Kawai Shen

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Practicing Another World On the conditions that make change feel possible

From my publisher, thoughts on art, resistance, community and ethics 💗

Thyme Travellers: A MW4P Reading Fundraiser Thyme Travellers: A MW4P Reading Fundraiser 📚🌱Join us on Thursday, March 12th at Articule (6282 Saint-Hubert) for a reading fundraiser for the Bridge of Solidarity, an anti-capitalist aid org in Gaza,...

For Montrealers: my former editor, H Felix Chau Bradley, will be reading from Thyme Travelers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction 🌌🌿 Details in 🔗

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd. Abstracted illustration of passive bodies and arrows violently strewn over the cover.

When the line between human and inhuman is drawn and redrawn by the hands that exercise power over you, there will never be enough proof. Nothing is actually being adjudicated, this paradigm is about control and domination.

I understand how painful and disorienting it is to have a career marked by carrots end with a stick. But if you believed grad degrees or thinky skills or valuable experience somehow exempted you from capitalist violence, you never really understood the reality you're living in...

Cover of Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature edited by Gaëtan Brulotte and John Philips.

Inconsistent levels of comprehensiveness depending on region but still useful for building themed reading lists, especially in French.

It seems to me that the loss of metaphorical/artistic skills, the kind of epistemic poverty we collectively accept as being advanced, is actually incredibly harmful to the integrity and meaning of empirical reality. Devaluing metaphor does not elevate the empirical, it degrades the empirical.

The skills necessary to work wisely with metaphor, to handle paradox and multiple shifting meanings, seem to have atrophied on a collective level. The loss of our ability to perceive and parse our reality wisely rests upon these skills. Our material survival rests on these skills.

Really wish that we'd recognize the importance of training ourselves to work w metaphorical/artistic/phenomenological truths instead of writing this off as "soft," frivolous, and subordinate to empirical truths. I fundamentally disagree with characterizing art as impractical 🧵

Cover of Putain by Nelly Arcan. Black and white photograph of a blond woman staring intensely into the camera, the eyeliner of one eye smeared and tracking down her face as though she's been crying.

Not an easy read for someone with shaky French. The sentences are so, so long. As well, the subject matter is heavy, esp given the context of the book's reception and how Arcan was treated by the press.

Installation titled Proof. An image formed by dots printed on strips of calculator paper, arranged almost like vertical blinds, forms the image of two crows among trees, one in flight. The last strip is still connected to a printing calculator on a table. Beside this, a flat screen rests on the floor screen-up, showing the same image.

Ground floor of Cafeteria, magenta neon lighting reflecting from the mirrored domes on the ceiling where rows of red Chinese lanterns hang. Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book is being projected onto the wall.

Mehdi Dandi at Cafeteria

Look Mom I'm a Hegelian E-girl On Lost Lambs, Flat Earth, and misogyny

It's lit criticism but imo this article by @emotrophywife.bsky.social also explains Praying (fashion brand) which also cashes in on a nakedly vapid kind of nihilism and perhaps does it better than the authors cited...

Cover of Hot Net Hotel: Comics from China's Alt Comics Scene, a comics anthology. A grid over which a colourful illustration of various sea creatures swim in close formation.

A full page panel by KKCIT's Hunger Breeds Discontent. An abstract figure rendered with melting, organic lines suggesting organs and fluids is seated at a table with plates and cups, holding chopsticks that pull at the skin of a dumpling. In type: I shouldn't eat but you smell good...

I forgot I'd backed the funding campaign for this amazing comics anthology by @paradisesystems.bsky.social - a pleasant surprize in my inbox!!

Hand holding cover of The Vermin issue 3. Red and ball image of a curled up NIN-esque Downward Spiral worm.

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C Magazine's latest call is for FILTH - more deets and rates for reviews in 🔗 and writers' guidelines cmagazine.com/events/call-...

