Selected Press

Interview with Keene Short on Failure to Comply

I realised that part of writing a book like this means writing up to the very point at which I don’t know enough to write anymore, which is why you see so many crumbling syntactical moves and blanknesses in the novel. So many of those things are the result of me thinking, There’s no word for this, no language, so I’m just gonna go: blank blank blank. They’re borne of the realisation that there is nothing else I can do to represent this, so I’ll non-represent it.

[…]

I also came to a conclusion that trapdoors are inevitable. Every reality, as much as it is invented, has that photo negative, that underside. Finding it won’t necessarily fix anything – it might make things worse – but the point isn’t to have a direction, but to know that the trapdoor is there.

Failure to Comply reviewed by Cassandra Whitaker

for Vagabond City Lit

Cavar’s control over language is luminous. Failure to Comply is stunning to read, insofar as that the text leaps. Cavar’s daring inversion of text expectations disrupts reading. […] Cavar’s wordplay engenders a hallucinatory, mirrored doubleness in so much that the landscapes of Failure to Comply are multi-faceted, but the main landscape is the human body, the speaker’s body, as she navigates existence.

Cavar’s nameless deviant protagonist [is] a symbol of resistance, holding on to their desires even as their mind decays under the pressure of the state. Rather than performatively giving up hope and resigning themself to oppression, this character instead evokes today’s foundational anarcho-nihilist idea that in circumstances of oppression, one must center the inherent joy of negating control. Failure To Comply is not revolutionary or utopian, but it is also not a cautionary tale. Instead, it is a manifesto of trans resilience, of choosing to live in an ungoverned body knowing the repression it entails, of poetry and intentional chaos, of willful conflict with the state. Without any concessions to a utopian future, [sarah] Cavar faces authoritarianism head-on, and in doing so, articulates a boldly anti-repression form of queer anarchy.

Failure to Comply reviewed by mk zariel

for Barrelhouse

I am an author, only eight letters from authoritarian. So, I need to make active choices with what I might call my authorial privilege: the choice not to govern, or to govern against governance. transMadness isn’t natural, even to those of us who are marked as psychiatrically disabled and/or gender-noncompliant. The term implies the vigilance with which I have written and edited this novel, vigilance against (among other things) the cop, the psychiatrist, the RSCH & its inevitable voice in my head.

Interview with S.G. Huerta on Failure to Comply.

In trans poetica

“What I am interested in doing is disrupting the binary between purity and impurity, both the one so explicit it at times felt satirical, to me, to write, and the more implicit one we uphold even in nominally radical communities. I’m not only talking about discourse on “respectability politics,” but also our collective unpreparedness to deal with Madness, crisis, harm, etc. in anti-carceral ways.

Part of being out there in the wilds, for Uncitizens, is not only to be “free from” the demands of the literal white-picket-fence imposed by RSCH governance. It is also freedom to hurt themselves and others. It is freedom to do things to their bodies that cause grievous damage and cannot be undone, with no adjudicating authority to determine who was and was not “in their right mind” when making that choice. [How do we…] navigate our love for each other when we all want to die, but when the government somehow wants us deader than our suicidal selves do? I don’t know, so I write.

Interview with Lor Gislason on Failure to Comply.

At LorMaggot