Beginning with a meditation on the affirmative potential of no alongside the dissident capacity of yes-saying as a species of refusal. The Yes of the No advocates different models of daily practice through which to perform everyday life – the as is – in the subjunctive key of what if or even what might be.

Existing in the space between imaginative proposition and a call to action, The Yes of the No is an assemblage of provocations, proposals and potential ways of operating – ranging from navigating the city and inhabiting the margins to errant acts of reading; from preparing for the unexpected to learning how to ‘not know’, from minor acts of singular sedition to collective expressions of an insurgent ‘we’.

One of the most unique books by one of the most compelling artist-writers today, The Yes of the No is the first collection of writings by Emma Cocker. The book draws together selected fragments of writing produced in dialogue with, parallel to and as art practice (from between 2007–2016). The book is organised into 111 pieces of highly playful and poetic prose. Emma Cockers work wittily explores many themes; actions like ‘doing and undoing’, concepts like the fabric of time and interpreting the real meaning of words, common and uncommon.

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Who’s this shadowy figure? An appendage in a trench coat, cat’s eye lenses, a hat atop a strangely curling wig… in this two-faced publication, Evelyn Wh-ell presents Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a science fiction dick tip diptych.

A diptych is any object with two flat plates which form a pair, often attached by a hinge. The diptych hinges on an image, or, maybe more accurately, becomes unhinged through an image, and in its unhinging cleaves open a wormhole; a fall between two surfaces; the surface of the pages of a magazine; of sunglasses; of a glistening dildo that is pointing right at you.

An ontological gender-fuck of comedies, Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole calls on the queer feminist possibility of science fiction with camp audacity. With an absurdist style which speaks to the punk brutality of the likes of Kathy Acker and John Waters, Wh-ell twists mundane activities such as going to a greasy spoon or watching television into sites for dismembering gender, penetration, iconography and worship.

As readers, we are led through the church, the image-as-hole, down the high street and to confession, where we sit in hallowed pews resplendent in fake tan. Our Narrator plays games with us, we paint ourselves in Her image, which is only ever a hole to fall through – and again, flipped over.

With two stories horizontally placed, neither takes precedence over the other but skews an image and replicates it. Circulating the penetrator and the penetrated, Wh-ell shows us how to escape yourself without even trying, resulting in a convergence. We follow Wh-ell’s paranoiac dioramas like the upward curve of our pinkish rod, to the centrefold wormhole.

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Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer, artist and critical theorist interested in queer/trans aesthetics. Their writing has been published by Another Gaze, Cambridge Literary Review, permeable barrier, b l u s h lit, and Sticky Fingers Publishing’s Dead Lovers series. They are also a 2021-2023 Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

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Sticky Fingers is an intra-dependant feminist publisher based in London. It consists of designers and writers Kaiya Waerea (she/her) & Sophie Paul (she/her).

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The Last Acts of Saint Fuckyou by Bern Porter was first published in 1975.

This new edition presents an additional introduction, transcribed from a reading given by Bern Porter on May 19,1985, in Madison, Maine.

Bern Porter wrote this poem, The Last Acts of Saint Fuckyou, which were presented in alphabetical order, with the same number of acts for each letter.

Edition of 500, 2021

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