2017 was an intense year. What were we up to at Anomaly and Anomalous Press? All this right here.
1. We came as we were.
Anomalous Press was lucky enough to publish this rad anthology of 90s pop culture, edited by E. Kristen Anderson, now available for preorder.
“COME AS YOU ARE is a collection of poetry and short prose celebrating 90s pop culture. With work from Francesca Lia Block, Allison Joseph, Chen Chen, Danez Smith, Stephanie Kuehnert, and others, this anthology is nostalgia, remembrance, and protest.”
Check it out or preorder it here!
2. We looked to the future with this folio of Speculative Fiction By Women in Translation, edited by Rachel Cordasco.
“Mr. N feels a rush of pride. Now, no one will recognize him. Not his wife and daughter, or his friends, or anyone on the street — not even that woman in the yellow raincoat, still out there waiting on a dark corner, or the patrolling policemen. They think Mr. N’s gone the same way as any other of those unfortunate middle-aged men, disappearing quietly in the V City rain.”
3. We’re raising money for Puerto Rico with the broadside collection, Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón, with 100% of sales going to Taller Salud.
These handmade broadsides have poems in Spanish and English by Yara Liceaga, Raquel Albarrán, Luis Diaz (Intifada), Gaddiel Francisco Ruis Rivera, Nicole Delgado, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, Martín Espada, Hermes Ayala, Ricardo Maldonado, Gegman Lee Ríos, Kenyatta JP García, Claritza Maldonado, Lara Mimosa Montes, Vincent Toro, Cindy Jimenez Vera, Luis Othoniel, Erica Mena, Abdiel Echevarria, and others.
You can still help. Find out more about our project. You can make a difference.
4. We got luminous with art and writing by neurodiverse queer and trans writers of color in our GLITTERBRAIN folio.
“They woke up the deadname and said that I had died / said that I had killed myself / how many of them are there that deadname me / a family made of mismatched broken cups / they say to me in their own minds that you’ll always be my Jacob / the mauve breath of selfishness disguised as love / an abuse scar / a fever fall in the pregnant mauve dark / the way the deadname wafts up as a miasma of loss / how spent the effort was to get you to call me by my actual name / my self-erected oracle / mauve: the color of the bruise that rests right where the name hangs on me / continues to hang each time it is ever used”
Read more from “Haunted,” by Chloë Rose.
5. We didn’t let the fascists speak.
Eunsong Kim prefaced our poetry with Pat Parker’s words: “Don’t Let The Fascists Speak.” The words we prioritized in our July, 2017 issue were those of “refusal, contradiction and voyage.”
“drenched in purple and possibility. lil edges all laid. horseback bandits. naked and illuminate. share a spirit with Ms. Lawson after the orange. are you surreal? dancing with the Woods on your birthday. that fucked up Gober; motherfucker’s just as complicit. the widow, forlorn. the hood hang, citizens of the world.
we are all undeserving of Nina Simone, but especially white people.”
Read more from Sean D. Henry-Smith’s “The garden at the Underground.”
6. Desiree C. Bailey’s Sacred Americas folio weaves the spiritual and the legacies of resilience, migration, and meditation, from New Jersey to Trinidad.
In her own words, “We forget Sun Ra’s eerie refrain, ‘It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?’ And don’t you know that the world has been remade, again and again?”
“O! –so dis be church / an jesus / look how many me around me / an ah don’t know wat to do wit dis love / ah mean ah seent it / in my imagination / but ah ain’t never seen it out my eyes unfoldin in front of me lik ah turnt up tapestry of history / ah did not know dis should exist / lik come on / we alive in dis mothafucka / an ah hug you cuz ah hug you cuz ah don’t know when ah might see you again / jesus christ / ah been hugging things sometimex for all the long reasons / im just tryin to feel skin dat ain’t mine / just to feel skin dats mine.”
Read more from Rico Frederick’s “How a ngh be ah ngh in ngh compa’ny but don’t feel lik ah ngh no mo’ –Pt 2+3.”
7. We got graphic. In our Comics section, anyway!
Read the rest of “Low Level Enjoyment,” by Austin English.
8. We explored what happens when persons are treated as objects, in our I(,) Object folio.
“On the way to the wedding banquet, the Imam congratulated the couple and reminded Malik that the best husband is the one who is quiet and guards his modesty.”
Read the rest of Khadija Anderson’s “The Best Husband.”
9. Translation explored our darker sides, with Anna Rosenwong and the translation team’s “Dark Issue.”
“We exiles
sleep pressing our cell phones
against ourselves.
Under the lit
screens of our computers
we fall asleep full of sadness
and wake up full of hope.”
Read “We exiles,” Hélène Cardona translating Maram Al-Masri.
10. Our prose was anything but prosaic.
Sybil Baker joined us as our new Fiction editor, bringing us four great stories by Hadley Moore, Petra Kuppers, Tariq Shah, and Wendy Wimmer.
“The spider child had crawled, mewled, protested and rallied, till the ceiling burst open when the rescue crew found her.” Read more from “The Wheelchair Ramp,” by Petra Kuppers.
While Nonfiction editor Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. brought us work that “transforms the carcass of experiene in the ocoon of memory,” by Kathryn Hargett, Kirstin Allio, Natassja Traylor, and Rachel Litchman.
Except there is no before the assault. Of course, I’d like to imagine myself soft and domestic: something without teeth. Read more from “The Myth of Oracle Bones,” by Kathryn Hargett.
Anomalous Press’s Year In Review — 2017 was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.