Cavar

Out of Mind & Into Body is a transMad engagement with medico-psychiatric violence, epistemic erasure, and Mad survival amidst the intolerable –– getting on and not getting better.

There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical or biological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social). While trans people share many common experiences, there is immense diversity within trans communities. There are an estimated 700,000 transgendered individuals in the US and 15 million worldwide. Even still, there's been a notable lack of organized information for this sizable group. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource-a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written for and by women, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts. Each chapter takes the reader through an important transgender issue, such as race, religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health topics, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more. Anonymous quotes and testimonials from transgender people who have been surveyed about their experiences are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In this unique way, hundreds of viewpoints from throughout the community have united to create this strong and pioneering book. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.

Undoing traditional psychiatric narratives in this innovative and bold first collection. Drawing from queer, trans, disabled, and Mad poetic traditions, Differential Diagnosis introduces a deeply entangled transMad approach, investigating ways of knowing, loving, and living not legible to the normative eye. This collection challenges the architecture of institutional psychiatry and its popular “wellness” analogues, offering instead a counternarrative of forced institutionalization, disorderly embodiment, and transMad self-determination. At once jarring and joyful, Differential Diagnosis interrogates psychiatric power and locates capacities for disabled and/or transMad resistance in the oblique, the speculative, and the “nonsensical.” Cavar’s inventive full-length debut defamiliarizes cis, sane, abled existence through linguistic play and speculative imagery, offering Madness not only as poetic content, but also as craft technique and, ultimately, as a new way of being in the normative world.

CO/NOTATIONS, by Sarah Cavar, embodies a pair of trans(genre) lyric essays published in 2018 with The Offing and 2020 with the since-fallen 3:am Magazine, respectively.

A Hole Walked In is a thrilling piece of surrealist-gothic-body-horror short fiction, featuring a protagonist whose face just won’t stop bleeding. Following writers like Carmen Maria Machado and Helen Oyeyemi, A Hole Walked In traverses the feminist Weird and leaves a red trail in its wake. –Publisher

Conjuring an ecosystem of Madness, music, memory, bugbutter explores bodies on the edge. In these hybrid poems, the human and the more-than-human mingle in sites of trauma and hope, with fantastical characters from Moomin to Catdog guiding the way. With bugbutter, Cali-based Cavar writes a modern myth of transMad childhood, and pulls poetry from its thickest hurts and tenderest absences. AND ALSO bugbutter features an 8-track playlist curated by the author. How cute is THAT?! Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook has a cover illustrated and designed by Jamie Crews. Typeset by Dani Spinosa. –Publisher

Smart toasters, zombie offboarding, and innovations in 3-D printing. These are but some of the strange tales to be found in this book. Mad Scientist Journal: Autumn 2017 collects thirteen tales from the fictional worlds of mad science. For the discerning mad scientist reader, there are also pieces of fiction from Sean Buckley, Jule Owen, and Steve Toase. Readers will also find other resources for the budding mad scientist, including an advice column, gossip column, and other brief messages from mad scientists.

Every story has its fugitives. I, a deviant self-hacker with three arms, two stomachs, and no name, is on the run from RSCH, an high-tech, authoritarian government that mandates wellness and carves the contours of truth itself. When I is kidnapped at axe-point to be mined for forbidden memories, they must struggle against RSCH’s medical abuse to recapture their history, reunite with their lover, and rewrite their future –– or risk remaining Patient forever. I crosses an epistolary, time-flipped dreamscape as they recollect their memories from RSCH’s hungry archive, and, in the process, write the story of their liberation.

In eighteen subconscious segments, The Dream Journals blends genre and form to stage scenes once hidden behind eyelids. The result is a micro-memoir of both speculation and recollection, of the surreal and the all-too-embodied. –Publisher