Current Reads

Writing at the seam of the internal world and the material one.

Tension Studies

In Tension Studies, a domme's client becomes a lover and a lover becomes a client but it is a relationship with a weaver's wooden loom which is the most intimate of them all. Through the frame of the loom, tension lines trembling between human and nonhuman experience interlock to reveal a text/ile dense with phenomenologies of longing, touch and the dangers of encounter.

Commissioned by The Lab, San Francisco, with funding from the Gerbode Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and additional support from DisArt.

Sming Sming Books.

“Themes of intimacy, power, chronic illness, and currencies spiral through Tension Studies in a striking and unexpectedly beautiful coil.”

—Amber Dawn, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

“Between the inanimate and the fleshly: wood and thread, muscle and bone. Between desire and the intellect: one body, and another's. Indira Allegra’s extraordinary, intimate volume Tension Studies weaves its way across all these gaps, making of them a connective tissue. It is a text to read slowly, appreciatively, and with loving care.”

-Glenn Adamson, Curator, Author: Craft: An American History

“I’m delighted Tension Studies exists. Indira Allegra writes with an ingenious, wide-ranging mind and heart.”

—R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness

What can an intergenerational conversation between three sick and disabled femmes reveal about the nature of choreography? Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness is a poetic treatise on choreography, moving the reader between spaces haunted with loneliness and the overwhelm of communion. The rhythmic phrases here discover how dance can be found in everyday survival.

Commissioned by The Lab, San Francisco, with funding from the Gerbode Foundation and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation with additional support by DisArt.

October 2024, English, 4 x 8.5 in, 28 pages, b&w, softcover, spiral-bound
Edition of 200
Sming Sming Books

“a rich poetic weaving…merges the logics and feelings of dance and writing, blending them beautifully into one humming rhythm…Indira Allegra’s poetic prose sucks you in and spits you out.”

—Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of knot body and The Good Arabs

Dear Mercury

Mercury is the messenger of the gods. This substack is an unusual short form advice and answer column imagining perspectives coming from non-human and more than human sources. Subscribe and become part of a community of people who share a belief that the answers we need can be found everywhere.