Anthology of feminist poetry from Russia. Assembles the feminist poets who have palpably changed the Russian language over the last decade. Against the backdrop of state violence and oppression, this is electric dissent in pursuit of a democratic, egalitarian future. A lexicon for revolution worldwide.
But this poetry’s brilliance lies in its rhythm, energy, and depth of emotion; in its universal relevance rather than applied politics.

F Letter takes its name from the Russian-language journal F pis’mo. Since 2017, this has been the center of feminist and LGBTQ+ writing, protest, and activism across Eastern Europe and Russia. It is rare that literature can wholly reinvent a language – and yet, F Letter has done so at the scale of the letter itself, coining, for instance, the “feminitives” that are now an everyday controversy in Russian society. The danger that the authors confront for such transgressive work cannot be underestimated. Many (like F pis’mo’s founding editor, Galina Rymbu) are forced into exile under threat of draconian prison sentences, on charges of “pornography” and “gay propaganda.” Others have been added to the “kill list” of the hate group, Pila, which was likely behind the murder of Yelena Gregoriva. And yet, these writers continue to organize; most recently leading the protest against the arrest of the young illustrator Yulia Tsvetkova. “My Vagina,” the last poem in the anthology, was composed by Rymbu as its rallying cry.

As Eileen Myles writes in their foreword, “there are lines like a curse that yodel radiantly out of the toothy mouth of the curser.. lines that are just so fucking metonymic in their grace…I’ve been invited to witness. To smell the crowd and be charged by history.”

Appropriately, what concerns Rymbu are the contemporary uses of poetry as “a form of public speech and thought, written as if there is someone else present, someone concrete.” The aim is that, out of the depths of the failed post-Soviet project, a book itself can create “islands of freedom.” A little orange-book that exists as a grounds for feminist movements globally.

Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, Ainsley Morse.
Foreword by Eileen Myles.
Texts by Lida Yusupova, Daria Serenko, Lolita Agamalova, Elena Kostyleva, Egana Djabbarova, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Georgievskaya, Stanislava Mogileva, Ekaterina Simonova, Nastya Denisova, Yulia Podlubnova, Galina Rymbu.

Softcover, published in 2020, 7×11 cm, 256 pages
bilingual edition (English / Russian)

ISOLARII’s tiny books

Founded in 2020, ISOLARII revives an extinct literary genre—the Renaissance “island book,” or isolario—to map the world’s most defiant and unruly intellects. ISOLARII are tiny, the size of a pack of cigarettes, but potent, maintaining the ethos that the most expansive ideas can be held in the hand. Authored by figures who interrogate the shape of the avant-garde, what it is, and what it could become, these volumes offer readers fully formed, high voltage ideas that can be finished during a commute yet felt for weeks. Editor of this series is Sebastian Clark.