iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The parent, still child Is it Chaos Or Not Mac Crane (@mcrane12.bsky.social) Green Latitudes Rick Magee Holds Up When Shattered Merri Andrew (@merriandrew.bsky.social) kithbooks.com

Is it Chaos Or Not
Mac Crane
cover: parent and child share a skateboard as seen from waist height

Green Latitudes
Rick Magee
cover: a brown state park sign over a green topographical map

Holds Up When Shattered
Merri Andrew
cover: an open white expanse reflected in shattered glass

kith books
the literary home of the trans, Crip, and queer

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 19/10/2026

On building a body, a life, and a home 36 Views of My Breasts: A trans body memoir & What was eaten was given Wilhelmina "Billie" Sainwood (@billiewrites.bsky.social) Like Blood on a Dog's Teeth Nivik kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 16/10/2026

Stars, cards, and systems: we could all use help Pulp Prophet McCaela Prentice Sobriety Through the Major Arcana Christy Tending (@christytending.bsky.social) Prospectus of Ambient Wonders Matthew Burnside kithbooks.com

Pulp Prophet
McCaela Prentice
cover: a golden snake winds itself off of, and back onto, a purple field of stars

Sobriety Through the Major Arcana
Christy Tending
cover: a large hunk of amethyst sits on a tarot deck

Prospectus of Ambient Wonders
Matthew Burnside
cover: a brown capped mushroom as seen through a psychedelic aperture in tree bark

kith books
e literary home of the trans, Crip, & queer
kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 15/10/2026

you've got to get a little angry about it some of the time. with gasoline & salt box nat raum (@greatearlofhell.bsky.social ) Body, Dissected Ivi Hua kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 14/10/2026

in case you've been wanting an author's website and need the push

bluesky post from @KithBooks that reads:
sometimes someone (me) reads a poem of yours and wants to find more poems of yours but your bio lists only paywalled (physical) publications and has zero links/socials. make yourself findable. the goal is to be read.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 14/10/2026

Introspective and thoughtful: poems to chew over on as the shadows grow long The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh Darius Phelps Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth Adrian Frandle The Magi Come to Toronto E.G.N. Lafleur kithbooks.com the literary home of the trans, Crip, and queer

The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh
Darius Phelps
cover: a painting of dense strokes in black punctuated by a blinding spot of white light

Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth
Adrian Frandle
cover: the first T of extraction is replaced by a sword lodged hard in a tooth

The Magi Come to Toronto
E.G.N. Lafleur
cover: a bronze and red tapestry depicting angels and fleur-de-lis

Kith Books
the literary home of the trans, Crip, and queer

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 12/10/2026

Rebecca Wood (@bextatic.bsky.social) on Multimorbid with @robmclennan.bsky.social kithbooks.com/shop/p/multimorbid

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book Multimorbid just came out with kith books in May 2026 so I feel like the change is still unfolding. This collection is about the overwhelm of navigating multiple diagnoses, multiple doctors, multiple medications, all while immunocompromised and isolated. The experience of releasing this book has given me the opportunity to reflect on how my relationship to that overwhelm has changed. It has also revealed that writing a book is a great way to see what lessons I keep learning over and over again as I navigate chronic illness and the medical system.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 09/10/2026

"Janakiraman launches the reader into a trance of raw devotion" - Jaiden Geolingo (How to Migrate Ghosts) Bodies In Phototaxis R. Janakiraman kithbooks.com/shop/p/phototaxis

R. Janakiraman’s collection wrestles with what it means to persevere through our internal strife. With each singing and passion-brimmed poem, Bodies in Phototaxis is a collection of pure energy: epitomizing gender, sexuality, race, and history, Janakiraman launches the reader into a trance of raw devotion. Their collection serves as an almanac for teenage warfare, and there is no poem that does not fulfill the demand of looking into yourself and moving away—or towards—the light. Everything begs to rebel and secede at once. Everything in Bodies in Phototaxis is “splashing in this pool of love”. But as all prodigies do, Janakiraman acknowledges that this love will haunt the page, slowly transfiguring into a presence that follows the reader homeward. This is a collection that recognizes the religions that govern us. This is a collection for the keepsakes we want unearthed. This is a collection that knows how to love and lose.
— Jaiden Geolingo, author of How to Migrate Ghosts

LIPSTICK

lipstick

—after Ryhanna Mbakop

I’m sorry mother of my mother martyr in your mirror
gold tube clicking open somewhere in g.b. road a prostitute
swipes herself red in a red-light district
in a sex-stained country with sex-stained saris
and I laugh her same laugh, round teeth and mouth munching on secondhand silk
I press the bullet of color against
my mouth, drag it slow a blade over ripe fruit
my brown body split clean open and
pomegranate seeds I mean hundreds spill out of me my wrists spilling bangles
wet clatter on hardwood floors a boy and I wet clatter on hardwood floors
behind the ration shop clove gum cheap soap
and I wiped his mouth clean with my shirt
lipstick blooming shame across the hem
six years ago, amma nurses my split lip after it was dragged across the pavement
I bled the color from my mouth and kept running

I looked back up at her and her mouth
was the color of every war we could not win
six years later
I hold a conch up to my ear and she is singing
with her red lips

from Bodies in Phototaxis
by R. Janakiraman

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 08/10/2026

"The symptoms titled madness are so often strategies for survival. Our bodies clarify our ancestors' lifetimes. Pour water into an empty container; theory fills every space." Madness Belongs to the People Jody Chan www.brickbooks.ca/shop/madness...

Madness Belongs to the People
poems
Jody Chan
cover: a linocut or block style print depicting a fish, and the inner working of a cell in bands of black, yellow, and blue

Madness Is a Strategy

Before madness meant rage, it meant insanity. Gemædde: to be out of one's mind. Sharing a linguistic root with the Latin verb mutare: to change, to go, to move.

Anger derives from Old Norse angr, or: grief, sorrow, dis-tress, affliction. My life grew around what, within me, needed protection. Later, my life's vocabulary-to wing, to wild-grew incongruent with the script of normalcy-to work the clock, to write the cheques, post-dated, for rent.

Madness disturbs the book. Anger bubbles the page, blooms a gathering. A red breach. I tend to boil over. The place my madness knows as home: a low-pressure front, a reservoir of panic. A muscular humidity, threatening heat.

To the state, mass murder is a matter of economy. Years into a pandemic, masking becomes an uncommon accom-modation. Words interrupt, but they cannot solve. Nor an-ger alone, translated into bodies in the street. A call-and-

response of strategy and pragmatism is not sufficient. Language cannot replace movement, only approximate it.

I learned about anger in my father's house. Belts un-looped, blurred doorways in my dreams. He raised us to be obedient, not happy. I couldn't tell the difference. Doubt condenses into a myth about the self. Only time revised my understanding. Thermal shadow of a mother long dead. Her wayward frequencies.

Preverbal, as in: before language or memory. A contraction in the eyes. A hardening of the chest.

The symptoms titled madness are so often strategies for survival. Our bodies clarify our ancestors' lifetimes. Pour water into an empty container; theory fills every space.

My instinct is to nod, make small, tame breath. To scream on the inside only, wield a smile, optimize for labour, to leave the frame. In Chinese, the characters for happiness depict an open heart; sadness, a heart that's hurt. Energy, or passion: a hot heart, a heart on fire.

Many lineages connect power to one's core. Martial arts and qigong, taiko drumming. Silence spills with movement. Breath tells a story of what matters. What loosens it; what grinds it down. Madness is my structure of possibility. I don't mean this as a metaphor. I trust the people who have sat with me there, outside the world. Every day, I've handed them my life.

In madness, I am more porous-the task is to need others without consuming them. Sentences collapse into sound. Sound glows without meaning. My mind lights up, no longer self-contained. The world transpires, then continues to transpire. The doctors give up their jobs so they can take care of the people. The state administers language, but it doesn't know how to dance.

To build bonds that outlast periods of crisis, political parties, the constrictions of work and rent. Certain modes of relating can crack us open, write Clémence x. Clémentine. We are learning how to unleash our desires

to the point that they rupture with capital.

Madness cutting the noise, unwinding a signal for elsewhere.

If a riot is a feeling and a sound. I offer my language to my madness. My madness takes whatever it wants. My mouth, my memory, my movement, my breath. My body finds freedom in the places where semantics fall short. Squares the chest, stacks the shoulders. Arms linked against an oncoming police line. Vertebra by vertebra, bearing up, unfurling my spine into the sky.

A sound can become a feeling of power. Silence, the space for my breath to synchronize with yours. Madness is not contagious. When the music plays, my body moves of its own accord.

To live beside madness has required me to follow my body through my own cruelties. The silences I wielded at myself, my ex-lover. The knife I dragged through suicidal hours. A dissonance not forgotten, but knotted around me like a scarf. I am necessary, I am not special. Can I imagine growing old? Can I imagine being satisfied by my own life?

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 07/10/2026

new from kith! Bodies in Phototaxis R. Janakiraman October 27, 2026 Is It Chaos Or Not Mac Crane December 17, 2006 preorders are OPEN kithbooks.com

new from kith

Bodies in Phototaxis
R. Janakiraman
October 27, 2026
cover: a sketch of a face emerging from a chaos of sharp, short, black lines on a background of white

Is It Chaos Or Not
Mac Crane
December 17, 2006
cover: a parent's eye view looking down at the feet of the parent and child side by side on a skateboard

preorders are open
kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 06/10/2026

"when we first met, you were covered in blood & guts. i was wearing my Allen Iverson t-shirt for good luck." Is It Chaos Or Not Mac Crane Poems of queer love & family. A unique and affecting collection from @mcrane12.bsky.social & their child, age 3. preorders are OPEN! kithbooks.com/shop/p/chaos

Is It Chaos Or Not
Mac Crane
photograph of an adult and child on a skateboard from the perspective of the adult looking down.

TWO BODIES

I have two bodies &
I just want to love
you with them. I love the sunset
but the sun is getting away.
I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.
The moon comes up & it’s another
hooky day. An ant gets stuck
in the spider web/ he’s sad,
he just wants
his kid. You are a boobie trap
& I’m in a hurt mood. A foolish
man built a house
on your face.
(Holy shit, the house is a mess)
He spit up on me & you are
going to wipe it off.
Now I feel better,
let’s listen to the lovely sounds,
to the plants wilting.
Let’s deserve nothing.
I’m driving a boat & you can’t
catch me. I threw an orange
fish up in the sky.
It’s so full of love
my skull is in pieces.

Mac Crane
from Is It Chaos Or Not

WHY I REFUSE TO GET TOP SURGERY DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR

it’s 3 am & you have just had an accident on my head. that’s how we like to sleep: like two intersecting Jenga pieces. i carried you like a princess to the bathroom—you wouldn’t have it any other way. when we first met, you were covered in blood & guts. i was wearing my Allen Iverson t-shirt for good luck, the one where he’s stepping over Ty Lue like bitch, stay down. i needed to borrow some of that confidence. i was so nervous, i thought i might cover myself in guts just to match you. from your mom’s chest, you reached out & grabbed my pinky & it was over for me. people talk of walking through doors but it’s more like grand theft autoing a rocket ship. let’s get the fuck out of here, let’s lick the moon & see if it tastes as good as it looks. three years later & we are wrestling on the bed. you request that we win together. yeah, baby, together is all that i know. suddenly, we are inside a shark’s belly, tickling its insides, & we don’t want to escape. that’s all i want: a life i don’t want to escape. Dorothy Allison said, “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made.” i got some things to do. some tiny lives to make so the big one is the loved version. i got to make some phone calls, see some doctors, get poked & prodded. i got to shape-shift into a dolphin & jump through the hoops like a good boy. i know what i need to do but i keep stalling. six to eight weeks without picking you up when you’re sad or hurt or need me for no other reason than i am me & you are you. or or or: i can’t say it. my god. i’m not letting anyone carry you out but me.

Mac Crane
from Is It Chaos Or Not

Is It Chaos Or Not is a playful and incisive collaboration between Mac Crane and Wilder, who was, at the time of drafting, an inquisitive and insightful young child of three. Throughout the collection, Wilder speaks and Mac answers. Wilder, through snippets caught and reassembled; and Mac, through those reassemblies, and their own thoughts at hand.

Using the cut-up method, popularized by writers like William S. Burroughs, who believed the technique could uncover hidden meaning within even the most ordinary—or ideological—text, Mac is able to reveal something quiet and intimate: the higher truth embedded in the everyday language of a child. Through the attentive eyes of their parent, Wilder’s musings become at once political (“the cops are not nice / they do not dance”), psychological (“I’m cheering / for the blue team / there is no blue team”), surreal, and voicey—alive with the contradiction, intuition, and clarity of one opening their eyes on this world the first time.

Crane’s original poems act as subtle responses to Wilder, creating an ongoing exchange between parent and child; between curiosity and the fraught aspiration to have all the answers. Beneath it all, another layer emerges: the child’s language echoes, shaped, as it is, by previous conversations, questions, and explanations from the parent. The results is a dialogue that transcends, a recursive intimacy that mirrors and reflects each back to the other.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 06/10/2026

"Perfect reconstruction is sickening They are as weird science made them Imperfect wounds," - The Bride of Re-Animator and Frankenhooker Share a Cigarette Outside a Body Built Anonymous Group Meeting, K. Blair (@kblair.bsky.social) The Death of the Cult Classic kithbooks.com/shop/p/cultclassic

The Bride of Re-Animator and Frankenhooker Share a Cigarette
Outside a Body Built Anonymous Group Meeting

The light spills across mismatched skin
like a shattered wine bottle
Chests rising but their breath
doesn’tcan't fog
Elizabeth keeps giving off sparks
GloriaMeg doesn’t mind
What is a girl anyway but
a series of misfiring synapses?
A passerby slurs that they’re not
dressed for the weather
They laugh, both victim to
someone else's
malfunctioning circulatory system
The meeting will start soon
Others with similar stitches
have taken seats in the semi-circle
Put packet sugar in tar black coffee
if they can stomach it
They'll talk about adjustment
They'll talk about personhood
They'll talk about the dealing with decay
Perfect reconstruction is sickening
They are as weird science made them
Imperfect wounds, defunct tissue
Susceptible to muscle memory
twitch glitching
different parts recall those last sensations
the imprint of lipstick on gauze
GloriaMeg wishes
Elizabeth would touch her sutures
excite new pleasures in old flesh
expand the definition
of coming apart at the seams

K. Blair from The Death of the Cult Classic

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 06/10/2026

today's log off and read suggestion: The Living Realm by Jordan Tannahill a gorgeous, if heartbreaking, examination of queer aging and grief app.thestorygraph.com/books/fbeccc...

The Living Realm
Jordan Tannahill
cover: a watery photo of white, blue, and green

Teufelssee had never once lost its water in the centuries since humans had begun keeping records of such things. What was a century to a lake, though, but a flicker of light? Teufelssee belonged to deep time, geological time, a great shard of ice calved from the tongue of a retreating glacier, left to slowly melt, carving a kettlehole into the substrata two hectares in area, with no inflow or outflow, no stream, no aquifer, the meltwater gradually replaced by twenty thousand years of rain. The lake was now a sanctuary for herons and cranes, and the nude bathers who visited throughout the summer, reclining on their blankets and towels in the sloping meadow along the southern bank, hidden deep within the Grunewald, the forest that lay at the edge of Berlin like its shadow. My waterproof Timex once slipped from my wrist as I ventured out into the middle of the lake with Birgit, and however much I fumbled after it, the watch sank from my grasp, down past schools of unbothered bitterlings. For years after, I would imagine the digital numbers counting with diligence the passage of seconds, minutes, hours in the cold dark. This summer Gabor, Birgit, and I took near-daily refuge at Teufelssee, a summer that was singular not only for the drought but for a series of strange and unaccountable occurrences at the lake to which I alone seemed to bear witness.

As I let the forest fuck me, I began to slip from the hook of myself, a dog in the sandpit, a seed spread on the wind, an untamed weed, I felt escaped, taken to the very brink of what my body could endure. I felt my awareness of all things around me sharpen, the seven million distinguishable colors of my human sight, the half million tones of my hearing, I was utterly permeable, with no distinction between my body, Lukas's, the earth, a moss-engorged log moldering back into the soil, every being that had ever nourished it with their body, the mystery was here all along, I had always been part of it, the immanence of all things, a raking light, lifting, alighting a lake a lack at last the moment in which we might rise and meet our-selves and know no there is no God heaven is here eternal life is what you are already part of you die you disperse what was you is reconstituted countless entities just as you have already been the pond the scum the sediment the dust in the light-shafts the gradual accretion of pollen spectra an ancient border of boreal birch phases pine phases larches spruce and alder phases the reeds the crane all time is in play all things unfolding at once every moment the same all of time pouring out and back into itself-

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 03/10/2026

"It's all softness and it burns." - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PAST LIFE, Ian Lark Miller @echosequence.space otherspaces.bandcamp.com/merch/ian-la...

Waking Palm
Ian Lark Miller

a line drawing on yellow paper of a three panel grid depicting a walking palm in full, the same again smaller, and a close up of its roots

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PAST LIFE

Guess it was different in the first draft,
rough draft, maybe,
like the callus that I used to get
from holding pens too tightly,
wrong.
Rub thumb to middle finger, feel
the way it's carried with me.
What was I digging for?
Not potatoes-I'm no Heaney-
no clean rasping or cool hardness.
Some people excavate themselves.
There's nothing clean about it.
It's all softness
and it burns.

Ian Lark Miller
from Walking Palm

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 02/10/2026

I'm incredibly proud to have played a part in bringing both of these books to fruition. A devotional to the imperfect mother & disabled poems that force eyes on the real. Phelps & Wood give us empathy in action—the true work of kith.

Congratulations
CLMP Firecracker Award Nominees

The Holy Ghost Lives in Her Laugh
Darius Phelps
cover: a near black graphite drawing with on glowing point of reflection, a light in the dark

Multimorbid
Rebecca Wood
cover: a cross stitched hoop that talks Multimorbid writing a wreath of purple flowers and green leaves

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 30/09/2026

"Date idea: choose any local stagnant fountain and I'll take us to the bottom, skate your fingers through the sludge (my mouth on your wrist)" - Pond Bitch, Jenna Jaco @jennajaco.bsky.social kithbooks.com/shop/p/mallwater

A pale blue washed photo taken from the Queen Street entrance of the Eaton Centre in Toronto is slashed at a diagonal by a red band with pink and yellow accents that reads "MALL WATER" in white. A smaller rectangle of red lies near the bottom right reading "Jenna Jaco"

Huge For Me

Mostly asleep I catch my wrist
flipping itself out again into the
space between blanket and
pillow, leading with my thumb,
the first two fingers extended.
A Seinfeldian gesture, complaining?
Pleading? Or Adam, reaching for
the DILFy hand of God? I undo it

but there it goes again. We
spar like this until the curtain
edges glow. When I wake up
this time I don’t scramble for
the thread. I don’t try to remember
who I was making my case to
and whether or not they bought it.
I no longer explain myself,

but if you wanted to do it for me:
Tell them I’m doing fine. Tell them
the museum docents know me,
that the end of the month holds
me close, that I like cucumbers now.
Tell them I'm not the man they
think I am at home, I'm hotter.
And you do, and they buy it.

Mall Water
Jenna Jaco

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 30/09/2026

The Mermaid Speaks of Social Justice from the Bathtub Nico Martinez Nocito strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

kelp patches do little to repair
a torn scale when, every morning,
you swim past the jagged outcropping
that snares it daily.

And on land, I say,
as she squirms against the narrow confines,
and massages the dark sores where my net snagged her tail,
there is more money to be acquired by displaying mermaids
than performing undersea maintenance.
People have come to expect an attraction,
something they can’t see anywhere else—
if I can’t give them that,
how am I meant to survive?

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 30/09/2026

calling my doctors to the carpet in my best teacher voice: who's ready for a story? let's learn about sloths.

Finally, after months and months of despair, Emma gave up. Fine, she’d climb a damn tree, just to shut people up. She found one in her parents' backyard and started to pull herself up, her claws acting as hooks. It was surprisingly easy, and it felt weirdly good. Unlike trying to do dishes, her body was made for this. She hung by her claws off a branch and took the best nap she’d had in months.

It was hard to wrap her head around, if she were honest. Serious people did not climb trees. Serious people weren’t sloths, right? And it was unbelievably weird, and if there was one thing she wasn’t, it was weird. But it felt so good.

The next month she climbed up again, and spent the night.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 29/09/2026

Bodies in Phototaxis wants and wants, and in wanting, Janakiraman recognizes a core disappointment: the quiet sadness of a life imagined as another. Bodies in Phototaxis mines past and present, unveiling a sun-soaked and grieving trans Tamil now. kithbooks.com/shop/p/phototaxis

Bodies in Phototaxis
R. Janakiraman
A face emerges from a chaos of choppy black lines on white.

Pre-orders are OPEN
OUT October 27th

lipstick
—after Ryhanna Mbakop

I’m sorry mother of my mother martyr in your mirror
gold tube clicking open somewhere in g.b. road a prostitute
swipes herself red in a red-light district
in a sex-stained country with sex-stained saris
and I laugh her same laugh, round teeth and mouth munching on secondhand silk
I press the bullet of color against
my mouth, drag it slow a blade over ripe fruit
my brown body split clean open and
pomegranate seeds I mean hundreds spill out of me my wrists spilling bangles
wet clatter on hardwood floors a boy and I wet clatter on hardwood floors
behind the ration shop clove gum cheap soap
and I wiped his mouth clean with my shirt
lipstick blooming shame across the hem
six years ago, amma nurses my split lip after it was dragged across the pavement
I bled the color from my mouth and kept running
I looked back up at her and her mouth
was the color of every war we could not win
six years later
I hold a conch up to my ear and she is singing
with her red lips

R. Janakiraman
Bodies in Phototaxis
kithbooks.com

ADVANCE PRAISE

"Janakiraman’s debut collection, Bodies in Phototaxis, immediately activates ideas of light (as the titular phenomenon, ‘phototaxis,’ implies), through self-clarifications and revelations. Janakiraman’s poetic obsessions span grammatical structures and functions, gender, romance, race, religion, and the body. The light graces all of these things—not just through mere existence, but also through stubborn insistence: “he crushes a slant of light into my lap,” Janakiraman writes, showing how occurrences of light come from the intimacy of the viscera because we make it, we absorb it, and we release it. One line begins, “There is a sin in wanting.” Through this expression of want, Janakiraman has proven to be an incredibly thoughtful poet: this debut demands the light to shine on it, showcasing the rawest form of desire and (un-)fulfillment one can encounter."
— Aldrin Badiola, Editor-in-Chief of Artists from Maryland

R. Janakiraman
Bodies in Phototaxis
kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 28/09/2026

i, the girl turned mockingbird. opening my beak and spilling untruths— - mouth & throat Vivid and drenched in the language of longing, this collection will be familiar to anyone whose sense of settled in their own skin came on fitful and slow. www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/bodyd...

Body, Dissected
Ivi Hua
cover: Cyanotype image of what looks to be flowers under a gathered gauzy fabric. The colours are white for the flowers, green for the leaves, a grey-pink for other flowers, and the background and overall wash of blue.
The tile and author's name appear in a white serif font.

kithbooks.com

light

after philip metres
dusk, night emptying
& pouring. horizon aflame
punctured. blazing, set alight.
my head, heart, swelling,
cresting & folding in waves
ephemeral. skin pulled
taut stretched scarred. oceans
boiled & pure down my
openmouthed
esophagus. the sky made sweeter
in clouded eyes.
all i wanted all i craved
was light.
could i recapture snag &
trap that justice, the perception?
only something tangible,
thorned, scarring my throat
could have held me
down.

Body, Dissected
Ivi Hua

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 25/09/2026

"The State of Israel is founded on mythology, and a myth is an incredibly powerful thing...the myths we tell about ourselves, about our communities, and about others, have the capacity to give life or to take it..." ...AND THIS WOULD BE MOSHIACH Leo Rose Rodriguez www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/moshi...

...and this would be Moshiach
Leo Rose Rodriguez

cover: an olive tree rendered in white and green on a background of black with red text

kithbooks.com

Hagar

And the messenger of G-d said to her, "I will greatly increase your offspring, And they shall be too many to count."

Genesis 16:10

Like a yoke over a cow's neck came
the touch of Abram
over Hagar's body
the woman given
as a clay pot from her mistress Sarai's wares
to be broken open and sealed wetly
together
vessel of uncountable stars

The stain
that grew
with passing weeks
of Sarai's hand
that brought him over her
The kicking momento of Hagar's
choked submission
The mistress
put on hatred as a veil
to shield from the whipping sand
that threatened a confession of tears

Hagar's daughters run
through rubble
bleeding-soled
heavy-wombed
delirious
breasts empty husks
their children gnaw on

Hagar's daughters
having worked a miracle
of nine months
bombs silencing birth cries
medical tent battered
watch the soft-boned legs
shrink
like fruit
hollowed
from the inside.
When Hagar ran from her mistress
she collapsed at the edge
of a spring
mouth full of sand eyes full of salt
tears dried by the desert
Her daughters run
from Sarai's
bullet-hearted heiresses
mouth and eyes bleeding phosphorus

Daughters of Hagar, may you too have an angel waiting.

...and this would be Moshiach
Leo Rose Rodriguez

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 25/09/2026

congrats to kith's 2026 Lammy Award nominees! kithbooks.com/shop

Congratulations 2026 Lammy Award Nominees

Direct Address
Robin Arble

The Death of the Cult Classic
K. Blair

36 Views of My Breasts: A trans body memoir
Billie Sainwood

Like Blood on a Dog's Teeth
Nivik

Another double text
K Angel

kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 25/09/2026

i'm not afraid of dying i'm afraid of dying & not staying dead. i'm afraid of spontaneous human combustion & i'm afraid of proving myself right. i'm afraid of the mess that's been made of my thoughts. - INWARDS / INNARDS, @drdissociation.bsky.social www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/prymeopen

here i am, pry me open
Atlas St. Cloud

cover: cropped section of a sepia toned painting depicting the wound in Christ's side

kithbooks.com

$IN WHICH WE ALLIGATOR DEATH ROLL MY SELF ESTEEM THERE ISN'T A LOT OF TIME LEFT TO SAY NOTHING WORLD GOING CATASTROPHIC - I WANT YOUR HANDS IN MINE =+=+=+= ALWAYS CONVINCED I'M OVERSTEPPING/OVERSAYING/OVERSHARING TOSS ME IN WITH THE LIGHTNING RODS / I NEED ANOTHER HIT OF ADRENALINE GOTTA CONVINCE MYSELF EVERYTHING I SAY ISN'T TAKEN IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY }}}}}}}}{ HUNGRY WITH A WANT SO SELFISH }}}}}}}}{ CLOUDS FOG MY REFLECTION\SHOW ME YOU LOVE ME HELP ME BELIEVE IT here i am, pry me open Atlas St. Cloud kithbooks.com$

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 21/09/2026

"There's more light on this small, selfish island than you'll ever see in a penny. The first cold day in September opens nothing and everything." Light Years Grace Q. Song www.graceqsong.com/publications

Grace Q. Song

Light-Years

I'm so bad at life and love men. Yesterday I bought too many onions from Morton Williams. I forgot plans

for lunch, and then it was all over, right there at noon. The truth is I'll take compliments from anyone

like handfuls of candy. And I'm not emotionally capable of leaving the supermarket with a receipt of my life,

even if it's the right thing to do. Jordan says it's wrong to sleep at eleven. But I am very lonely

and love sparrows fat as cupcakes. I accept the filth and sirens of the city because a poem is waiting inside

whenever I take the 1 downtown. On the longest night of the year, I told myself that nothing would hurt

as much as this. Not even the truth, stuck under the rib of my lung like a lost, hard chord. There's more light

on this small, selfish island than you'll ever see in a penny. The first cold day in September

opens nothing and everything.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 21/09/2026

my current reads are a real chipper shot chaser tl:dr Less is More - walks you through the historical and philosophical origins of capitalism and offers a path for killing it dead Waste Wars - your 'recycling' is the global south's trash The Castle - men are increasingly fucked up and sad

Less is More: How degrowth will save the world
Jason Hickel

Waste Wars: The wild afterlife of your trash
Alexander Clapp

The Castle: Adventure in a world of unraveling men
Jon Ronson

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 21/09/2026

My plan for marriage was courage the way a plane lands by sinking - My Plan For Marriage, @merriandrew.bsky.social Holds Up When Shattered writes into the hard rush of insecurity and disorientation that floods in as childhood's left behind. kithbooks.com/shop/p/shattered

$Holds Up When Shattered Merri Andrew A close up photo of glass fracturing out from an impact point near the center top of the image. The reflected image shows the interior of a parking structure painted white with sporadic graffiti in black and red. A banner of robin's egg blue spans the bottom of the cover bearing the title and author's name in very dark brown.$

My Plan For Marriage

My plan for marriage
was courage
the way a plane
lands by sinking
then with a rush of strength
flexes to kiss the tarmac
as an equal
a drama soon forgotten
as we wait to see
whose luggage is whose
looping round the lucky horseshoe
magnet pull of what will emerge
and what must be swallowed again
whole
but when I’m nearly asleep
and my hand starts
to fall from his shoulder
and I wake sick once more
with knowing I’m still
not the person I want to be
not someone who holds on
instinctively like a baby
or an animal
or a baby animal
not someone who falls asleep
and lets go
and it means
nothing
is it not a kind of courage
to lift the curse, my hand
and place it on the sheet
between us?

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 18/09/2026

"Say a prayer for the house on fire and the father who started it." Dirt Roads & night drives course through this chapbook—each page a chance to hold speed, or stop. Mothers & fathers & the bare earth that birthed us. What goes & what carries. What grows into you? kithbooks.com/shop/p/beastcountry

Beast Country - K. Christopherson

A grey and black tinted image of densely intertwined branches crossed horizontally near the bottom with a red band bearing the title in all caps black text above a black band reading K. Christopherson in grey all caps.

MY OLD MAN

My old man hates the dry heat, his lips
stick to tobacco-stained teeth, speaks of
days that are dead to
everyone except him.

The bodies never belonged to him, but
he digs ‘em up anyway.
“You find your city of gold,” he says.
“I’ll lay claim to the wasteland.”
None of the corpses look like her—
worms crawling through the eye sockets,
bodies surrendered to the dirt.

Say a prayer for the house on fire
and the father who started it.

He tells me, “Stay out of trouble, boy.”
Really, he doesn’t mean it.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 17/09/2026

“You’re an animal. We’re all animals. Even you, son.” Lewis is headed to the Painted Rocks with three fellow aspiring Eagle Scouts and troubled Scoutmaster Ben. Alcoholism, internalized homophobia, and big open water: a recipe for disaster. Will he survive? kithbooks.com/shop/p/paintedrocks

Painted Rocks
Parker Wilson
cover: A greyscale photo of the author in his boy scout's uniform, hand on hip, turned slightly to the viewer's right, with the head of an alligator graffitied in black marker obscuring his head.

The roar of the fire doubled in the silence that overtook camp. Its turbulence, louder from a whipping wind, drowned out the pops and cracks from steam released by the fibers of burning wood. The wind died; the fire turned its talking to a whisper. Ben held the mug with Jack Daniel’s in his hand. Rhys knew what was in it. It needed to be drunk, but it couldn’t be drunk in front of the scouts. Not now. Lewis could have kept his spirits upbeat if it weren’t for the renewed tension that seemed to wind tighter around a fire spiraling in on itself like a gear, pulling all of them inward, one slow-turning notch at a time.

Painted Rocks
Parker Wilson
kithbooks.com

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 16/09/2026

"It was in the winter of 1876 that I arrived at Dreadwood Estate..." As worrisome messages begin to arrive in the snow outside without explanation, Sabrina begins to suspect there may be more to Dreadwood and her cousins than she understands. @writerlcarter.bsky.social kithbooks.com/shop

A Haunting Most Cold
Lauren Carter

A stately house in the Victorian style nestled in trees and laden with snow. The title and author's name appear in a large gothic script. The image is rendered in shades of white and teal.

“You do not need to hover. Not here,” a voice called out before I made up my mind. “Do come in.”
I slowly opened the door to a cupboard room with no windows and only a desk pressed against the opposite wall. The voice was coming from the figure with his back to me. Quillon, back hunch over writing, was sat at the desk.
He turned his head and I could see a quarter of a smile. “What brings you to my writing desk at this hour?”
“I apologise for disturbing you,” I said, wishing I had stayed in bed.
He turned back and shook his head. “Come, I told you. You need not hover, come in.”
Come where? I thought, looking around at the small space. I inched close enough to Quillon to peer down.
“I am a novelist,” he explained. “This is book seven, I believe. You are welcome to read it in its entirety once it’s finished. It’ll be nice to have another set of eyes other than my brother’s.”
“Where is Avenal? In his room?”
Quillon shook his head again. “He’s likely on the ground floor.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
He stopped writing for a moment. “We have trouble with it, as you can imagine.”
"I can."

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 11/09/2026

lately, I've been trying very hard not to start my poems the same way I always do- this is what it feels like this is what it looks like- this is how- - BONES, envy in the form of four years of screaming @bonesandpoetry.bsky.social www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/maybe...

graphite drawings of four sections of bone on a background of parchment with handwritten all caps text reading 'MAYBE JUST THIS." and "BONES"

$this morning, january, forever small sharp knives wind-driven caressing red cheeks tender cold glass air inhaled, gently filling irritated lungs opaque sky clouding vision tiny white stars, whirling fractal winter blanketing asphalt an icy, quiet sleep gusts of white stirred by motion a dance, jubilation numbness in the flesh slow-motion, sluggish a warmth behind the ribs kindness, between the snow nothing will ever compare windy and sharp and bitter, bitter cold and warm inside, anyway i'm falling in love all over again$

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 11/09/2026

Big congrats to Jamez Terry! grief poet, reverend, and devoted zinester See You In the Mail (out yesterday!) is your perfect last soft summer read

See You In the Mail
Jamez Terry

cover: a man is seen checking his mailbox while another reads a letter

"I am absolutely enamored with this book. A tender tribute to zine culture and punk community, it is accordingly a meditation on creativity, queerness, and slowing down enough to appreciate not just love through snail mail but all the small, beautiful details of our world. I never wanted to leave its soft, inspiring embrace."
-ANITA KELLY, author of Something Wild & Wonderful

As long as Greg has a typewriter, strong coffee, and a pocket full of postage stamps, he's alright with the world. His zine, LONG WALKS ON THE BEACH, parodies Craigslist personal ads an ode to the sweet absurdity of public declarations of desire. But hidden somewhere in each issue, there's one quiet ad that reveals something of Greg's actual self. No one has ever found him there. Until a letter arrives from a reader called "M."

