What I am Reading Now…
Sarah Shin
February 2025

We were catching desolate green jelly, gelatinous bile, in a sieve held under the drain, like when my mother lost an earring in the shower. It never materialised.

The alarm went off. Nuclear war had begun, and our lives changed. How to name the many causes of rupture and resulting splinters? The oracle said to spend time in the cracks, to dance in the silent zone, to stop the snapping into sense.

It was 22:22 when I slipped the key off the neck of the statue. In the museum of yellow light, the doorway leads to the place where stories don’t work anymore. Lifting into senselessness, only fragments can hold what happened: the brown heart beating out of its chest, my grandmother’s teeth wandering through the film, the fool walking off the edge.

Bruised and muddled, we practised clearing out the dirt, peeling back the tea leaves of the clairvoyant, radical elegy. Breaking open a spell involves welcoming all forms of oblivious autobiography, all hauntings, without exclusion. Let’s not return to normal: become who you are.

The temple exists in nocturnal space, queer returnity. Listen as you walk or wheel around (the meaning may or may not come later) the revival of a banned medieval art, the repair of ‘spacetimemattering’. Because, it meant something to someone, once. ​​Disguised as planets, it is the ancestors who cast the net.

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

Where have you been? Grandfather asks me,
his voice getting
weary of
plowing the thick, muddy
soil of language.
My arms are down, too tired to lift
even to say hi.

I’ve been pulling up buckets of water
from the camp’s well,
searching for words
for my epic.

How to Tell When We Will Die by Johanna Hedva

I don’t want to talk about healing unless we talk about never getting better and staying broken and what to do with all that hurt. I don’t want to talk about care unless we also talk about how messy and painful and unfillable is the hole that our needs make in us. Do not speak to me about self-care unless you also speak to me of revenge. Do not tell me to rid my house of the demons in the basement – where would they live if I kicked them out?

Fantasia by Nisha Ramayya

Onomatopoeia may pose a grave threat to diasporic experimentalism for these reasons and more. Kukūnana [poet gargles on stage]!!! At a dinner party in the mirror universe, we’re all played by fungi – beautiful, submarine, networked fungi – and a xenobiologist descends to catalogue us, channels our spore clouds, and eventually helps us converse. Our words and images tend to oscillate irregularly; what seems like blurriness from a distance is methodically bound up close.

L argues, the point at which sound reminds us of our corporeality is often the point at which sound is described as becoming noise.

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang

In my talk on revolutionary loneliness I reminded the audience that how we choose to interpret life and death is not neutral; interpretation itself is always strategic. Some interpretations are more politically and personally enabling than others. I think of this when I write my dream down in the morning. When I had this dream I thought, Here is the destroyed world, and here – beyond the threshold – is the luminous world. Simone Weil says that the greatest calamity is the destruction of a city. That’s where I was: walking through a destroyed city. But . . . the luminous tree!

Tuning Into The Quantum: A Vibrational Exchange Between Karen Barad And Black Quantum Futurism

Karen Barad: Matter in its essence – and this is precisely what is being contested and undone here – is radically queer and trans. It is constantly undoing and redoing itself, responding to all matters of yearning, to become otherwise. Matter on this account is a dynamic enfolding, an involution. It can’t help touching itself and in this self-touching it comes into contact with the infinite alterity that it is. The other is not the foreigner, but on the contrary, the stranger at home. Perhaps there’s something to learn from, and with that, a way to tap into an energetics of the otherwise in the thick now of an infinity of infinity of possibilities.