m. forajter
| background photo by v a e v e n |
ABOUT
M. Forajter is the current editor of Tarpaulin Sky Press & Magazine, a small press celebrating innovative trans-genre texts, which was once described by Vice as "beautifully startling and fucked and funny and tender and sad and putrid and glitter-covered all at once." Founded in 2003 by Christian Peet, Tarpaulin Sky Press has published titles from Jenny Boully, Johannes Göransson, Steven Dunn, Joyelle McSweeney, Rebecca Brown, Kim Gek Lin, Olivia Cronk, Aaron Aps, and more. You can buy Tarpaulin Sky's “hallucinatory … trance-inducing” ("Publishers Weekly “Best Summer Reads”) books directly from the press website.Heavily influenced by the Necropastoral, Forajter's work focuses on experimental poetics, the gothic, and ecology. Her essays on the anthropocene can be read at Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, and her post-ecological poem, "When I mourn a dying planet," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. You can read her series of prose-poems based on the life of climate activist Greta Thunberg at Another New Calligraphy.Her poetry has been published with Journal Petra, the Action Blog, Court Green, Impossible Task, Deluge, Witch Craft Magazine, and Udolpho: Vol. 2, among others. Forajter has been listed for several awards including an Honorable Mention in 2023's Big Other Readers' Choice Book Award, and as a semifinalist for Tarpaulin Sky Press' 2015 Book Award prior to becoming an editor at the press in 2017. Her chapbook after summer, a lyric poem about the horror of existing in the midst of ecological crisis, won the 2021 Radioactive Cloud Chapbook Prize.Her debut book, Interrogating the Eye, is a poetry-essay on the poetics of looking/the gaze, and is available from Schism Press. The book is available in paperback or as a free ebook.In 2022, she and Cat Ingrid Leeches curated the free literary study series, MIASMA collective, which sought to decentralize postgraduate educational experiences for creative writers. MIASMA's two series explored "Making Art at the End of the World" and "Visceral Poetics."M. Forajter taught for ten years in higher education, and now works in literary rights & permissions. She is married to the artist Michael Bramford, with whom she shares many lovely cats. She really likes Nirvana, werewolves, and medieval art.
BOOKS
Interrogating the Eye
Schism Press, 2022
Art, like voyeurism and idol worship, ultimately becomes a futile gesture towards the divine. Part poem, part image-text, part essay, Interrogating the Eye looks at the transparent, flickering image of the artist-self with longing, shame, and helpless despair. No polemic or manifesto or creed, but rather a lyric investigation of the yearning for art.
Available in paperback or ebook
Praise for Interrogating the Eye
M. Forajter's Interrogating the Eye shoots its eye-ray through the stigmata-cum-macular-hole where desecration and consecration are constantly turning inside-out. In this pinched, profound orbit, fraud needs our faith in a way God does not. Only hatred remains pure, and when devotion arrives its scandalous aperture stops the whole show. These are wild proceedings.
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
As a Catholic school kid, I regularly imagined, back at home in the velvet of night, that under my bed was a hole and inside that hole was a nest of snakes and they might come leaking out from the hole to swarm my feet and make of me a barefooted and glamorously tolerant Virgin Mary like the small statue I spent time staring at during each school day. Forajter’s book is like this.And it’s like Bataille’s naughty kids in their piss orgy, like Videodrome and the infectious VHS tape in The Ring and Bernini’s rendering of marble into impossible fabric.Interrogating the Eye contemplates the gaze and its relationship to guilt and martyrdom, ecstasy, the end of human history, tears, garbage, distance and immediacy, daisies, cherry trees, Kurt Cobain, the body as a poisoned-by-Capitalism fizz that bubbles with eyes. “[T]o watch a thing is to own it.”Emission theory (eyes emitting waves) may be dead, scientifically, but its potential for annunciating a poetics of looking is undeniably delicious—and Forajter folds all possible shadows of look into her work, which is packed like a ravenous and roving eye.Forajter’s speaker “want[s] to make-look like a spectacle. like a porno.” And because the gaze—in Forajter’s poetry-essaying inquiry into being AS an eye—is so leaky, the text is “[m]ore than a mirror of reality.” This book, like only some books can ever really do, invites the reader to contemplate their own image while reading. And that pleasure-shocks me, like seeing my secret bedtime snakes in someone else’s looking glass. “[I]s there a gun in me? / in my mirror is the opposite.”
—Olivia Cronk, author of Skin Horse
"My eye is a wolf's mouth," asserts M. Forajter's Interrogating the Eye, catalyzing curiosity about the answers that might emerge from a wolf's mouth. In this astonishing book of poem and image, Forajter grapples with the paradoxes of being alive—how?—in bodies that simultaneously isolate and unite us. What do we do with the faulty material of our belonging in the world, and with each other? The "eye" is the "I" here too: "(to see & be seen is the crux/problem of poetry)." It's the excruciating pinch point certain bodies occupy at the moment when intense scrutiny meets and crosses total indifference. This is where we are, on Forajter's pages, in the permeable bodies that are her words. This is where we are in our own bodies too, our eyes joining on the page and asking, asking. Here is our "worldly burden, in all its perfect symmetry": each other, ourselves.
—Jay Besemer, author of Theories of Performance
Selections of Work
Chapbooks
Marmalade Girl, dancing girl press. 2016
White Deer, dancing girl press. 2014
Poetry
Action Books Blog, Winter 2022. Selections from “A Horrible World”
Impossible Task, Summer 2021. “anti-greta 1-24”
Rejection Lit, Fall 2020. “Untitled.”
Deluge, Fall 2019. “When I Mourn a Dying Planet,” “Trash Prayers 1-4”
Burning House Press, September 2019. “Myself the Photograph.”
Burning House Press, October 2019. “Myself the Photograph, Pt 2.”
The Journal Petra, Winter 2017. “Your Keyboard is Sticky, Stop Crying.”
Witchcraft Magazine. Spring, 2016. “Hymn for Bear-Girls”, “The Castle.” Print.
Tarpaulin Sky. Summer, 2015. “Selections from YIELD.”
Court Green. Spring, 2015. “Slander.” Print.
Prose & Reviews
Tarpaulin Sky, Summer 2020. “Review of Emily Carr’s Name Your Bird Without a Gun.”
Tarpaulin Sky, Winter 2019. “Ars Necrotica: Technicolor Death Dress.”
Tarpaulin Sky. Fall 2015. “Review of Danielle Vogel's Between Grammars.
Tarpaulin Sky. Spring, 2015. “Review of Justin Limoli's Bloodletting in Minor Scales A Canvas in Arms.