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Instructions for Living by Michael Workman
Instructions for Living is a collection of performance scores, civic prompts, and poetic directives that invite readers to reconsider how they move through space, language, memory, and one another. Blurring the boundaries between choreography, writing, sculpture, and social practice, the book offers a series of instructions-each designed to activate the body as both instrument and inquiry.

Across its pages, simple gestures unfold into complex propositions. Stand still and observe how architecture instructs you. Imagine a small circle at your feet and refuse to step outside it. Choose a single word; break it into sounds until breath reshapes your spine. Approach a sculptural element as if it has asked for help. These prompts operate as "choreographic objects" in textual form: frameworks that structure attention, alter posture, and reveal the invisible systems-civic, emotional, historical-that pattern our behavior.

Rooted in Michael Workman's decades-long interdisciplinary practice, Instructions for Living draws from performances, workshops, and exhibitions developed in collaboration with dancers, artists, and communities. The scores reflect an ongoing investigation into how bodies are shaped by architecture and urbanism, how movement encodes power, how grief and memory inhabit gesture, and how even the smallest shift-an inch, a pause, a reversal-can become choreographic microcosms.

Both intimate and collective, the book functions as a portable studio and a public tool. It can be read privately, enacted alone, or activated in groups. It asks participants not simply to perform, but to notice: the routes others carve through space, the ways presence can be rehearsed or undone, the difference between becoming data and becoming deviation.

At once poetic manual, civic meditation, and choreographic archive, Instructions for Living proposes that instruction is not control but invitation. The body is a sentence. The space is punctuation. Between them, a new language is always forming.

AFFLUVIA: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” by Johanna Drucker
Affluvia is a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” Approximately 60,000 words, the text is focused entirely on tracking the ecological costs of the author making coffee and feeding her cats every morning. The actions take less than ten minutes, but they are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts—the lifecycle of the beans, coffee grinder, coffee maker, pet food, aluminum can, label, bowls and spoon—and profiles each in turn.

Biography of a Villain by Michael Workman
Michael Workman’s Biography of a Villain is an uncompromising, genre-defying 700+ page graphic novel that delves into the psychological unraveling of a man entangled in the creation of the most powerful weapon ever conceived. A hybrid of sci-fi, surrealism, and political thriller, the book follows a clandestine government experiment that harnesses human emotions as a weaponized force, leading to the formation of an agency so secret that even its own creators are systematically erased from existence.

At the center of this nightmarish descent is Charlie Chaser, a man whose fractured psyche becomes both the driving force and the battlefield of the novel. As he wields a weapon capable of reshaping reality itself, his mind splinters into an intricate maze of hallucinations, conspiracies, and brutal self-destruction. The story shifts across dimensions—both literal and psychological—blurring the lines between prophecy and paranoia, fiction and reality, perception and delusion. Workman constructs an immersive, fever-dream narrative that collapses time, identity, and agency, forcing both protagonist and reader into a constantly shifting landscape of uncertainty and dread.

The Genocide House by Robert Kloss

In The Genocide House—the American—maelstrom—The world—delirium—

Villages—slaughtered and burned—Cities eradicated—in atomic flame—

Young women lie—yearning—in valleys—incinerated—

Dying men—dream of war—murder—Their—dreams of blood pooling—Their dreams—of bodies—posed—erotic—

Visions of flame—Clouds atomic—rising and swallowing—cities—Television screens—winking and shimmering—visions of flame—clouds—atomic—

Aged women—their recollections—sweltering—

Young men—languid—vile—Licking—devouring—Their humid minds—shimmer with—war—murder—Dreams of blood—pooling—Their bodies—posed—erotic—

Bridge serialized Darya Foroohar’s “My Eyes, Your Gaze” on social media throughout fall 2023, and in a flip-book in the Bridge Member’s Section, culminating in publication of the full graphic novella in spring / summer 2024. From the theories of urbanist Georg Simmel to the bars of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, there has been no dearth of work exploring how cultural expectations of physical presentation have shaped people’s relationships to both their bodies and those around them. My Eyes, Your Gaze is a graphic essay on the cultural perception and conception of the body, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. Using her own experiences as a thread tying the piece together, Foroohar engages with both queer, anticolonial, and feminist theory in addition to modern pop culture to explore the ways in which the concept of the physical body is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism, misogyny, and queerphobia.

An Archaeology of Holes by Stacy Hardy
An Archaeology of Holes is an excavation and an evisceration of love, loneliness, alienation and what it means to be human. Working between fabulism, dark realism and autofiction, these stories propose the creative and liberatory possibilities of holes, which are everywhere: in bodies, in the ransacked earth, in erased lives and memories, in forgotten loves and lovers and the endless massacres.

“I welcome the way Stacy Hardy’s fiction gives me the shivers, disturbs my understanding of myself and the world around me. Her stories guide me, sometimes lodestar, other times mischievous will-o-wisps, always revelatory. Through lenses both forensic and fantastic, Hardy holds up to her strange light the human body and the body politic. For fans of writers like Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Rikki Ducornet, Kathryn Davis, or Carmen Maria Machado, for fans of crossing the veil to slip off their skin and dancing around in their bones, of picking through their own trash, of rediscovering themselves after despair, heartbreak, and loneliness, Archaeology of Holes is a most perfect companion.”

— Danielle Pafunda, Author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel, Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize

“Audacious and masterful, every story collected in Stacy Hardy’s An Archaeology of Holes delivers a new and unexpected euphoria. Each story promises intellectual enticement and emotional entanglement, brutal and ugly and real: Stacy Hardy is prophetess and I will follow her anywhere.”

— Lily Hoang, Author of Changing, Winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“These wild, weird, amazing stories create life, create the best and most vibrant art, out of the many ways that death is absorbed into our worlds, our minds, our bodies. From bullet holes to black holes, from mouth holes to safe holes to buildings with holes in their centers, Stacy Hardy’s writing blasts its way from absence into vital and unforgettable presence. When the extreme violence of misogyny and racialized capitalism becomes a normal part of our life and landscape, it is art and great writing that helps us see both our damage and our potential escape routes. Archaeology of Holes is a collection that will stay with me for a very long time.”

— Daniel Borzutzky, Author of The Performance of Becoming Human, Winner of the National Book Award