There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations.
Read MoreLocust #9 Call for Submissions: CONFLICT
Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.
Read MoreCall for Submissions! ~ Locust #8, “The Utopia Principle” AND Imago #2!
We can still dream… for now. Throughout all of the darkness, we have managed to hope for something better. And behind that hope, there is always that word. Less a word than an idea, a longing, whose open description has come to be scoffed at in adult conversation. Utopia.
Read MoreGive the Gift of Locust (Review)!
The discounted gift subscription rate will be available through January 15, 2022. In addition to the standard subscription packages, all gift subscriptions will include an additional copy of Locust #6 and Imago #1.
Read MoreLocust at Historical Materialism Online 2021
The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November.
Read MoreLocust #7: “Missing Days” ~ Call For Submissions!
“Are you employed sir?”
“Employed?”
“You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”
“Is this a… what day is this?”
-- exchange between Jeffrey Lebowski and the Dude
Read MoreLocust #6 ~ Call for Submissions!
So send us what you have – your art, your poetry, your fiction, your odd ephemera – and remember that we only ask it be weird, strange, experimental, and that it cling to the dreams of liberation and the hopes of radical transformation.
Read MoreLocust #5 ~ Call for Submissions!
How strange does sunlight seem to us now? Or seeing someone we haven’t seen in a year? Perhaps… even shaking hands with them? What is the odd-but-familiar sensation we call touch? And what does it mean on this dying rock? What does it mean for our hope and despair to be simultaneously so attenuated?
Read MoreLocust #4 ~ Call for Submissions!
Submissions are now open. As always, we want your words and images, your prose and poetry, your “this doesn’t quite fit in a normal world, in more than one way.” It needs a place. We have always sought to give it a place. We reckon, as the world spasms and unravels in so many unpredictable directions, it will continue to need a place.
Read MoreEvent: Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy (Thursday Nov. 12)
Join us on Thursday, November 12 (18:30 GMT, 1:30pm EST, 12:30pm CST, 10:30am PST) for a Locust Review panel discussion at this year’s (virtual) Historical Materialism conference. Our panel, focusing on “Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy” will feature Locust editorial collective members Alexander Billet on “The Case for Critical Irrealism,” Holly Lewis on “How Collective Dreams Can End the Sleep of Reason,” Adam Turl on “Their Weird and Ours: Socialist Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism,” and Anupam Roy on “Representational Impossibility: A Propagandist’s Urgencies and Crisis.” More information follows below.
Read MoreSWARMCAST is coming!!!
Attention humans. We at Locust Review are pleased to announce SWARMCAST, a monthly podcast on the weird, the political, and where they intersect in fiction, art, poetry and creativity. Hosted by LR editors Tish Markley, Adam Turl and Alexander Billet, SWARMCAST will feature discussions of the radical weird, history and current events, interviews with artists, writers, and musicians, readings of poetry and fiction from contributors to LR, and even the occasional comedy performance.
Read MoreSUBMIT (art, poems, stories, gestures) to Locust #3
Now here we are. A global pandemic. We are stuck at home, that voice asking “what about the rent?” or “what happens if you lose your job?” or can’t get unemployment getting louder and louder. Or we are saddled with that ignominious label of “essential worker,” unprotected, likely underpaid, always exhausted, always at risk.
Read MoreLocust #2 is (finally) in the Mail
Locust Review #2 is finally in the mail. We’re sorry that we were so delayed mailing out the issue. Of course this four-week delay was largely due to the pandemic and its related social crises and catastrophes, struggles and horrors.
Read MoreAnnouncing Issue #2 of Locust Review!
You cannot stop us. We are legion. We are Locust. Our second issue will be coming back from the printers soon, and it contains a new passel of the bizarre and bombastic, the cosmically communist. You know you want to read. You know you want to subscribe. A copy of Locust Review issue two will give you art from Adam Ray Adkins, Leslie Lea, Anupam Roy, James Walsh, Sambaran Das, John McVay, plus a continuation of Tish Markley and Adam Turl’s Born Again Labor Museum. There will be poetry and fiction from Alexander Billet, Tish Markley, Adam Marks, Frank Fucile, Lane Powell, Mike Linaweaver, Adam Turl, Evan Edwards and many others.
Read MoreSUBMIT (to Locust #2)
You’re an artist, poet, author, playwright, an unearthly creator of the fantastic and terrifying. You’ve decided to destroy capitalism. Only social movements and struggle, from below, of the exploited and oppressed, can overthrow capitalism. Nevertheless, art is a human necessity, and an arena for the contestation of the imaginary. To that end, Locust Review, a quarterly socialist publication of critical irrealist art and literature, needs you.
Read MoreLocust Review at London HM
Two editors from Locust Review, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl, will be speaking on art related topics in London at the annual Historical Materialism (HM) conference (November 7 - 10, 2019), sponsored by the Historical Materialism journal and book series. Turl has organized a panel with fellow artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb (more information below). Other LR editors will also be speaking on matters not directly related to art and aesthetics (but still awesome) and attending the conference as well. Holly Lewis will be speaking on two panels, presenting on “Queer Liberation and Marx’s Ecology” and acting as a discussant for the book launch of Ashley Bohrer’s Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (2019). In addition, Adam Turl’s fellow editor at Red Wedge Magazine, Jordy Cummings, will be presenting on “Bruno Bauer, Class Reductionist: A Strategic reading of On the Jewish Question in 2019.” The theme of this year’s HM is “Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism, and How to Survive Tomorrow.” See below for more information on the art and aesthetics presentations (basically we copied and pasted the “abstracts.”) The exact schedule for the conference is forthcoming.
Read MoreGet Locusts Delivered
We offer six different levels of subscription via our Patreon. With multiple subscription rates, as affordable as $1 or $3 a month, you can get every irrealism packed issue of Locust Review delivered straight to your door through the anachronistic marvel of universal postal service. Our subscription model aims to be very affordable as well as emphasize the importance of the material object/journal in light of the corporate enclosures of the Internet. Therefore, all contributors get two dozen copies of each issue to distribute; and we encourage our readers to order multiple copies as well.
Read MoreAnnouncing Locust Review
We are pleased to announce the first issue of Locust Review — forthcoming in late October 2019. Locust Review is a socialist journal of the radical weird. Printed four times a year in relatively affordable and anachronistic black and white newsprint, as well as online, we will be offering up art, fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction, and whatever else we think may directly fuel the imagination and hunger for a different future in our drab end times.
Read More