Bhanu Kapil

Una McCormack

David Naimon

Marilyn Strathern

Nisha Ramayya

Canisia Lubrin

Federico Campagna

Daniel Heath Justice

Theo Downes-Le Guin

Shoshone Collective

Standard Deviation

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own. 

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined.

The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin

The Word for World

Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya's debut poetry collection, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice, and bliss. Seeking a way home, Ramayya discovers that homecoming - the impossible return - is a process of make-believe and magical thinking across Britain, India, and the infinite expanse. Ramayya's visionary poetry traces an opalescent, treacherous world by way of heritage, ritual, and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. Meditating on diasporic identity and relationships, her writing roams the Indo-European language family, finds consolation in genealogies of decolonial and anti-racist resistance, and roots itself in the movements between ancient Sanskrit texts and contemporary feminist prose poems. In Ramayya's hands, the body assumes many forms as love produces many states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self. Desire, eroticism, and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury, and destruction. Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power - the poems in this book never leave love's hold.

States of the Body Produced by Love

Nisha Ramayya

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