffs who declare themselves the ultimate arbiters of what is legal in their jurisdictions.”—Los Angeles Times, 30 Books to Read This Fall

“In her new book The Highest Law in the Land, Jessica Pishko shines a much needed spotlight on the right wing extremism brewing in Sheriff’s offices across the country and asks the tough question about whether we still need this inherently problematic institution.”—Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing 

Nat Raha // Kay Gabriel // LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Please join us for a night of poetry as we celebrate the publication of apparitions (nines) by Nat Raha with special guests Kay Gabriel and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.”
—CAConrad

“Describing and defying the murder of experimental gathering requires and allows syntactic variety, paratactic flare. What you can hear in Nat’s nonet9 is dressed to kill, extravagant, and spare. For all we’ve ever wanted, all we’ve ever needed is a weapon to share. In apparations / this is unconcealed, & open,, && laid bare. Seeing that we haven’t just been seeing things is rare”
—Fred Moten

“Like a sculptor releasing the figure from the stone, Nat Raha breaks and chips away at language to liberate and unleash the hidden, layered meanings that nest within the anguish that is english. Through the inherent restraint of the niner, apparitions both complicates and clarifies the contesting and lasting forces of empire, allowing us to “re/assemble[d] our/affections and solidarities/our cracked, efflorescent hands.”
—m. nourbeSe philip

“This is a book that imagines (and refuses to imagine) survival, in spaces that serrate recollection, that don’t require their occupants to be embodied subjects. Nat Raha is a brilliant writer who upholds and generates incompleteness as both ethics and terrain. Book as scream. Book as frequency. Here, in the book, we might ‘remember what we live.’ Not how.”
—Bhanu Kapil

Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities

Book Launch with
Sofya Aptekar,  Dana Morrison, and Jason Thomas Wozniak of The Coalition Against Campus Debt

“This outstanding book is a crystal-clear analysis of how and why higher education got captured by the finance industry. It's also the definitive guide for those who want to free themselves and their institutions from the sticky trap set by Wall Street.”
—Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal

Sofya Aptekar is an associate professor of urban studies at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the author of Green Card Soldier (MIT, 2023) and a delegate of the Professional Staff Congress.

Dana Morrison is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and chapter secretary of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties.

Jason Thomas Wozniak is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department, Coordinator of the Transformative Education and Social Change Program, and Co-Director of The Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (LAPES) at West Chester University. He is also a long-term organizer with Debt Collective.