from my email, from Calamari

 

For disobeying by sasha hawkins For disobeying is a metafictive take on the power dynamics of sexuality and the roles we as humans are expected to play, the directives we’re expected to obey, in seeking approval. By focusing a candid yet critical lens on Marlon Brando and other notable men, the author flips the script on gender, age, race, inheritance, and societal status, luridly exposing the mechanisms by which trauma and mental illness destroy and reinvent the concept of self. By inhabiting Brando’s body, the author replicates the dysphoria of abuse, cathartically acting out not only through the perspective of a lover and idol, but a father figure, a person of status, someone that has proudly given you a chance at a life, but at the same time resentful of the parts of themselves they see in you that they incestuously want back. We compassionately experience both sides of the sexual violence—recepient/victim and giver/aggressor—and through this bipolar method-acting we can cope and understand the bodies/roles given to us at birth, bodies that seek approval from figures other than their own. this abattoir is a college by orchid tierney The modern university is a factory that transforms knowledge workers into carcasses. We are cattle primed for the slaughter. Part poem and part poet’s novel, this abattoir is a college explores the hostile demands that higher education places upon capitalised bodies, upon students and faculty, whose common purposes are now brittle and pointless. If these institutions will never love you back, Tierney asks: can the knowledge worker foster a different collegial monster? Burn down the classroom, the poem replies, we can build an unreasonable college.  Calamari has also recently reissued Worsted by Garielle Lutz + A Question Mark Above the Sun by Kent Johnson.