Cavar 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 ✡️

@cavar.bsky.social

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transMad & queercrip writer, editor, phd-haver. cooler on goodreads. edits manywor(l)ds. wrote FAILURE TO COMPLY (featherproof) + DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS (Northwestern UP) rep: Noah Grey Rosenzweig. 🕸️ www.cavar.club 📖 goodreads.com/cavar

The "sickos" meme, with a man with a sickos shirt peering through a window as he says "yes...ha ha ha...yes!"
C: The distinction between liberatory and liberation is really important, and one I’ve been asked about often regarding Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis. With Failure, one of the most fundamental takeaways I wanted to leave the audience with is that words are a formidable weapon, but they cannot act alone. They need to be accompanied by other acts of resistance - violent, material, collective, persistent, ongoing. The axe can’t work alone, nor the knife, nor the gun. It’s frustrating and reductive when the arguments for the liberatory power of poetry always assume poetry is acting alone. It never is! Poets fight! We’re violent! We always have skin in the game. Poetry is one tool that some of us have chosen to hone. I think that it is a crucial part of a vast arsenal of practices of resistance, refusal, and liberatory pursuits.
another story bookshop and northwestern university press present the toronto launch of differential diagnosis by cavar, in conversation with twoey gray rsvp at cavar.eventbrite.ca tuesday march 24 / 7pm in store, 315 roncesvalles ave.
3/24, 7pm - Toronto, CAN Another Story Bookshop w/ Twoey Gray 4/10, 6pm - Columbia, SC Queer Haven Books w/ Evelyn Berry 4/21, 6:30pm - Amherst, MA Amherst Books w/ Niamh Timmons 5/23, 6pm - Minneapolis, MN Boneshaker Books w/ Danez Smith
venmo: cavars
Freelance Info & Rates Thanks for considering me as a partner in your important project! Whether you’re applying to college or grad school or a new job; perfecting a poem, story, or essay; or need a push to move forward on your next big project, I’m happy to provide editorial support and creative mentorship. The rates listed below, unless otherwise specified, apply to a broad editorial package featuring proofreading, developmental edits/suggestions, and copyedits. AI Statement: I am committed to integrity as a human editor, and as such, do not use AI at any stage in the editorial/feedback process. For all of the below services as well as other inquiries, please email editorialcavar at gmail.com, or click here.
pangur-and-grim's tumblr post that reads "all books should be written by deeply damaged autistic perverts"
"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 "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
Diagram of a face wearing glasses, illustrating how to connect glasses chains to one’s stretched ears. The text reads “swappable chains of your choosing / chain connects to tunnels/plugs / balances both form and function.” It is part of a Reddit post captioned “everyone, I have designed stylish eyeglass chains for those who wear and drop their glasses a lot :)”
Rainbow autism yippee creature surrounded by rainbow confetti
These practices, naturally, inspired and continue to inspire debates which never fail to strike me as painfully passĂŠ and also in dire need of my unsolicited opinion.
submission guidelines: Alterhuman/Multispecies Some people aren’t human. Actually, mostly people aren’t: cats, sharks, trees, rocks, and everyone in between each hold histories and vital relationships that are too often sidelined in favor of anthropocentric narratives. For this call, I want to see stories in which the idea(l) of human individualism is narratively and poetically challenged. Stretch and break the bounds of who is typically afforded a voice; who matters; who counts as an ally in the struggle for collective liberation; and who determines what it means to be a person at all. In addition to more conventionally multispecies/nonhuman narratives, I’m particularly interested in works by/featuring alterhuman characters and themes, and am looking for the complex, imaginative, thoughtful over the polemic/educational. Regular fwp length guidelines apply (up to 1500 words/no more than 3 pages of poetry/hybrid pieces).
I am learning how to be weakness leaving the body. I am licking citric atlas critic acid off my fingers. Every day is keep doing my tasks keep reminding and head down. Nobody minds the back kept slant until straight again. My name are looking for rooms among all the names the all the other names. My Sarah looking for its girl among its mother. A name is looking for more cells to burn.
