An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex — in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.

Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.

Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah's The Rage Letters — set in Montreal and beyond — are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters' desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.

Valérie Bah is a multidisciplinary Québécois artist, filmmaker, documentarian, photographer, and writer. Bah's first collection, The Rage Letters, was translated from the French by Kama La Mackerel and published by Metonymy Press. Subterrane is their first book in English.

Valérie Bah's profile page

Kama La Mackerel is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, cultural mediator, and literary translator who hails from Mauritius and now lives in Montreal. Their work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, and self- and collective empowerment. Kama's artistic practice spans across textile, visual, digital, poetic, and performative work, and is at once narrative and theoretical, at once personal and political.

Kama's work has been published both online and in print, including pieces in the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy (2015) and We Mark Your Memory: writings from descendants of indenture (2018). Their translation of Kai Cheng Thom's From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea was published in French by Éditions Dent-de-lion in spring 2019 and their co-translation of Vivek Shraya's I'm Afraid of Men was published in French by Éditions du remue-ménage in winter 2020.

Kama La Mackerel's profile page