Dr. Cavar 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 ✡️
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cavar.bsky.social
Dr. Cavar 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 ✡️
@cavar.bsky.social
6.1K followers 700 following 1K posts
transMad & queercrip writer, editor, phd-haver. cooler on goodreads. edits manywor(l)ds.

wrote FAILURE TO COMPLY (featherproof).
repped by Noah Grey Rosenzweig.

🕸️ www.cavar.club
📖 goodreads.com/cavar
🧨 bookshop.org/p/books/failure-to-comply/20969806
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cavar.bsky.social
find my pieces & audios here.

and check out everyone's incredible work!

anmly.org/ap41/sarah-c...
I am learning how to be weakness leaving the body. I am licking citric atlas critic acid off my fingers. Every day is keep doing my tasks keep reminding and head down. Nobody minds the back kept slant until straight again. My name are looking for rooms among all the names the all the other names. My Sarah looking for its girl among its mother. A name is looking for more cells to burn. I am learning to learn appropriating the hurts of others Is the wrong kind of sorrow. Doesn’t suit this age of me. Doesn’t suit this plane of me, too flat, too full, Too echoes. I have viewed suffering as a sign of power. Why Am I suffering at the edge of submission? I just encountered a sharp ugly comfort But it was not the product of my mind. It is hard to want to die when everything is wanting to die and hard to live.
October 15, 2025 at 3:23 PM
cavar.bsky.social
thank you @anmlymag.bsky.social / @sarahclark.bsky.social for making space for autistic protest poetry & inviting me to introduce the issue. as i read through these works, i feel i can see the future of our craft.

anmly.org/autistic-pro...
The small something could be a creature, perhaps a technology. Maybe, in more abstract terms, a political orientation or set of social norms. Looking back, I now understand “A small something” as part of a larger body of autistic poetic work, which, in my view, are always and already “protesting” neuronormative creative and political frameworks. Thinking back to the misleading figure of the savant and this demand for autistic exceptionality, it seems to me that to impute autistic life into our creative practices, to document it as it exists and not as our neurotypical counterparts with it were, then we must turn to a form prepared to resist normative grammars and restrictive relationships to language, activity, and achievement. After all, these very restrictions—this sociocultural “common sense”—are what got us into this mess in the first place: demands for tact over honesty, ambiguity over courage. Instead, I want live in a poetics which refuses common sense, a poetics of autism.
October 15, 2025 at 3:23 PM
cavar.bsky.social
a new poem about one of my/our names in @petrichorlit.bsky.social :)

