Rosa Press Mega-Pack
This special Rosa Press mega-pack includes the full-length collections fag/hag by Max Fox and Madeline Lane-McKinley and Inferno by Andrew Brooks, plus the Black Series pamphlets. fag/hag is an epistolary book about crisis, friendship, and grief. Inferno, which reimagines Dante’s Hell in an age of raging bushfires and endless bureaucratic violence, suggests a way to get from one burning world to another. The pamphlets document solidarity and survival (across essay, memoir, and poetry) against torture and incarceration and within sex worker labour militancy.
Postage for the mega-pack is $8 for anywhere in Australia and $15 for anywhere else in the world.
Max Fox and Madeline Lane-McKinley, fag/hag
— Dear M, Love M
The heart of this book is a series of letters exchanged between two friends in 2020. Fox and Lane-McKinley found themselves unable to work on a book left unpublished at the death of their other friend, Christopher Chitty. Chitty is the author of the posthumously published Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, and was a committed organiser and comrade. In avoiding one book, Fox and Lane-McKinley came to write another through their conversation as it unfolded amidst Californian wildfires, the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, and the fascistic flares of white nationalism. And, of course, grief. Remembering Chitty became a way for the two friends to make sense of the sexual politics of the long 1990s, that interminable decade in which they both came of age, both became imprinted by intimacy and its prohibition. The fag/hag emerges in their letters as a relation, at once a promise of love outside the privatised family unit and something vulnerable to capture when made to sequester anxieties about sex, gender, and the future. Before and after the letters, there are two essays, one by each author, which chart the prehistory of their friendship and their respective entries into the fag/hag relation. Together the three pieces speak to each other, as Fox and Lane-McKinley do in their epistolary register, and as they both speak to Chitty, the beloved and staunch subject of the book’s apostrophic address.
Andrew Brooks, Inferno
— We listen to the disorganisation of organisation, where form becomes force. It was through this music that I came to the Hindu music of my maternal line. One collective chant giving rise to another, a backward path to an origin point where the origin is also a moment of dissolution.
Even in the depths of Hell, there’s an exit strategy, if only you can find a pal and something to jimmy the locks. Inside every version of the world that is burning down from the misery and appetite of capital, there is another world that is burning down from the love and rage of an assembly. This book, which reimagines Dante’s Hell in an age of raging bushfires and endless bureaucratic violence, suggests a way to get from one burning world to another. You need love, kimchi, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the promise of the other side. Brooks writes with a disarming breeziness, picking up embers and changing their course.
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.