A5, 58 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2022

To be against the violence of the capture of work, the state, and borders is to intimately know their constitutive repetition. Again and again and always against, Cassandra Troyan’s stunning and brutal poems in Against Capture “tear up the bed sheets” that carry the trace of forms of captivity that keep us apart. These are poems about sex at the edges of a city that teach us the political calculus of gender, detention, trading sex, and how "love" gets implicated in this math. Smashing together intimacy and state violence at a rapid scaling of degrees, Troyan invites us to escape together, even while still entangled. In simultaneously a whisper and a scream, Troyan offers a “heuristic cream pie for the trash can of our love,” demanding we “steal back our leisure,” “touch the fog,” as we “get obliterated.” Our modes of capture may be distinct, but Troyan’s vision of trans/species solidarities calls us to feel the possibility of our freedom “in the heart/ of what refuses to break.

Published by