Kim Koga, girlgirl

In “The Cannon,” Leslie Scalapino theorizes that “individuals in writing…may create a different syntax to articulate experience, as that is the only way experience occurs.” Kim Koga’s girlgirl responds, “Skinbag dragdrag a different grass lad,” as it forcefully cartwheels through radical use of anaphora, fragmentation, and clausal jamming to create a leaking, yolky vision of femininity that is both an embrace of and a rejoinder to Tiqqun’s Young-Girl, who “exemplifies all of the appropriate indifference…demanded by the conditions of metropolitan life.” An utterly adventurous work, Koga’s girlgirl “gets collapse” as urgently as it follows its lines of fantasy, where “girlgirl forge a nuvaring vaginal coin operated birth control machine.” Koga’s work is an indescribable reading experience that pulses with fluids, abjection, and moments of crystalline insight.

150 copies, $8 usd in so-called North America, $10 elsewhere.

Danielle LaFrance, Tentacle Rasa

If to be a subject is to be subjugated, then Danielle LaFrance’s latest chapbook suggests that we might find a way out of this state by plunging through murky depths, the mind working as a tentacled sex organ feeling through possibilities of desire, sovereignty, and communion. Tentacle Rasa seeks seeking when LaFrance asserts that “One moment this self is In & the next/ this self is Out,” putting the lie to the myth of the stable subject and showering the reader with “fuck words,” with a deluge that flushes through questions of devotion and the limits of ideology. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes that “being” is always a “being-with,” LaFrance utterly wrecks the borders between subjects but also between species, so that the self “smells of/ everything”: crisp air, pine, bear scat, smoke from the tracks, seaweed, oil, the bracken inky stew of erotic thought.

150 copies, $10 usd in so-called North America, $12 outside.