Your Hold is Ready! (9.28.24)

September 28, 2024

Hello from book-news-land!

I feel like it’s going to be a while before I have a non-chaotic/omg-what-a-month month. After all, this month, I returned to Davis (which is still unbelievably, miserably hot, and I’m starting to lose hope that an actual fall will ever come), celebrated Failure to Comply hitting bookstore shelves [find it on Bookshop, an indie listed here, or perhaps at one I’ve missed!), AND, most recently, have been able to publicly celebrate my next book –– Differential Diagnosis, forthcoming in 2026 with Northwestern University Press!

Differential Diagnosis by Cavar. Imprint: Curbstone Author of failure to comply Cavar's differential diagnosis, the author's debut poetry collection that engages with critical disability, mad, and trans studies to interrigate psychiatric power and locate capacities for disabled, trans, and Mad resistance in the oblique, speculative, and the nonsensical, to Marisa Siegel at Curbstone, for publication in spring 2026 (world).

Like Failure to Comply, Differential Diagnosis is inextricable from my dissertation; in a lot of ways, these three are a triangle of shadow projects. While I wrote most of F2C during my undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College, the issues I grapple/d with more obliquely in the text take center stage in my ‘nonfictional’ research, as well as the surrealist poetic practices I bring into DD.

(As a side note, I’ve been building some lists on Bookshop: a general favorites page, and one for books that fed Failure to Comply. If you buy from these lists, I make, like, a dollar per book, which is one dollar more than I’d make in any other situation. If you like these lists, let me know, and I can try to make some more based on the recommendations I provide here and/or based on other projects of mine (including Differential Diagnosis!)

All writers have obsessions. Few writers are classifiable as “non-obsessive” people. All of my own work swirls together in a muddle of monstrosity, holes & gaps, violent embodiments, multiplicity/plurality, consumption, and, somewhat perplexingly, dismemberment. Surely there’s some kind of freudian explanation for that last one.

Fortunately, I have a bit more time to breathe before the next ~book tour~ stops that involve travel. got the chance to read locally just the other day at Third Space Davis, which was a wonderful time. It was particularly special –– and particularly nerve-wracking –– to read my work surrounded by so many of my comrades and colleagues.

Cavar, wearing a black and white striped tank top and red shorts, stands behind a music stand and reads from Failure to Comply.

In November, I have several confirmed events:

Additional housekeeping: manywor(l)ds is open for submissions through Oct. 31! We’re particularly interested in seeing more non-text-based submissions, so if you’re a queercrip/transMad visual artist/music-filmmaker/etc., please do send your stuff along.

Other ways to support me/my work: consider getting a paid subscription to this newsletter (or making a one-time payment of $10+ for my full chapbook catalog), buying Failure to Comply, reviewing it on Goodreads and Storygraph, and requesting it at your local bookstores and libraries. Also, contact me if you’re interested in a review/interview.

I think that’s all for my updates for this month. Thanks so much for the incredible support. I say this whenever I send out a newsletter, and truly mean it each time.

Now, onto the recommendations.

Today’s Recs:

Books:

Albums & Podcasts

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

Essays and Articles:

My Recent Work: