Your hold is ready! (10. 30. 25)

Author

Cavar S
October 30, 2025

Hi all.

October’s been hard. Really hard. And I know I’m not alone in that –– a government shutdown and impending loss of SNAP, families being torn apart by ICE, a lull in the Palestinian genocide in which survivors are returning to homes, schools, and businesses in rubble. Climate change-induced disasters, the most recent of which being Hurricane Melissa. In light of all that, it feels weird to complain about my days spent obsessing over job applications and fears existential and very personal. But I’m just me, and sometimes my personal fears feel easier to control than these things too big to fully conceptualize. Either way, most of my days this month have been mired in anxiety and depression. I don’t really see any sign of that stopping.

Despite that, the residency has been going smoothly. I successfully read from my forthcoming poetry collection, Differential Diagnosis, which is now available for pre-order on Northwestern University Press’s website. More information is available on my website, including some very kind blurbs from Cameron Awkward-Rich and Crystal Odelle:

“Reveling in poetry’s tendency toward ‘bloat’ and excess and not-yet-normalized syntax, this propulsive debut collection showcases and delights in the poet’s mad wit. Through Cavar’s serious humor and playful theorizing and clever attempts to ‘outwit’ Gender, psychopower, and ‘commonsense,’ Differential Diagnosis offers all of us who sense that we were “born in the wrong episteme” strategies for making and making ‘where the nameless live.’”

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of An Optimism

“TransMad automythology, diagnostic of refusal, animal / bodymind of hunger & grief & play—Differential Diagnosis asks why peer precisely at what can’t be measured. Whether internal organ or fridge door, Cavar is gracious, opens and langues what’s inside: a whole of holes, the riddled disease, all that can be / is, and lives.”

—Crystal Odelle, author of Trans Studies

Those interested in a copy for a review/interview are welcome to email me.

I appreciate all the positive feedback I’ve gotten on my introduction and poems for ANMLY’s Autistic Protest Poetry Folio, and strongly encourage you to check out everyone’s work!

You may notice that there are fewer recs this week than usual. This is because I have been depressed and overworked. Sorry! I’m genuinely going to try to engage more with things I actually enjoy in the coming months (i.e. forms of writing that are not cover letters) because returning to that practice for the last few days, in combination with keeping up my regular running and workout schedule, has been keeping me afloat), but for now, even doing that is difficult.

Housekeeping:

Submissions: manywor(l)ds is open through Oct. 31 (Tomorrow!!!). We want more multimedia, visual, translation, and review/interview pieces! Send ‘em in!

Take a peek at how we sheep, co-written with scholarly-(anti-) crush/comrade/collaborator ulysses/constance bougie, is out with Ethel Press. For background on what we’re doing with queerness, Madness, and (a)sexualities, check out our work in) Kairos and Asexualities. You can order it on its own or purchase it bundled with my third chapbook and first with Ethel, Out of Mind & Into Body.

And check out Failure to Comply digitally and in print and on Bookshop in both formats, on Goodreads and Storygraph, and request it at your local bookstores and libraries. Find inspo/similar reads/books that fed Failure to Comply at my Bookshop affiliate page, where each of your orders gives me a dollar.

Now, onto the recommendations!

Today’s Recs:

Books:

Music

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

Essays and Articles:

My Recent Work: