FUCK WITH THE FUTURE
FUCK WITH THE FUTURE
Gap Riot’s 11th season is a look back to look forward feminist fuck-it-up powerhouse party. We’re working two incredible author/artists on two incredible small-run small-press visual/experimental poetry artefacts and they are badass and beautiful. Here’s a little sneak peak at what we have in the works, babes.
Our great thrill as small press publishers is when a submission arrives in our inbox from a writer we’ve never met that is so completely our style but also surprises us and opens us up to something new. Victoria Spence Naik’s chapbook get ready with me blew us away when we first saw it and we can’t wait to share it with you.
About the work (in the author’s own badass words):
get ready with me captures grotesque moments in the care routine of an aging poet, pausing for an up-nostril view of the legacy of 90’s tv violence, the post-prime bloom of peonies, and the contemporary desire to bare/bear it all for the camera. Illustrated and interwoven with visual commentary, this work provides a step-by-step guide to facing your creative prime amidst furious predictions of imagined decline.
Victoria Spence Naik is a Canadian artist and writer living in Hanoi, Vietnam. She loves clean pen lines, complex images, and the layers of meaning that emerge when you place text and image together on a page. Find her work online and on Instagram.
OH and our OTHER great thrill as small press publishers is getting a submission from an amazing poet/scholar whose work you admire and have been following for ages and whose delightful, genre-bending, patriarchy-exploding work lights our feminist and poet fires all at once. And damn, Melanie Dennis Unrau’s gorgeous Grocery Slip set us ablaze.
About the work (in the author’s own badass words):
This long poem is a hand-traced poem made by reorganizing letters from a grocery list found in the Sidney Clarke Ells fonds at Library and Archives Canada. Sid Ells (1878-1971), also known as the “father of the tar sands,” was married to Irene Currie. There isn’t much about Irene or their domestic life in the fonds, so it was neat to find this piece of paper, with the list crossed off, in the fonds. The list is in both Irene’s and Sid’s hands, and my uneducated guess from tracing their letters is that Irene was left-handed and Sid was right-handed. This poem haunts, disrupts, queers an archive and critiques the tar sands.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Métis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025). Her latest title is Goose (Assembly Press, 2025).