Launch of Significant Others by frank r jagoe

with
Remi Graves
Erin Holly
frank r jagoe
Allie Oliver
EK Myerson
Lou Lou Sainsbury
Daniella Valz Gen

PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE IS NO BAR BUT YOU ARE WELCOME TO BYOB.

‘Significant Others is a fully grown and highly original manuscript. It is a remarkable and beautiful piece of writing which forges a new language of material aesthetics to think and write beyond the human. There is a fluency and elasticity of invention here, resonating with the processes of artistic creation and encounter. Exciting, passionate and surprising.’
– Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price, judges of the 2024 Prototype Prize

The world is always speaking to you. Held together by a shared language, all beings are constantly, endlessly chatting away, saying something or other. What this language constitutes may vary, but all matter is alive, and it always has something to say.

Significant Others is not a world of magical realism, but a different means of describing the existing world. It offers an opposition to the reductive logic of Western capitalism which views other-than-humans as only resources for extraction. Other beings feature as metaphors, or omens, but also as fleshly, agential creatures. Often the encounters are erotically charged, using Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as an intentionality that can permeate all aspects of life.

In one story, the protagonist attempts to figure out how to have sex with a bathroom mirror; in another, a catfish drags itself through Piccadilly Circus tube station with an uncomfortable level of intimacy with all the surfaces they come into contact with; a person births a stone from their rectum; a lump of topaz in someone’s brain triggers their depression; a human tries to talk to a limestone cliff using touch; a swan drinks the bathwater of their human lover.

This book is a collection of different fictionalised narratives, but across them they chart, somewhat anachronistically, a journey from total withdrawal to reimmersion in the ebb and flow of living, alongside a growing recognition that isolation is never truly possible. Life insists.

so
many
people
everywhere.