The small something could be a creature, perhaps a technology. Maybe, in more abstract terms, a political orientation or set of social norms. Looking back, I now understand “A small something” as part of a larger body of autistic poetic work, which, in my view, are always and already “protesting” neuronormative creative and political frameworks. Thinking back to the misleading figure of the savant and this demand for autistic exceptionality, it seems to me that to impute autistic life into our creative practices, to document it as it exists and not as our neurotypical counterparts with it were, then we must turn to a form prepared to resist normative grammars and restrictive relationships to language, activity, and achievement. After all, these very restrictions—this sociocultural “common sense”—are what got us into this mess in the first place: demands for tact over honesty, ambiguity over courage. Instead, I want live in a poetics which refuses common sense, a poetics of autism.
I follow my knowledge to neck solar plexus waist spoon-hips pale thighs. And so follows the sun in hasty afterwards. A small opacity of lies between our bodies: mine & theirs & rayoflight’s. When I bow service in the shadow of our name we drapes me in their clothing. When I kiss their feet they render us a broken prince.
Download now! sundresspublications.com/e-anthologies “Delicate Machinery takes survivorship poetics beyond catharsis––it is a beautifully curated gathering place for poets writing the unwritable, without apology. The poems collected here capture the beauty and intensity of living on after experiences sexual violence within a sociopolitical climate that denies us bodily autonomy.” – [sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis
mushroom girls in love: redux [sarah] Cavar Themes: monster girls, yuri Love comes in all sizes. Blame it on those gods I guess. Plenty of inserts with explanations, illness, operations, and even a dastardly royal plot. While this fungi world may seem a yuri paradise (Adorable concept + a shroompedia) I recommend only for the yuri completionist or mycological fanatic. if you’re looking for something that “makes sense” and “is cohesive,” look somewhere else. (1) When mushroom girls fall in love, fertilizer mute-dances on their undulating rhizome. When they fall, their carrotlove greens top 4 orange bottom. | Fuck | makes a plump round sound. Morphology: Mushroom girls are also tight. In the right ways. Vast, too, like hazes mazes and ramps. When they tangle they can feel their beating insides breathe together, gilled undervents turning into breathing mouths. Mushroom girls say | let me love you with my million miniature mouths. | Mushroom girls treat love like a challenge. And mushroom girls will not back down without a fight. 1 Found text fragments compiled from online reviews and descriptions of Mushroom Girls in Love by Kei Murayama (Seven Seas Press, 2018)
Me, Cavar, in a hood, cap and gown and keffiyeh, standing with my advisor, Colin milburn, in red regalia.
I’ve learned to sustain myself In tiny drops of water From oases so small They’re invisible To the naked eye You flow over jagged rocks Like a mountain spring That reminds me I’ve forgotten how To be thirsty
Cavar: Yes, very much so. I could like listen to you talk about archives all day, 'cause like this was just really delightful to listen to. (Diamond laughing) But very much so. I think coming into college, I, as a teenager, I experienced forced institutionalization for being Mad and a sort of lifetime of medical and psychiatric abuse prior to and subsequent to that. And I was trying to figure out the way I was going to relate to this sort of language that had been used, both as an excuse and as violation in and of itself toward me. And I couldn't go so far as to disavow it because that would be proving the powers that be right. And I couldn't embrace it because, you know, obviously I'm not gonna do that. And so, obviously I learned that the word I should use for this is disidentification when I first read José Esteban Muñoz. But around that same time, I was also getting super, super theory-headed in my freshman year of college. And, reading Muñoz, reading Foucault, reading Spillers, reading Hartman, reading Moten, reading all of these people who all were talking about the same thing—and that is whatever violations power attempts to make, those violations are immense, but they're never totalizing. That's literally not possible. Because if power were totalizing, we wouldn't be able to name it.
The libby listing for Failure to Comply
KS: I’m thinking of this passage near the end describing a last generation of activists who used slogans such as, ‘THINK ME WEAK/BUT I AM POWER.’ Like their bodies, they deviantly grammared. I wonder what your thoughts are on claiming, using, reusing, breaking or fragmenting language? Cavar: I first learned that grammar could talk about something other than parts of speech when I read the paper ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ by Hortense Spillers, which is subtitled ‘An American Grammar Book’. It talks about this process during the Transatlantic Slave Trade by which African persons were transformed into chattel as the founding grammar of US American society, and this thinking about the world was extremely influential for me. Poetry has been really helpful. Reading more about variations to English like pidginisation has helped with that. Also, in my sophomore year of college, a beloved professor told me that I was allowed to make up my own term if there was no term, and then I saw that reinforced within the trans communities that I moved through – being in a place where it was completely normal and expected to change your name, change your pronouns, change your signifiers. Go by something no one else understands. All these things together – even if they aren’t direct super-material means of Resistance ™ – illustrate cracks in a grammar that society presumes to be natural. Calling attention to those cracks is extremely important.
how do you do fellow kids meme; text reads "how do you do, fellow makers of degenerate art?"
