Our friend Dinah DiNova is working her first book collecting her amazing tintype photographs that document queer and radical culture. And we’ll be publishing it once she gets the project more completed. To say we’re excited about this is to understate it quite a bit.

She’s raising the money right now to complete her 4 year journey of documentation.

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is quite happy to announce our latest title, These Burning Streets by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back. The book is a collection of poetry paired with an essay on her experiences thus far with the Canadian prison system. Kelly herself is a rare combination of award-winning poet and militant anti-capitalist street fighter.

On Thursday, Kelly was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for her role in the anti-g20 demonstrations in Toronto after she pleaded guilty to six counts of “mischief” that took the form of busted out police cruiser windows and trashed corporate stores.

We were waiting on her sentencing so the book could accurately reflect the length of her incarceration, but it’s off to the printers and we’re excited to see it back and get it into people’s hands. It bears a foreword by Direct Action veteran Juliet Belmas and praise from a number of influential Canadian poets and activists.

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, along with our distributors Combustion Books and AK Press, are dedicated to passing 100% of the profits we receive along to Kelly until she is free of the judicial system.

“…at once a book of windows into fantastical places, an album of love songs for the small things we’ve all forgotten, and a celebratory political manifesto for worlds we’ve yet to imagine… a simply stunning first collection from a wise and talented emerging poet.”
—Leanne Simpson, author of Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence.

My friends are a varied bunch: anarchists, activists, punks, artists, musicians and techies. They come from a variety of different backgrounds, gender expressions and political persuasions. But one thing I’ve noticed about my friends that cuts across qualifiers and social groups is that many have chosen new names for themselves.

I love hearing friends’ stories about how they got their names. As I’ve heard more of them, I’ve become increasingly interested in the cultural phenomenon of taking chosen names. Why do radicals often shed the names they were given as children and take on new ones? How is this act fueled by a mainstream American culture where children are named according to entries in baby name dictionaries? What are some of the many reasons radicals choose to reject this culture and name themselves? Conversely, why do some folks feel connected to the names they were given as children and choose to retain them?

This zine will combine cultural histories of naming with interviews and personal narratives. It will not shy away from issues of appropriation and of naming as a way to obscure abusive pasts, but it will also be a celebration of what we have chosen to call ourselves and why.

I’m looking to interview people for this project. Please contact Wren Awry at seamsandstory@gmail.com.

Update: The book is published and available from Combustion Books!

Sometime this summer we’ll be releasing a short book of poetry by political arrestee Kelly Rose Pflug-Back. For those who remain unaware, Kelly was arrested at the G-20 demonstrations in Toronto in 2010 and accused of being the leader of the leaderless Black Bloc. The worst of her charges have been dropped, but she has pleaded guilty to destruction of police and corporate property (I believe the formal charge is “mischief”) and awaits sentencing. Until she is free of the judicial system, we will be selling this book as a fundraiser, with every dollar we receive going directly to support her.

For more about the political repression related to the G-20 in Toronto, we suggest the Toronto Anarchist Black Cross.

For more about Kelly’s poetry, see for example her poem Sweet Mercy, Her Body an Ark of Wild Beasts published by Ideomancer.

Also, we’ve redesigned our website entirely to better allow people to download and/or buy the stuff we make.

The biggest of these things yet, by far! This zine is really a book. 170 pages and over 200 photographs printed in full color, covering Margaret Killjoy’s travels of 2011.

You can download the pdf, which is 31 mb and web-quality (the print quality file would be 10 times as large!) or you can purchase it for $25 from Createspace. Hopefully soon some anarchist distros will have it too.

• download(free!)
• purchase ($25 but worth it!)

So far they’re only carrying Ever & Anon, Being The Adventures of One Fine Summer, and …And Into Autumn, but the rest of our catalog will be forthcoming!

Bookmark the Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness page on the site in order to keep up to date on what they’ve got!

The cover of That Kind of Change

Our third collection of anarchist poetry, this one, science fiction, takes the form of academic commentary from our anarchist future on poetry written in the midst of the 21st century revolution. Surreal and lovely. By C. Campbell.