Bored Wolves

On a spring-like, far-too-warm January morning, I happened upon the magic humpback snail between the pebbles of a small cove. The sea at the gulf stood still as an inland body of water, no meltemi to ripple its surface…

Combustion Suite doubles as rekindled refraction of Combustion, a piece by choreographer Wendy Osserman—Kresge’s “dance-mother” and kindred collaborator of decades—limited to a single performance due to the pandemic. The premature halt compelled Kresge, one of its dancers, to summon these poems from the experiential ash in which they held their breath.

Zine of ink drawings by Murat Cem Mengüç prompted by parallels between the Late Devonian mass extinction and our own accelerating Traumacene, a premeditated ecocide.

Joanna Burdzel’s collection Exorcisms: The Songs of Echo is a cycle of emancipatory spells of self-discovery in which the poet, alternating between scrying surfaces of English and Polish, weaves an escape from patriarchal traps. 

In her autobiographical photobook Running to the Sun, artist Antonina Gugała weaves images of moments in time paced to the clock of parenting (an alternately hustling or stalling mechanism) with capsular prose texts detailing motherhood envisioned and navigated through various forms of isolation and societal rupture. And all while molding an evolving identity as artist-researcher and mother-of-two attempting to balance generative practices of creation and caregiving.

The Edge of the Vessel at the Height of My Mouth gathers together twenty-five of artist Alicja Bielawska’s colored-pencil drawings of (jugs) (vases) (vessels) combined with self-reflective poetry and prose fragments about jugularity in her ceramics work—part of a constellated practice melding sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, and drawing.

Nourhan Maayouf’s I Was Going to Work is a hybrid sci-fi picture book by the Cairo-based artist, in which the proto-cyborg citizens of Happy Land Nation establish new-fashioned diurnal rhythms against the ever-present backdrop of a monorail to nowhere and its pillars, idle and idolatrous.

Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

e. irem az’ The Blond Daisy is a booklet composed of two multi-section poems, including the eponymous poem, about irem’s late grandmother, Zinet Tosun, and her Allah, at once universally boundless and simultaneously present in diurnal labor; and “perhaps it all started with,” which resurfaces smothering intergenerational trauma, zeroing in on domestic thresholds as simultaneously a seal but also potential escape route.

In Birthday Boy, the Italian poet and artist Marco Antonini constructs a cup-and-string phone between vulnerable adulthood and lingering childhood memories of eucalyptus, avocado (“which was edible: / the pit or the pulp?”), popcorn (ceiling), the boxes of mysterious moves, argent dust, and a loop of buckets of sudsy water sloshed into the gutter. 

Attuned to the moods of mud, lancing of light, and shivers of vine across the seasons, and with a healthy interest in the idiosyncrasies of his fellow allotmenteers, Rossiter adopts a typological approach softened by empathic curiosity. Throughout, he seeks to locate himself while reflecting on what it means to be a foreigner sinking hands into local soil.

“Told with spare, precise drawings, and a dark, subtle sense of humor, Cartoon Graveyard is a layered portrait of loss, memory, and devotion. The simplicity and slimness of this book are deceptive: there is a generosity to Joey Perr’s comics that invites the reader to settle in, stick around. It is always wonderful to spend time here.”
—Anna Wiener of the New Yorker

“Poetic and humorous, dreamy and stark, Cartoon Graveyard aches with tenderness as it articulates the experience of caretaking for a parent, and grasps toward the incomprehensible absurdity of loss.”
—Alex Tatarsky

I am not deep, although my eyes are, like a black sea that has been forgotten, as many have told me.

Noura Alsouma’s zine “Nawar’s Sketchbook” is a liquid lament by the Berlin-based Syrian visual artist and printmaker, riveted to eyes that see and therefore shed tears, channeling the heartfelt exposure of the sketchbooks Noura fills to the bleed.

With a moving text by the artist in the original Arabic, reproduced in her handwriting, as well as in English translation by Suja Sawafta.

Artist Felix Dahlström Persson’s Thermos zine is a collection of pencil drawings and tasty trail-tested recipes that you can smoosh into your thermos before setting off on a hike, including instructions for campsite steamed cod on herbs, cheesy peppery polenta, Porro e Pepe, fennel with hazelnuts, appearances of lascivious leek and surprisingly coquettish cauliflower, halloumi with cornichons, ajvar & co., flapjacks, pizza in parts, and the ambrosial Thermos Spritz. And all related in Felix’s mellow voice: “Start by boiling pasta like you used to do,” and, with generosity, “if it looks like it needs it, add more butter.”

Chris Fink’s collection of short prose, Forage Like a Bear, contains a whole lot: whistling acorns, scribbling clams, gossipy geese, technicolor ducks, turkeys (including human ones), roving bands of chipmunks, chimneys, fires, chainsaws, lice, thin ice, approximately 30,000 blueberries, cars rolling uphill, the leaves of a mulberry tree drifting down, Peace Trail meanders, and maybe just maybe, a holy grail morel.

And all related in Fink’s gently shimmed sentences, adapted from radio dispatches, and illustrated with the inky grace of John Porcellino.