Rosa Pamphlet Bundle (Red Series)
Inaugural pamphlet series for Rosa Press: three softcover, pocket-sized titles from Tom Melick, Sarah Rodigari, and Elena Gomez sold as a single bundle. The pamphlets read fatigue, desire, and communist treats across essay, collage, and poetry. Postage for bundles is free for anywhere in Australia, $5 for Aotearoa/New Zealand, and $10 for anywhere else in the world.
The Red Series pamphlets are sold out.
Tom Melick’s A little history of fatigue is available as a free download here.
Sarah Rodigari’s Pulp is available as a free download here.
Elena Gomez’s Crushed Silk is available download here.
Tom Melick, A little history of fatigue
— What if we read fatigue as an underhistory of labour? For if fatigue can be accumulated and properly felt, can it also be seized, shared, cherished?
In this essay, Tom Melick asks how fatigue became a disorder. When and how was exhaustion shaped by alienated labour, modern science and social reform? When did it become evidence of dysfunction? Following interconnected threads from science, philosophy, social theory, and psychology, this little history traces fatigue as both internal to, and a problem for, capitalist production, or as he writes: a little rock that never leaves the shoe. The essay asks what might be found if we think of fatigue as an affective state that protects us, in reclaimed moments or rapturous dissociation, from the incessant demands of work. Can we find each other in such a state, and plan for a more permanent escape?
Sarah Rodigari, Pulp
— young girls with no jobs and timid eyes; old girls with no jobs and telling eyes
In Pulp, Sarah Rodigari re-reads a stack of lesbian novels gleaned from trips to discount bins and secondhand bookshops. The pulp titles are read for their recurring preoccupations – jobs, bars, shops, jerks – and reimagined into short poems that explore queer desire and public feeling. Rodigari’s poetic intervention is in direct dialogue with the books’ covers (their cut-price stickers and silhouettes) and suggests an inventory of the pulp character’s passage through the city, through codes of intimacy and withdrawal, with and without shit jobs and shit bosses. The pulp character here is both a relic and a fantasy, a ghostly figure tugged free from its reference, or else, forever in search of its promise.
Elena Gomez, Crushed Silk
— I’m pretty / Sure you can light the fire at the base
In Crushed Silk, Elena Gomez continues to build a sensual archive of communist desire. What does it look like, feel like, taste like, on the other side? Or: What do we already look like, feel like, taste like, when we are together, or apart, or fighting, or hiding, in the glimpses of freedom that we find in the struggles that birthed us and that continue to sustain us? Gomez’s poetics holds close the minor, daily sensation of living across time and space, with hope and fury; it also lays bare the huge history that daily life produces as it swells and burns.