Strange Realism

Strange Realism

~ Poetry, short essays and graphics by Francis Gene Rowe, as well as visuals by Erica Masserano and Daina Daugaviete ~

Strange Realism was previously featured by Future Natures as part of their 2023 / 24 series on Strange Natures. Get it as .pdf here.

Strange Realism

Introduction to Strange Realism

Strange Realism was parcelled together in late Autumn 2023, with the poems which make up the majority of its written content being composed in August-September of that year. A sense of its themes emerged from the process of its creation and are elaborated on in a pair of short essays that bookend the zine. One of my biggest influences and inspirations is science fiction (sf), particularly its ability to show us that the things we are insistently told are natural, evolutionary, progressive, part of ‘common sense’, are in fact engineered, contingent, brittle, and false.

Something I think about quite a lot – and feel even more – is the impossibility of the model of subjecthood that’s continually reproduced and reiterated under global capitalism. It is a thoroughly constructed thing, and yet all too violently real: the rational individual who orders and colonises the(ir) world, isolated from other people and things.

Life is a web, a net, a text, a constellation, but the forms of language and desire permitted to be visible and available under hegemony operate as a kind of enclosure. I believe that poetry can and should be a language of the commons, a form of collective speech which articulates both the dissolution of what is and the possibility of other realities and realisms, other worlds that are our world.

Part of the commoning ecologies call/section – you can download it here.