JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher

Good news! Contrapuntos X is now available. It features “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed,” a single-sentence fiction of mine that limns the liminality, precarity, and atomization of life in/within the Capitalocene-of-the-crime. And yes, the title is from Part III of Francis Bacon’s “Plan of the Work.”

Here are editors Aimée Mendoza and Lucía Orellana’s remarks about “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed”:

A story of approximately three thousand two hundred words told without periods or paragraphs; the flow of thought of a man who, at a crucial moment in his life, gives an account of it in an accelerated tour through the recesses of his memories, his desires, his aspirations; all this interspersed with the present and acute moment and its effects on his body, his mind, his existence. John Madera offers us in “Nature Under Constraint and Vexed” an intense narrative exercise, controlled and at the same time enriched with vertiginous rhythm and language.

Thanks, Lucía Orellana and Aimée Mendoza! And thanks, Marcos Pico Rentería and Ángel M. Rañales!

Delighted to share that Anti-Oedipus Press will be publishing my first book, Nervosities, a collection of experimental short fictions, in 2024. Ka-pow!

Nervosities chronicles the complexities of identity, memory, history, and language, the various fragmentations resulting from and the violences occurring within and because of these heterogeneities and instabilities. Borne of diaspora and transversalism, Nervosities employs disruptive narrative modes, registers, etc., to deeply engage and interpret our over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized worlds. What is ultimately enacted in these fictions is confrontation with and destabilization of what Deleuze and Guattari via Antonin Artaud call “the cancerous body of America, the body of war and money.”

Helmed by D. Harlan Wilson (an exemplary writer in his own right), Anti-Oedipus Press has a commanding list of fantastic writers that includes Ansgar Allen, Louis Armand, Steve Aylett, Eugen Bacon, Harold Jaffe, Barry N. Malzberg, Lance Olsen, James Reich, Lawrence A. Rickels, and Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m amazed and thankful to be counted among this innovatively unruly number.

Big thanks to editors Bradford Morrow, Jason Teal, Douglas Glover, Adrian Todd Zuniga, and Elizabeth Cohen, who previously published one or more fictions from Nervosities in, respectively, Conjunctions, Heavy Feather Review, Numéro Cinq, Opium Magazine, and Saranac Review!

Big thanks, too, to several other supporters of this work, namely, Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, Carole Maso, and Lenina Nadal!

(Image: Bridget Riley’s Current, 1964)

Good news! Salt Hill: 47 is now available! It features “Blues for Borinquén,” an experimental fiction of mine that foregrounds two Puerto Ricans in the middle of Hurricane María, the first in the storm’s eye, the other in its mediation and aftermath. The fiction is full of black holes—call them shrouds, caesuras, portals, thresholds.

I wrote this fiction in response to another journal’s call for fictions about “mutants” and “castaways,” so of course it features Puerto Ricans, we hybrids, fusions, and reified hyphens, we who are largely invisibilized in literature, not to mention culture as a whole, mainstream and otherwise.

Big thanks to editor Si Yon Kim and the rest of the Salt Hill team!

Excelsior!

Delighted to recently receive my contributor’s copies of Contrapuntos IX: Antropoceno, which features two of my poems (“‘The Science of Storytelling'” and “Two Spaces After a Period”), which limn the liminality, precarity, and atomization of life in/within the Capitalocene-of-the-crime, the poems also featuring a host of ghosts, among them John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Matisse, Virgil, Caravaggio, and Monteverdi.

Big thanks to editors Lacie Cunningham and Marcos Pico Rentería!