KS: The uses and abuses of technology – for surgery, for surveillance, for medicine, for data collection – are a major theme in the novel, both in the oppressive setting and in characters’ resistance and liberation. What are your thoughts about the state of technology now? Cavar: I owe a lot of my thinking about the drawbacks of technology under systems of neoliberalism and racial capitalism to people like Ruha Benjamin and, more recently, to Legacy Russell. These are Black feminist theorists talking about the brokering of data as an expansion of chattel slavery, and the accumulation and usage of data as a means of controlling populations more broadly. Also, Simone Browne writes about contemporary policing and surveillance practices and their relation to slavery and settler colonialism, and the literal ones practiced in prisons and psychiatric institutions. Anything understood as speculative, if it is imaginable, is happening somewhere, to someone, even if it looks different. My fears around new technologies are less about what the future could look like, and more about who the future is already happening to. In the example of climate change, it is discussed as something that might happen in the future, when entire islands are already going underwater. I’m concerned about who’s already trapped in the future.
failure to comply cover
When I taste blood my mouth don’t see it as a bad thing. See, every night I affront the mirror w/ sordid tales of glorified flossing. So ask me: Does all my narrow make this teeth look fat? / I don’t know about you, but I was born in the wrong episteime. My contrite gums are cherry, jaw fusty. &thus my slutty canines make lust to the sound of tribbing paradigms. &thus I have cavities in my cavities and also many unofficial holes.
RSCH first founded its hegemonocosm on violent purges and maintains it through brainwashing and oppression, all justified on the grounds of being “evidence based” — the logic of which is naturally circular: the admissibility of evidence is determined by a regime whose overwhelming violence allows it to arrogate to itself sole arbitership of what is Real. This equivocal “heads I win, tails you lose” logic imparts power on the regime precisely by convincing its victims that it is they who are evil. Indeed, it appears almost nobody ever rebels or resists. Most seem cowed by the impossibility. But RSCH wouldn’t need all these laws against deviancy if people didn’t sometimes fail to comply.
Cuckoo by Gretchen felker Martin
The Bhagavad Gita on top of a paper towel dispenser.
Orange Season In the future, we volunteer at the produce-distribution collective because we feel like it and because we really should and because we enjoy the smell of early-summer oranges as they roll toward us in great, eponymous tidal waves. Each has just been plucked by volunteers next door, who work in half-hour rotations so as not to succumb to the brutal May heat.
What if this is the moment that I learn how to eat again. Am I ready? Am I ready, in a sense, to be cared-for, to be cared-out? I mean, to be cared-about? There is a feeling I get just from sitting, back hardly grazing my chair, inflamed, puffed-up skin grazing the place where the chair back meets the seat, and it itches and tingles but is numb in the places that matter. I locate in that itchy spot everything I have felt for the past 72 hours. I watch it move outward to my pelvis, to my stomach, to all the tiny muscles in my groin that pull and pull and pull, that tell me pain is constant whether in my bed or out of it, standing still or walking, that this pain, whatever number I assign it, will not leave.
There is something poetic in scarring the site of the umbilical cord.8 In doing so, I deny the very people whose (re)productive efforts rendered me possible, upended the dynasty whose heterosexual whiteness brought them from poverty to vermouth and price-less menus. This, and the refrain: all we want is for you, someday, to do better than us. This is why we have you. When you’re a parent, you will want the same for your children. Now my children die in the biohazard bin. My children are medical waste. My children, like all children, are not children but misplaced possibilities. I think often about the difference between “last" and “final,” the way that “last" can be Novocain for existential dread. For every Last Supper, there is a last week; for every last gasp, last-minute redemption. “Last" was recent blood, was when was your last period and is there any chance you might be pregnant? I was only the most recent of a coming-many, an Atlas to my family tree, the most recent of my bodies. "Last Girl Cavar” was bestowed upon me with pride and anxiety. In this instance, the girl is merely the promise of a woman who will make more, more, more. The girl is not an affinity but an obligation. I am not a girl but I am the final. I tell the story of a family history that will soon end. Without intending to do so, I have ended history: severing it and slowly, painfully, excreting what remains.
