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Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive.

At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.

Sexology and Translation is the first study of the contemporaneous emergence of sexology in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Heike Bauer and her contributors—historians, literary and cultural critics, and translation scholars—address the intersections between sexuality and modernity in a range of contexts during the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. 

From feminist sexualities in modern Japan to Magnus Hirschfeld’s affective sexology, this book offers compelling new insights into how sexual ideas were formed in different contexts via a complex process of cultural negotiation. By focusing on issues of translation—the dynamic process by which ideas are produced and transmitted—the essays in Sexology and Translation provide an important corrective to the pervasive idea that sexuality is a “Western” construct that was transmitted around the world. 

This volume deepens understanding of how the intersections between national and transnational contexts, between science and culture, and between discourse and experience, shaped modern sexuality. 

By shifting the study of sexuality to focus on “sexual aim,” we can understand the birth of the sexual subject—the historical emergence of an understanding of sexuality as an aspect of personhood.

Is it possible that half of the organization of modern sexuality has been forgotten? Historians of sexuality have thought about sexual desire almost exclusively in terms of the sexual object—the person to whom one is attracted. This book offers a history and theory of “sexual aim”—the what and how of desire—arguing that aim furnishes a constitutive and almost wholly ignored governing logic of sexuality. 

The term “sexual aim” was coined by Sigmund Freud to describe “modes of gratification”—the sexual acts in which one finds pleasure, from kissing and copulation to voyeurism and fetishism. Benjamin Kahan repurposes this account to tell the complex story of how sexual aim catalyzed the formation of modern sexual identity and continues to operate as a powerful optic for understanding Euro-American sexualities.

Kahan focuses on nonnormative sexual aims, examining the histories of sadism, masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and fetishism in order to articulate the relationship between sexual acts and sexuality. Drawing on diaries, court records, erotica, literary texts, marriage manuals, and medical treatises, Kahan vividly maps the emergence of the sexual subject from the early modern period through the twentieth century to furnish a new account of sexual modernity.

These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.
 

Winner of the 2024 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize
 
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt’s So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. “Soon,” she says, “we’ll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.” In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt’s speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling “in their sweat-resistant fabrics,” “so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time”; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers “no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.” It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title’s idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, “& look at how lucky I’ve been, for so long.”

What does it mean to sustain a creative life over fifty years? Split Britches: Fifty Years On offers an intimate look at the enduring collaboration of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the artists behind the groundbreaking performance troupe Split Britches. The collection highlights Split Britches’ enduring queer and feminist legacies, tracing how their distinctive butch/femme lesbian aesthetic and collaborative performance practice have evolved over five decades and nearly thirty original productions. It foregrounds their shift toward increasingly autobiographical and introspective work, while also situating their later performances within key theatrical, historical, and critical frameworks–paying particular attention to issues of embodiment, aging, the archive, and queer temporality. Bringing together performance scripts, candid interviews, production photos, accessible essays, and video documentation, Split Britches: Fifty Years On demonstrates how Shaw and Weaver pull from the past in order to critique the present. For scholars, artists, and students, the volume's unique combination of primary texts, critical essays, and multimedia resources makes it an essential volume that considers theatre scholarship and practice, queer and feminist discourses, and the evolution of creativity with age and time.

A nonfiction work examining a confluence of bodily and worldwide transition

Stream is an exploration of the large- and small-scale changes taking place in a single body and on our planet as a whole. Using a stream as a biological, technological, and psychological metaphor, Angus layers lyric essay, journal entries, and the detritus of a life spent writing about the climate within and without to consider how we remain fluid in a time of constant change. Each section of Stream flows into the next, weaving through thaws, floods, cataracts, and eddies while asking how a melting of rigid categories, from seasons to gender, might help us approach a changing world anew. From winery workers dying in the fields to endangered desert tortoises unable to outrun the flames, Stream is an outpouring of climatological grief toward those who perpetuate inaction, an elegy for those we’ve lost to the heat, and a tribute to the tributaries that help us see the world from other perspectives.

About Sugar, David Orr has said: “Andrea Cohen’s ninth collection is elegantly precise—but this isn’t the precision of a meticulously arranged garden or tidy bookshelf. Rather, Cohen’s nimble, exacting lines are like guide ropes strung up the sides of an icy mountain: Her precision manages risk, and the risk leads to startling vistas. An entire relationship dynamic unfolds in the five monosyllables of ‘Proximity’: ‘She died / Of my wounds.’ In ‘Ghosting,’ the ambiguity of departure—the way in which lives and loves sometimes cease without concluding—is captured in all its shades of gray:  ‘Any ghost will / tell you— // the last thing / we mean // to do / is leave you.’ We sometimes think of poems as recreating experience, but Cohen’s work reminds us that poetry, at its most patient and compassionate, is also a way of discerning. Sugar brings us a step closer to the sun; it helps us to orient ourselves, but more than that, it helps us to see.”

She wanted to die. The universe—and her mother—had other plans.

Maldon is an adjunct literature instructor at a prestigious East Coast university, with a deteriorating heart condition and no insurance. She finds herself caught between the demands of her job and the needs of her body, triggering economic and emotional strains that cause her to fantasize about taking her own life. But Maldon, who has pledged to safeguard her mother ever since their arrival in the US on a refugee ship from postwar Vietnam, has vowed to forgo suicide for as long as her mother is living.

In time, her heart worsens rapidly, and she ventures cross-country to a place called Cloud for the operation that may save her life. In Cloud, Maldon is joined by old friend planet Neptune, who is hermaphroditic, peculiar, and has agreed to accompany Maldon through the operation.

Swimming with Dead Stars is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of our existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all.