ON SALE NOW
ALEJANDRA OLIVA
DECLARATION
Chapbook | $8 | 32 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | January 2018
“I love that almost everyone who has chosen to stay at Our Lady Queen of Angels is a woman. And these Catholic women, they make do. One of them blesses each of the others in a tiny weekly sacrilegious act. They lead each other in song, tell each other the sermon, help each other interpret the words of the reading. They make their voices heard in the service. Their voices are the service.”: An essay on faith, family, resistance, & communion.
ALEJANDRA OLIVA is an essayist and embroiderer currently studying for her Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Follow her on Twitter at @olivalejandra_
dear hearts,
like many of you i've spent most of the last year in mourning; a grief so massive it felt annihilating; a horror that seems to require an entire new language of its own to describe. i struggled to do the most mundane imaginable things: get out of bed, drink water, go to work, eat, across the span of this, the longest year i can remember in my lifetime, a year that left my hair streaked silver and new lines mapping outward from the corners of my eyes and new kinds of nightmares, new sorrows, a whole new kind of pain.
there are many ways to live with despair kicking around you like an unwanted houseguest who refuses to leave and i believe art is one of them. art, and love, and art made from and in love; art that speaks the unsayable, that builds homes in which we can gather, that dreams worlds for which we can yearn. art that names those who we have lost and those who we are losing; art that demands we stand on the front lines with our arms linked together or make meals for friends and strangers or knit cosies for penguins or print signs for street protests: art that says there are many bodies and ways to be in the world and we will leave none of them behind on our way to the other world that is still possible. unlikely, maybe, but possible.
alejandra oliva's new guillotine chapbook, Declaration, is a moving testament to the power of faith and resilience and resistance. in january of 2007, the catholic archdiocese of new york city shuttered fifteen churches around the city in an effort to save money, nearly all of those in poor neighborhoods of color. among them: our lady queen of angels, a tiny church in the heart of east harlem, dwarfed by the neighboring thomas jefferson houses--the projects--that surround it.
the women parishioners of our lady queen of angels--all of them black, latinx, immigrant, of color; nearly all of them elderly--were undeterred. every sunday for over eight years they met on its steps and led the lay services themselves. facing hostile church authorities, excommunication from the church, the police, the brutal new york winters and hothouse new york summers, enduring arrest and harassment, the women of our lady queen of angels organized and protested and served jail time and came back every sunday to say grace. it's a beautiful chapbook that i'm proud to publish on the eve of the winter solstice: the long night of dreaming before we wake once more into the light.
here's to new fights in the coming year, new strength, new faith, new language, new love. here's to making art. & as a special treat if you made it this far, use discount code ROSETICO for 15% off your entire order until december 31.
keep loving, keep fighting
xoxo sarah
coming soon from guillotine | 2018
Guillotine is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas! You can make a tax-deductible donation to Guillotine here. Your contributions go directly to pay our writers, printers, designers, and the other amazing small businesses that make possible our production line. (Our production line is Sarah watching Vampire Diaries and sewing 400 chapbooks.)
MATIAS VIEGENER | THE ASSASSINATION OF KATHY ACKER
Chapbook | $8 | 32 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | January 2018
“The day before she dies: Kathy wakes from a nap and tells me that the door is open. I tell her all the doors in the room are shut. But she is suspicious, and asks me to close the door. Which door? I ask. She looks around the room and then behind her bed. I think there’s a door behind me, she says. She dreamt that it was open and all the animals would get out.
No, I say, I think it’s closed.” Kathy Acker’s literary executor & friend Matias Viegener on her death & afterlife.
MATIAS VIEGENER is a writer, artist, and critic working solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, and social practice.
KRISTEN STONE | THAT WHICH GIRLS CONJURE WILL HELP THEM SURVIVE
Novel | $12 | 112 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | March 2018 | ISBN TK
“Joan knows it was much easier for her grandparents, but doesn’t know much about exactly how it happened. In the fifties they licked sealed and locked the records. They simply transferred babies from girls to women, quick, anonymous. And her Mimi is dead now and cannot be asked. ” A haunting, rich, & gorgeous story of families found, lost, & chosen.
KRISTEN STONE is a writer, educator, and social worker living in Gainesville, Florida. They are the author of Domestication Handbook (Rogue Factorial, 2012) and self/help/work/book//The Story of Ruth and Eliza (Birds of Lace, 2014). Their poetry and essays appear at Mutha Magazine, Entropy, and elsewhere.
LOLA PELLEGRINO | LIE TYPES
Novel | $12 | 88 pp. | 4.25” x 6.25” | Summer 2018 | ISBN TK
“Lies my friend Estelle calls, ‘Credible, but a little magnificent.’” A taxonomy of feminist falsehoods.
LOLA PELLEGRINO is “a lesbo slut with scary friends” (–9th grade classmate). LIE TYPES supported in part by a FACE OUT grant from the Community of Literary Magazines & Small Presses.