Me, smiling and holding my medal
[sarah] Cavar to they for whom I am in the passenger seat i spent all my lyric years against slim and straight- haired girls their dyke-shaped mouths and underglances believing with my everything this thing this sing ular & special we were akin to light moving behind itself trees growing down instead of up wrong insofar as without right’s smooth having- knownhood & true we have not ever & always & already right
3 MICROS by [sarah] Cavar Elephants think they are the size of dogs Who can fault them, outwitting their great heft? And I am the size of Grammy’s voice at the burnt crack beneath her knife. Her grandmother, mème, would eat two toasts per day, no grease, between her prayers alone. Face against the floor. Grammy takes hers with coffee and a camel. An earlier version of this piece contained incriminating information on but I got rid of her. An earlier draft of this piece contained incriminating information on 1 2 3 4 Grammy once described clothing as forgiving and I imagined a wardrobe built only by resentment. She spoke between smokes of her deathdream: a forest, a fuck, a rainstorm, alone. I can’t breathe around you, granddaughter tells her fore. Now you are a featherbed. Now I am a rib. Who can fault me for outwitting my body. ____________________________________________________ 1 having gone the distance as it were from the scene 2 of which dried up carbon, or perhaps the sound of scraping 3 hitherto unknown but as measure of license 4 and perhaps local to the knife or even the greed
RUNNING If I were the person I thought I once was this spring evening I’d walk miles in my mother’s old sweatshirt not out of hatred for my body but out of sheer sick cold. I would smell manure familiar to me and invented by the dairy midway between my home and the school where I learned I was fat. In that story, I become thin the way others grow up: gradually, adding with patience restraints, compunctions, ligatures, weights; steel where once was air. In my hometown is a correctional facility, another word for prison. When inmates escaped we kids hid in a dark corner of the classroom as in active shooter drills. Afterward we ate lunch. Today is any other March Wednesday. My arms with bumps or perhaps goosegrief I am feeling perhaps even grief for the girl whose few words concerned the grief I mean the geese of her sister: good geese, kind. At the correctional facility she wound mandalas into ink at her bed while I, adjoining, jogged in place. You see there is a point that you get to when you forget to be hungry and begin to run into traffic. Sometimes I grieve that feeling the way my mother has tacit-promised to grieve me, if At present the sun is melting and I am about to bike from this place to the the apartment in which I keep my sad food and sometimes food for strangers. When I reach the traffic light I will consider my bicycle, legs, white shirt, bare arms now thick with ink. Being disordered is a manner of being out of order, that is, insequential, that is, inconsequential. I think of my mother. I love you. Your sweatshirt is in my closet.
I hold a copy of Jonis Agee’s “a .38 special and a broken heart” next to my Pooh bear mug of tea.
sneaker pimps - becoming x
you could say I’m in despair: ex-child, ugly / in the future’s grevious face. & somewhere a younggirl secrets books from borders reads untaught texts, learns the language of distraction, hunger, warp & weft modest muzzle a firm fix to this poor round mouth; shared nose, name, body seeking blade. these days, I am learning to delineate the erotic from rhetoric.
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky
open throat by henry hoke
A dent is a type of haunting. So is regret. Renee haunts me in the moments when I least expect it; my archive regenerates as if through divine intervention. A debt is a type of haunting. The debt I carry is unpayable, even as my creditor, my lineage, walks beside me. I am followed by a cascade of critical memories that hardly feel my own. They return to me at random moments, demanding collection.
Goodbye Forever Party After “Marjorie Will Ride the Death Coaster” in Jason Teal’s We Were Called Specimens and Julijonas Urbonas’s Euthanasia Coaster. Baptized in a blue pool of sky. Cloudless the reckoning. When the day awaits I go like smoke pulled toward a ceiling Leave bad black brackets on pastel walls. We stand inline like dentures. We wash our faces Hands, feet In baths of blue. Which reflect the sky. Baptismal Fingers follow my reflection, eyes squenched Against hot water. Leaky spigot sounds follow pairs aboard. The great iron horse lopes the track. The track speaks the language of the horse The iron language
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