Rosa Pamphlet Bundle (Black Series)
Second pamphlet series for Rosa Press: three softcover, pocket-sized titles from Tabitha Lean | Budhin Mingaan, Carlos Soto-Román, and Chelsea Hart sold as a single bundle. The pamphlets document solidarity and survival (across essay, memoir, and poetry) against torture and incarceration and within sex worker labour militancy. Postage for bundles is $4 for anywhere in Australia and $10 for anywhere else in the world.
Tabitha Lean | Budhin Mingaan, Four Scenes
— The prison industrial complex brings so much chaos into the lives of those caught in its clutches, while at the same time purporting to be concerned with maintaining the order and safety of the community.
Just not the whole community, unna?
In this pamphlet, which moves between memoir and poetry, Tabitha Lean | Budhin Mingaan addresses her reader directly. The ‘you’ who reads is asked, from the very beginning, to consider their relation to the carceral state and to the twin infrastructures of policing and prisons. There is no one untouched by the violence of the carceral state, by the violence of policing and prisons, whether as its beneficiary or its subject. And so in this pamphlet, readers are asked to take a position: to consent to the world as it is or to work collectively towards its destruction. Lean makes a powerful and urgent claim for abolition, driven by her lived experience of incarceration and her absolute commitment to the liberation of all those who remain inside.
Carlos Soto-Román, Alternative Set of Procedures
— Asked if the voice has forbidden her to answer / everything she was asked, she said: “I will not answer you that.”
Soto-Román works between documentary, lyric, and concrete poetry in an exploration of state-managed violence. The poems reproduce the horror of bureaucratic manuals detailing torture protocols, which often included the short- and long-term trauma that is the desired outcome. Against this horror, the poems index the spirit and force of refusal, survival, and autonomy — that which can never be contained, nor destroyed. The pamphlet continues Soto-Román’s longstanding practice of examining, with absolute clarity and conviction, the violence of statecraft and the fugitivity of poetry.
Chelsea Hart, With Love, and Labour
— We are naming the work to refuse respect for the work altogether.
In With Love, and Labour, which comprises a single poem-essay, Chelsea Hart offers a political economic account of sex work as work. This claim is not meant to reify work, for sex work is work and all work sucks, as she writes, citing a collective slogan of workers against work. Hart writes not just a theory of the labour of sex work but also a poem of the different ways that lineage — the passing of knowledge and the transmission of agency — can be read across the history of sex work and between generations of workers. Hart’s articulation of lineage emphasises the ambivalence of collectivity and solidarity forged under the sign of work: a labour of love, where love is synonymous with refusal.