The Utopians

Grace Nissan

Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called “THE WORLD” about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.

'Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times. Nissan’s remixed no-place reverberates with (political) desire’s painfully promising residue, something like the stain left on a mirror by a backwards look at ruin. Squeeze the mirror! Break language with language! I’m grateful for this book.' – Hannah Black

'Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? And why does that process 'look so much like suffering … like suffering plus change'? Nissan’s translation—irreverent, taunting, sometimes affectionate, 'based on death'—wrestles the communist project into a formal principle, in which abolition or invention is only possible through reworking the material of actually existing hell. It’s as nimble and daring an experiment as it’s useful to think with.' – Kay Gabriel