We’re excited to share our spring 2022 web series, REVOLUTIONARY FORMS! For this series, we sought hybrid pieces from writers whose work does not conform to traditional genre prescriptions. Award-winning writer Katie Farris describes hybrid forms as what allow the impossible to occur, to become possible. She continues: “Hybrid forms give us new ways to think and engage; they are specialty tools like the aye-aye’s crazy-long finger, formed to pull insect larva out of tree bark. They are investigative forms, revolutionary forms. They nourish what is strange in us.”
We selected work that pushes the boundaries of what language can do, and were particularly interested in centering works from BIPOC, trans, nonbinary, disabled, and other marginalized writers and artists who may embrace such alternative modes of expression to reimagine, recreate, subvert, and defy definition, boundary, possibility. Work that leans into its strangeness to access truth and provoke change. That investigates with a curious, free-spirited, disciplined eye. That makes us think and engage in unexpected, groundbreaking ways. That revolutionizes what we expect writing to be, look like, feel like.
revolutionary forms
Lucy Zhang
"Thoughts from a self-perceived hero" by Lucy Zhang
"Excerpt from a Conversation Where I Don't Come
Out in a 2006 Honda Odyssey" by Caroline Orth
Two Poems by Jenne Hsien Patrick
"Untitled" by grace (ge) gilbert
"memory map 1" by Kinsey Cantrell
Two Poems by Hannah Keziah Agustin
"Etymology of Latin American Nursery Rhymes" by Veronica Silva