B. Pladek

it’s definitely one of her balder rewritings of her own escape from Switzerland in 1940. very odd, brief, gestural, with a surrealist ending uncharacteristic of her novels generally

Visa for Avalon – Wesleyan University Press George Orwell meets Margaret Atwood in this stunning dystopian novelIn this chilling dystopian novel, four men and women attempt an escape to legendary Avalo...

thinking abt the awful Kansas news & how much Bryher hated personhood-legitimizing documents; she even wrote a dystopia satirizing how borders & bureaucracy kill called Visa for Avalon. gender borders, national borders; related violences.

this is just my Bryher dump thread now I guess

both a de facto mobility ban on trans people in Kansas--drive anywhere and risk arrest--and an easy way to incarcerate many people very quickly. only a few steps, now, behind the concentration camps where ICE/DHS is already imprisoning anyone non-white or undocumented.

Marquette picks AI expert as commencement speaker. Some students aren't happy. Students' concerns about picking an AI expert as speaker ranged from AI's environmental impacts to the elimination of entry-level jobs.

the kids (specifically at my place of employment) are all right

when even the edgelord barstool insta account is mocking your commencement speaker choice, you've made a grave error

I mean obviously it's a false binary; writing/communal good are not mutually exclusive. I'm immensely lucky to even get to handwring about this. but hours/energy/days-left-on-this-green-earth are real limits, even laying aside the drumbeat of capitalist productivity culture.

this year testing the small bright nugget of self-regard transitioning gave me, as I've written a great deal of stuff I love that no one will ever see. is it selfish to spend my energy writing when I could be doing more clear, actionable good for the world? idk.

Salutations In Search Of 1. Dear floaters, bloated kin. Dear flooded necks and reckless leapers manic for the flow. Though you are elegant in flight, your wrecks distress the ocean’s floor—the stark tableaus of sliding ski…

also this whole sonnet sequence:

"Dear someone who has chosen just to rust
instead of breathe—here’s how they lied to you:
Your child will keep on dying, and you must
keep punching play to watch him blue and blue
until he trends. Then he’s a photograph
who laughs at you and rips himself in half."

I feel like I’ve been collecting answers to the question "what good can poetry do?" for years now, as I think about it a lot and even wrote a historical novel (RIP never sold) kind of about it. It's striking how so many poets respond with some version of Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen." This is Smith's version, from the penultimate poem in her magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder: "On the F train in New York, a woman was set on fire. Click for the photo. She stands in the train car, sways like a bone-tired commuter, fully aflame, alone. It was decided that the controlled burn was best. All I am is poet. I am small, just one enfeebled fist, a whimper beneath the weight. I am seventy years of witness that poetry can change your life, but changes nothing else. No unleashed havoc calms to my quatrains, no ghazal coaxes our earth from her cliff's edge. I write because it's contrary to kill. Because anemone sounds the way it does. I write because George Floyd cried out for his dead mother. I write because she answered him."

The end of "Scars Poetica," the penultimate poem in Patricia Smith's magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:

feeling real feral here

tussling with draft thought: second-world SFF & free verse both require creating new structures to push against, & the challenge is to make them seem as rich as extant structures (real life; a sonnet) that arrive w histories/contexts full of friction. a magnificent sleight of hand, when done well

feels like we're in a similar moment in re: reckoning with the passing of the pre-internet, pre-social-media world (cf all the 80s-90s nostalgia) & I wonder how fantasy as a genre is responding or will respond, or if fantasy is even the genre to record that response.

in ROTK now & it's so striking (tho obvs not a new thought) what an artifact of modernism LOTR is, wrt its disillusionment & melancholy at lost ideals, "magic leaving the world" etc. fascinating how that modernist lament remained such a strong thread in early-mid c20 fantasy.

almost forgot her affection for "large fat cigar[s]". not what you'd call subtle

There's still time to kill these bills, Wisconsin:

I don’t doubt there were straps around but unfortunately the letters don’t discuss them. Only cringey psychoanalytic equivalences

not for display! more like assembling swords, knives, and aggressive dogs and then telling people XYZ object is “pure codpiece” or just straight up “penis”

there are a few choice Bryher vs. Pound anecdotes! In another, Pound tries to creep on Bryher at a party and she just stares silently at him until he’s so unsettled he leaves

right?? and I mean like of course, Bryher was the kind of transmasc who collected substitute cocks like it was a sport and referred to them as such in letters to literally Freud, there was no way it was not gonna be fencing

shit I totally mistyped this, it’s even better, it’s not tennis it’s FENCING

checking my references and discovered that Ezra Pound, whom Bryher hated, once tried to teach her tennis bc he’d taken 2 lessons from a random Italian guy this one time. She’d been playing since age 6 & wiped the floor with him.

we had them at our local indie theater for a screening and it was wild. there was cosplay and screaming. verdict is in, Wisconsin supports the boys

Beneath Ceaseless Skies - Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies by Natalia Theodoridou —she the ship recalls stories she never read of women and men in rivers weighed down their pockets full of stones she wonders at her cavities and hollows wonders am I an I am I my cargo does the I I a...

"Medusa's Ship, or the Thing About Bodies" is out now! Formally Experimental Greeks in Space, anyone? www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/medu...

@bcsmagazine.bsky.social also did an incredible job podcasting the story. Listen, I am in awe: www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/audio/bcs-35...

signed the contract today, so delighted to say this will be out in The Yale Review sometime maybe in 2027--a perfect fit for a piece whose goal is to beg trans scholars to visit Yale's Beinecke Library, which holds Bryher's (breathtakingly extensive) archives.

<3 thank you so much! I'm excited to make good on all this archival work

thank you! It's pending edits, so I don't want to say for sure, but I'm very grateful for the chance regardless. It feels surreal. I've read/thought so much about Bryher for the past 2 years; there's easily enough for a monograph (that I hope someone else writes).

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the mid-late 30s, a decade she spent doing a great deal of heartbreaking psychoanalysis to try & cure herself of--or at least explain--her lifelong belief that she was a boy trapped in a girl's body (her words, circa 1920). Using "her" because Bryher did, though if he'd been alive today he would have been an insufferable bro with a weightroom set-up & a despicable job in finance. At the very least he would have boxed & told you too much about it.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the 1930 Paul Robeson movie Borderline alongside Charlotte Arthur. They're standing in a bar. Bryher got a slouchy double-breasted coat situation happening, and Charlotte, in a wrinkled housecoat, is pretending to be, or is actually, smashed.

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.

I thought this was one of the scariest and most relevant stories I edited all 2025, so if you didn't read it then, be sure to read it now!

thank you! watching much of the AI-related awful in this story (which I wrote in 2023) happen in realtime has been very 🙃

"inevitable" is a word I've heard from so many colleagues in re: AI lately (& these are the good-faith ones; the craven ones are using it & lying abt it).

inevitable: what an attitude for this political moment, abt a tool so useful to fascists & so destructive to basically everything else