LYRIC COERCIONS: ON IMAGE, Ethan Fortuna

Summer 2026

LYRIC COERCIONS: ON IMAGE is an essay sequence synthesized from two of Ethan Fortuna’s recent manuscripts: body of the bather (forthcoming with Antiphony Press, 2028) & LYRIC COERCIONS. Moving between essay, poem, and pinting, this textual experiment meditates on grammar’s preemptive ontic bounds and the forced foreclosures of “the unsayable.” Each piece takes up the convention of the image to differently explore how its conceived function within the genre of poetry entangles with broader cultural pathologies that bolster heteropatriarchal and ableist thought-forms. Loosening the work of description from that of diagnosis, Fortuna’s sequence strives to expansively theorize vitally bewildering relations between sensation and language.

Ethan Fortuna is a trans writer, visual artist, and educator. His work can be found in Chicago Review, Blue Bag Press, Black Sun Lit and elsewhere; his full-length poetry collection, body of the bather, is forthcoming with Antiphony Press in 2028. More at ethanfortuna.com.