Chapbooks
What started with making zines with friends back in the late 90s has grown into a practice of making zines, chapbooks, books, pamphlets and artist books. Additionally, I've done a number of chapbooks and pamphlets with my collaborator Jen Hofer as Antena; for now, you can find those on the Antena site. Here are other chapbooks: some are hand-made and some are published by wonderful small press projects.
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Swamps Fly
A small book of poems printed in 2021. Part of the long-term project, The Unsettlements. I wrote these poems in dialogue with Elana Mann's show Sounds from the Swamp at Lawndale Art Center. This chapbook is an anti-marker of a Gulf Coast history gone awry: spindly remnants, but also gifts for my ancestors and descendants, both blood and queer and trans and otherwise. Thanks to Jai Arun Ravine for design help and Mystic Multiples for beautiful printing and assembling.
Hard copies available for purchase here at the Lawndale Art Center store. Or you can email me to buy directly.
Hooks
A DIT (Do It Together) chapbook designed by Jai Arun Ravine and printed by Mystic Multiples in Houston in 2019.
Full of hooks in desire, sexiness, poetry, Grindr, non-human animals, and plants.
To purchase a copy, email plujo7 at gmail dot com.
An Accompanying Text
A chapbook published by She Works Flexible in 2015.
Full of companions, conflict zones, gaps and generators.
At the chapbook launch, a reading of the text was played without the author on the stage, an attempt to see whether or not a text could accompany without a body or if a text could become a body that might accompany the reader / listener.
Ioyaiene
An accordion-style handmade, DIY artist book in 2014.
Made for the Fresh Arts Community Supported Art Program.
Full of Karankawa words, anti-definitions, bayou sand, and drowning Spaniards. Ioyaiene became a part of the book Ford Over as one of the sections. The making of this artist book led me to experiment with painting over European words in a glossary of Karankawa words, thus forming an Anti-Glossary of sorts.
Click here for a slightly different online version at Hinchas de Poesía.
Killing Current
A chapbook published by the borderlands-based Mouthfeel Press in 2012.
Full of rivers, silt, mud, crossings, intricate maps, slight squiggles, crosshatches and cut-ups.
Undone
A handmade, DIY chapbook from 2011.
Full of pants ripping on plastic chairs, BUENA VIDA, coladores de sueños, Master locks, Trapitos de Angel and City Cosas.
My collaboration with the Dusie Kollektiv Round 5.
Click here for a PDF version on the Dusie website.
A second edition was made in 2013 for Jen Hofer's CalArts class.
Routes into Texas
A handmade, DIY chapbook from 2010.
Full of nose-grabbing, backwoods exploring, expropriations and other poety prose.
Cachitos
A DIY art zine collaboration with Jorge Galván Flores from 2003.
Full of photos of murals from Houston's East End—unicorns, big-lipped fish, Selena, pool-playing bulls, crawfish, mustachioed beauty queens and a fading historical singularity.
Multi-Kid #1-5
A DIT (Do It Together) compilation zine from the late 90s that I made with a crew of friends.
Full of black boxes, kids, race, class, gender, sex, bands, riot grrrl, and more. As Elizabeth Badurina writes in a review of the first issue of the zine, “a post-futurist dream with an unusual structure and a visual impact that's like a bastard child of Dada and Lichtenstein. It's jam-packed with art and content [and tackles| issues of race and media, women's rights, pregnancy scares, a very serious article on an Indian natural disaster from a personal perspective, and American politics as usual. Class and gender are definitely not sacred cows with this crowd.”