Their correspondence swiftly becomes the most honest relationship Greg has ever had, but M, a musician, seems to retreat when Greg suggests they meet. As Greg gets closer to the truth, he's forced to confront the walls around his own heart. Set in the halls of mid-2000's zine festivals, at underground music venues, and on the rocky, moody coast of Maine, See You in the Mail is a feel-good queer romance about the radical intimacy of being truly seen.

"A slow-burn love story about falling for someone who really sees you.

Beautifully intimate and inventive."

-KIRKUS REVIEWS

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 10/09/2026

Two scientists plan a coffee date with decidedly mixed results… A precocious young man turns to forbidden magic to medicate his chronic illness… One resurrection man contends with the most important body of all… YOU ARE NOT YOUR BONES @allyscottauthor.bsky.social www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/youar...

You Are Not Your Bone & Lesser Misfortunes
Alice Scott
Volo, the main character of the titular story, stands in front of a window, the light of a full moon revealing their bones.

“So. Mr. Pacey, I’m here to offer you an opportunity. I can let you continue on the…trajectory you’re currently on, and who knows? Maybe you manage to grab the window frame and stop your fall, though it would be quite impressive for a man as drunk as you. So. You could keep going with your life, however short that may be, or you can join me and become the thing that lurks in the dark, if you so desire. You’ll have access to places you could never imagine."
- The Killing of Christian Pacey

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 10/09/2026

"While I fear the destruction Trump and his oligarch co-conspirators will impose...the greater threat is that our descent into tech fascism will be spearheaded by liberal politicians who, co-opted and corrupted by Silicon Valley money, will abandon democracy without much of a fight." @gilduran.com

While I fear the destruction Trump and his oligarch co-conspirators will impose over the next few years, the greater threat is that our descent into tech fascism will be spearheaded by liberal politicians who, co-opted and corrupted by Silicon Valley money, will abandon democracy without much of a fight. Trump is a symptom of a far greater disease in our system, a disease that will continue to grow and metastasize after he dies. The billionaires of Silicon Valley have a plan to succeed. They understand that a political system dependent on checks from wealthy corporations and individuals is inherently tilted in their favor. They seek to innovate this corruption: to buy the levers of democracy and use them to destroy the entire system. This is the logical end point of the predicament. The survival of the United States has relied on a delicate balance of powers, and that balance has now been tested. It has failed catastrophically, exposing a major flaw in systems that have proven shockingly weak in the face of billionaire-powered fascist power grabs. Fixing this flaw will require us to adopt an urgent spirit of innovation and prepare for a long journey ahead.

The Nerd Reich: Silicon valley fascism and the war on democracy
Gil Durán

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 09/09/2026

"The light is brighter now but no more comforting and all we want is fried rice, safety, to skip the muddy breaking of the spring." - @egnlafleur.bsky.social, Period Drama www.kithbooks.com/shop/p/thema...

The Magi Come To Toronto
E.G.N. Lafleur

A section of Opus Anglicanum (Chasuble), a late 15th century British textile that depicts angels in gold on a background of red. The title and author's name are written over the image in all caps serif in white. A white border surrounds.

Period drama

Blood in the bed.
Products of conception:
pro-life Catholics,
a queer grunge band.
You decide. The wind
whips between luxury stores,
salt on the glass faces.

Blood in the bed.
Remdesivir, Spironolactone.
Three fingers, a crust of bread,
trans joy.
This is the other poetry of madness and desire.

Blood in the bed.
A wound that will not heal:
the fisher king, the holy lance.
The smell of iron mixed with soap, the froth
pouring from the washing machine
like the melting ice, translucent grey
with water running underneath.

The light is brighter now but no more comforting
and all we want is fried rice, safety, to skip
the muddy breaking of the spring.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 08/09/2026

currently reading these two in tandem #localreads

Front Street
Resistance and rebirth in the tent cities of techlandia
Brian Barth

The Nerd Reich
Silicon Valley and the war on democracy
Gil Durán

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 08/09/2026

find your next trans, Crip, queer, and/or sick read! kithbooks.com

097 9

kith books @kithbooks.com · 06/09/2026

read trans, Crip, queer, & sick kithbooks.com/shop

read trans, Crip, queer, & sick

Like Blood on a Dog's Teeth
Nivik

Direct Address
Robin Arble

Grief Is Not Shelf Stable
Jamez Terry

The Death of the Cult Classic
K. Blair

Multimorbid
Rebecca Wood

The Holy Ghost Lives In Her Laugh
Darius Phelps

kithbooks.com

03019 30

kith books @kithbooks.com · 03/09/2026

thank you to everyone who makes kith crit possible. if you've bought a book this year, I'm talking to you. want to see what we'll do next?* buy a book, make it happen kithbooks.com/shop * an asynchronous variant for those of us with bodies and bosses that get in the way

kith books
the literary home of the trans, Crip, queer, and sicck

the words "kith books" appear and a rainbow coloured jumble on a background of dark teal

thank you to everyone
who applied for, hyped,
and helped fund
kith crit: cohort two!!!

if you’ve bought a book from us
this year, that includes you!

press revenue is what allows us to offer free, accessible programmes, and make sure our partners are all fairly paid.

want to see what we’ll do next?
buy a book, make it happen.

kithbooks.com/shop

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 01/09/2026

current read current read!

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 31/08/2026

i think it's incredibly important to understand that, as trans people, this is our model & our moment is now. zines, stickers, posters, events, books, lit mags, murals, etc. it is enough? no. but art makes us human. art can turn the tide.

It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful:
How AIDS activists used art to fight a pandemic
Jack Lowery

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 26/08/2026

New for cohort two: a transfeminine workshop option! Huge thanks to @aporianautics.bsky.social for helping us offer (the first of many?) population specific kith crit workshop spaces. kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

kith crit: cohort two
a grassroots critique workshop for the trans, Crip, queer, & sick

New for cohort two:
kith crit includes a transfeminine specific option!