My union is pretty much what is getting me through this 🤡 timeline

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"Wavering Futures is alive with precise physicality. Whether Shen is writing about a scene that doesn’t go as planned, piercing hooks into a sub’s chest, surfing the web in the 90s as its own physical space, or about the mosh pits of the past as somewhere “to create our own inverted worlds,” her writing engages the reader with visceral images and multiple pleasures. Impressive in its hybridity and multiplicity, Shen’s Wavering Futures reminds us we can create our own inverted worlds, ones we have agency in creating, ones where we can bask in pleasure, rather than the doomsday dystopian world we live in." - Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of knot body and The Good Arabs and winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2022

"Ecstatic? Nightmarish! Earnest? Scholarly! From the mosh pit to the bacchanal, the riverbank to the dungeon, Kawai Shen plots a rollercoaster course through apocalypse that all comes back to our middles. Climb on and let yourself hang upside down in Shen's vision, all her own." - Lee Suksi, author of The Nerves and Acting On You and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Erotica, 2021

More blurbs ✨

Also. When someone is laid off, please don't treat that person and their team like they caught the plague. Give them a moment and reach out. If you don't know what to say, you can search online for phrases but really, "I'm so sorry, I'm thinking of you, this must be really hard, etc" is decent.

My recent convos keep rapidly escalating from "Doing well thanks 🙂" to

"I'm still looking for work 😬"
"They're raising tuition I'm screwed 🤬"
"My coworker was let go, she was crying at her desk 😞"
"I keep breaking down worrying about layoffs and my bills 😭"

Kindness to anyone going thru it🖤

"Instead of lines of social propriety, I redrew my world according to baselines, coke lines, visible panty lines. I redefined my lifelines."

Cover of Wavering Futures by Xiaoxiao Li, intense watercolours from fiery orange to deep sea blue bleed into each other.

"Kawai Shen is my favorite agitator of revolutionary desire. Earnest in her angst and yearning, and alive to the possibilities that disorder and pain can open, her collection approaches big subjects from strikingly intimate angles, with vignettes as strangely satisfying as picking at a scab. Moving from teenage summer scenes, sparing yet sumptuous in their autoeroticism, to a meditation on the mosh pit social-politic, to bondage play and epistolary romance unfolding in a speculative fascist dystopia, Shen pursues her obsessions with such care and sureness I am a willing submissive, ready to follow wherever she goes." - Whitney Mallett, Founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing and co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey

Pre-orders for Wavering Futures, my debut book with @metatronpress.bsky.social, are open now🔥 metatron.press/shop/waverin...

Preorders OPEN: bedfellows split series v. 1! side 1: Candice Wuehle | The Confidence Artist (prose) // side 2: Phil Spotswood | The God of Knots

Pre-orders are open for the first volume of a new split series from @bedfellowsmag.bsky.social! 🍒

People often ask how you know when a piece of writing is finished and I'd say everyone's different but when looking at your work makes you want to puke out of exhaustion, it's probably done.

Metatron Press is ecstatic to announce Wavering Futures by Kawai Shen @kawaishen.bsky.social

A shape-shifting debut of fiction + essays on intimacy, collapse + desire—Wavering Futures imagines new ways of relating + resisting inside a trembling present.

Pre-Order → metatron.press/shop/waverin...

Yes indeed, but I've had some of my best nights out in London so exceptions must be made

Copy of The Whitney Review of New Writing issue 006 and Who's Afraid program.

Closed out the week with the lovely Who's Afraid reading series and am now looking forward to chilling with my fave magazine for lit reviews ❤️

The Malahat Review | Submission Guidelines The Malahat Review, established in 1967, is among Canada’s leading literary journals. Published quarterly, it features contemporary Canadian and international and contemporary works of poetry and…

From February 14th-28th—or until our submission cap is reached for the month—we'll be accepting international (including US) submissions in poetry, fiction, & creative nonfiction!

Canadian citizens & PRs are welcome to send us regular submissions from January 1st-June 30th.

Guidelines:

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the Hill...

Mini bouquet with faith roses, Minerva carnations, pink waxflower, mauve snapdragons, aubergine eucalyptus, red ilex berries, and red photinia.

💘❄️🌹 #winterblooms