Under the leadership of Callie Jennings, you’ll have the chance to share and workshop your writing within a cohort of peers. Still Crip and sick inclusive, the transfeminine only workshop will give you all the same access and resources as our general workshop within the comfort of a purpose built group.

Send a writing sample and a brief statement outlining the reasons for your interest to wim@kithbooks.com

if you’d like your submission read by Callie only, feel free to say

wim@kithbooks.com
kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 19/08/2026

"You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird kithbooks.com

kith
the literary home of the trans, Crip, queer, & sick

with gasoline
nat raum

Multimorbid
Rebecca Wood

Jump Cut
Helen Gu

SWARM
NDR

Direct Address
Robin Arble

Another double text
K Angel

Grief Is Not Shelf Stable
Jamez Terry

Pulp Prophet
McCaela Prentice

How to Migrate Ghosts
Jaiden Geolingo

The Death of the Cult Classic
K. Blair

Like Blood on a Dog's Teeth
Nivik

The Holy Ghost Lives in Her
Darius Phelps

kithbooks.com

0911 11

kith books @kithbooks.com · 18/08/2026

applications for kith crit: cohort two are open NOW kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

kith crit: cohort two
a grassroots critique workshop for the trans, Crip, queer, and sick

the bullet points:
eight weeks beginning at the end of September
two hours/wk (plus roughly one hour of prep
at your leisure)
any/all genres
transfeminine only option
painless email application
100% FREE

Send a brief statement outlining the reasons for your interest and a writing sample to wim@kithbooks.com by August 31th.

for more information: kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

Autumn 2026
wim@kithbooks.com
kithbooks.com

054 5

kith books @kithbooks.com · 18/08/2026

kith books the literary home of the trans, Crip, queer, & sick kithbooks.com

a collage of kith book covers

You Are Not Your Bones & Lesser Misfortunes
Ally Scott

For Spite and Rosemary
Odette Augustine

space neon neon space
luna rey hall

I'm My Next Quiet Life
Audrey T. Carroll

icarus rising
dre levant

Painted Rocks
Parker Wilson

Hunting at Decolonization
Nicola Andrews

My Chainsaw is a Heart
Elizabeth R. McClellan

what was eaten was given
Billie Sainwood

The Magi Come to Toronto
EGN Lafleur

... this would be Mosiach
Leo Rose Rodriguez

WOLFCANNON
C.J. Selwyn

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 16/08/2026

patiently waiting for the @jacobgeller.com deep dive archive.org/details/1983... 'Recovering Lost Software' by Josh Renaud in Vanishing Culture

Take “Nosh Kosh” from 1983, for example. Essentially a Jewish take on Pac-Man, this is an action game designed to teach children about kashrut, Jewish dietary law. It was one of three games modeled on existing arcade classics made by Kirschen together with Gesher Educational Affiliates in Israel.

In "Nosh Kosh,” the player moves a kippah-wearing character named Chunky around the screen, trying to eat all the food items while avoiding three non-kosher bad guys: Peter Pig, Larry Lobster, and Freddy Frogslegs. There are three kinds of food-ice cream, meat, and carrots-but the player must wait a bit between eating the meat and ice cream, otherwise Chunky will yell "Oy!” and lose a life.

Or consider Kirschen and Gesher's more ambitious "The Georgia Variations,” a choice-based narrative game about Jewish history, identity, and migration, introduced the same year as “Nosh Kosh."

In this game, the player takes on the role of Boris Goldberg, a Jewish boy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century who must make decisions about school, work, marriage, and even what to do in the face of persecution and pogroms. The player's decisions affect the storyline, but in the end, all the threads eventually lead to the same ending: Goldberg immigrates to Atlanta, Georgia.

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 16/08/2026

Vanishing Culture Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, & Juliya Ziskina text by Nichole Misako Nomura

$Vanishing Culture Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, & Juliya Ziskina cover: a vhs tape, a book, a film reel, a website, and a vinyl record fracture asking their bottom edges into tiny pixels that recollect at the bottom, having changed from black to white.a cursor icon points at text reading "SAVE"$

Punch cards preserve the past and future

Knitting punch cards are an important part of any feminist computing history, and surprisingly resilient. They're interoperable across machines with the same repeat, can be stored as physical (but still fundamentally digital) copies without worrying about hard drives going bad or requiring ongoing power consumption, and are also, in the age of seemingly-endless proprietary software and terms and conditions, refreshingly punk, in a minimal computing, 232 open-source sort of way. How many people actually read the source code of the open-source software they use? Punch cards are the source, in something so fundamentally binary that fluency is not hard to come by. (Fluency in binary for almost all other tasks is nearly impossible.) I can repeat a row as many times as I wish. I can change whether my machine ignores the 1s, knits the 1s, purls the 1s, etc. I can perform subsequent operations on the punch card's outputs with manual manipulation. And I own it. I own my knitting machine, can take it apart and repair it without violating some terms of service, and can hack and modify it and my punch cards to my heart's content.

- Nichole Misako Nomura

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kith books @kithbooks.com · 14/08/2026

“Coming from a more Iowa approach to workshop in undergrad, kith crit: cohort one was a breath of fresh air.” - Rayne Alarcio (@raynealarcio.bsky.social), author of Starving the Wolf kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

kith crit: cohort two
a grassroots critique workshop for the trans, Crip, queer, and sick

“Coming from a more Iowa approach to workshop in undergrad, kith crit: cohort one was a breath of fresh air. wim’s Zoom rooms were a site of lively discussion and friendly debate, and I would recommend kith crit to anyone seeking a more empathetic approach to traditional workshops.”
- Rayne Alarcio, author of Starving the Wolf
(Bottlecap Press, 2025)

How: Send a brief statement outlining the reasons for your interest and a writing sample to wim@kithbooks.com by August 31th.

for more information: kithbooks.com/cohorttwo

Autumn 2026
wim@kithbooks.com
kithbooks.com

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