petrichormag.com/28-sarah-cavar
I follow my knowledge to neck solar plexus waist spoon-hips pale thighs. And so follows the sun in hasty afterwards. A small opacity of lies between our bodies: mine & theirs & rayoflight’s. When I bow service in the shadow of our name we drapes me in their clothing. When I kiss their feet they render us a broken prince. Pronouns are erotic, though this is difficult to notice still harder to admit: I: am: I: a narrow panic, lightness tightened to a throaty vowel. This, I am told, her body does, spoons favor from my open mouth. Snaps elastics of my flesh. I do not want to know anymore, third penitent in the booth of our name. But my sun is just a star, turning at the horror of our closeness.
October 2, 2025 at 12:03 AM
cavar.bsky.social
Happening at Barnes and Noble Smithfield Rhode Island!!!! 2pm today AKA in half an hour!!!!!
August 2, 2025 at 5:34 PM
cavar.bsky.social
here's what I had to say:
Download now! sundresspublications.com/e-anthologies “Delicate Machinery takes survivorship poetics beyond catharsis––it is a beautifully curated gathering place for poets writing the unwritable, without apology. The poems collected here capture the beauty and intensity of living on after experiences sexual violence within a sociopolitical climate that denies us bodily autonomy.” – [sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis
July 28, 2025 at 11:26 PM
cavar.bsky.social
and furthermore
July 25, 2025 at 7:16 PM
cavar.bsky.social
very pleased to announce that my tribute to the dolls, "mushroom girls in love: redux", was nominated for @sundresspub.bsky.social Best of the Net by @fifthwheelpress.bsky.social ! <333
mushroom girls in love: redux [sarah] Cavar Themes: monster girls, yuri Love comes in all sizes. Blame it on those gods I guess. Plenty of inserts with explanations, illness, operations, and even a dastardly royal plot. While this fungi world may seem a yuri paradise (Adorable concept + a shroompedia) I recommend only for the yuri completionist or mycological fanatic. if you’re looking for something that “makes sense” and “is cohesive,” look somewhere else. (1) When mushroom girls fall in love, fertilizer mute-dances on their undulating rhizome. When they fall, their carrotlove greens top 4 orange bottom. | Fuck | makes a plump round sound. Morphology: Mushroom girls are also tight. In the right ways. Vast, too, like hazes mazes and ramps. When they tangle they can feel their beating insides breathe together, gilled undervents turning into breathing mouths. Mushroom girls say | let me love you with my million miniature mouths. | Mushroom girls treat love like a challenge. And mushroom girls will not back down without a fight. 1 Found text fragments compiled from online reviews and descriptions of Mushroom Girls in Love by Kei Murayama (Seven Seas Press, 2018) Etiology: Mushroom girls emerge in damp conditions. Prefer the rain. Prefer-prefer the period just after, not so that they might smell the dewgrass or stare into emergent rainbows, but so they might snuggle deep inside the mud, make their beds in it. A bed of leaves and twigs. A bed of bugs. A bed of eating. Mushroom girls eat dirt and perhaps each other. Epistemology: Mushroom girls a million ways & birth more girls on every edge. Think in rain and damp and moss and muck. Make love to yucky things. But mushroom girls know no yuck: everything is mushroom girls given time & tenderness. Phenomenology: There is no mushroom girl. Mushroom girls are plural already. One implies another, because mushroom girls cannot make it alone. Today storms beat the windows and the doors and swinging tree limbs back and forth and drains emit their alto gurgle and frogs & salamanders dance the edges. Dirt makes brown-damp paste. Worms wind manylooping notions. Under mooncover, mushroom girls make the most egregious haste. But slugs come first.
July 23, 2025 at 11:23 PM
cavar.bsky.social
Somehow, #phdone!!!! Today I walked at graduation and am officially Dr. Cavar. Thank you everyone for your support!!!!!!!
Me, Cavar, in a hood, cap and gown and keffiyeh, standing with my advisor, Colin milburn, in red regalia.
June 13, 2025 at 1:51 AM
cavar.bsky.social
you can also find a rich trove of autistic poetry & poetics in Mel Baggs (z'l)'s archive. Sie wrote as a sibling to the redwoods and oaks of her home, to the water, to the rocks, and to anyone of any species denied rightful access to personhood.
I’ve learned to sustain myself In tiny drops of water From oases so small They’re invisible To the naked eye You flow over jagged rocks Like a mountain spring That reminds me I’ve forgotten how To be thirsty Over the trees I see A flock of birds Made out of nothing but light A flock of birds Waiting for your final flight So don’t be afraid Don’t be afraid when they come They’re only coming To welcome you home When it’s time to fly away Then fly away Don’t hold out too long Trying to stay You have the whole of eternity To fly into
April 17, 2025 at 7:43 PM
cavar.bsky.social
Can I be real for a minute
April 15, 2025 at 12:41 AM
cavar.bsky.social
visual aid. don’t miss the free feet pic guys it’s a rare one
April 6, 2025 at 7:09 PM
cavar.bsky.social
Trans Horror was so packed last night I'm still wordless with joy. It was beyond my wildest dreams as to what an AWP offsite could be, thanks to so many amazing writers and a truly fantastic audience. Ty everyone who made it possible.

(photo creds to @lunareyhall.com + @cdeskilson.bsky.social !!)
March 29, 2025 at 4:01 PM
cavar.bsky.social
Out like a Lamb is TONIGHT, 7pm @ the Wayfarer!!!!!!! I’ll be wearing my cow print pants and reading about trans dyke cyborg sex YEEHAW come through
March 26, 2025 at 8:44 PM
cavar.bsky.social
here's my silly little awp graphic. excited to rep @manyworlds.place at Out Like a Lamb + sign with @featherproof.bsky.social + @whaleroadreview.bsky.social.

Plus, check out the offsite I'm co-hosting with the incredible @cdeskilson.bsky.social, A Night of Trans Horror!
March 23, 2025 at 7:28 PM
cavar.bsky.social
@poemsandcake.bsky.social and I had a magical chat at Firestorm Co-Op last summer just a week after FAILURE TO COMPLY was published. Today, I get to share it with you again on @honeyliterary.bsky.social. Feeling haunted & encouraged by my own words.

www.honeyliterary.com/issue9/the-l...
Cavar: Yes, very much so. I could like listen to you talk about archives all day, 'cause like this was just really delightful to listen to. (Diamond laughing) But very much so. I think coming into college, I, as a teenager, I experienced forced institutionalization for being Mad and a sort of lifetime of medical and psychiatric abuse prior to and subsequent to that. And I was trying to figure out the way I was going to relate to this sort of language that had been used, both as an excuse and as violation in and of itself toward me. And I couldn't go so far as to disavow it because that would be proving the powers that be right. And I couldn't embrace it because, you know, obviously I'm not gonna do that. And so, obviously I learned that the word I should use for this is disidentification when I first read José Esteban Muñoz. But around that same time, I was also getting super, super theory-headed in my freshman year of college. And, reading Muñoz, reading Foucault, reading Spillers, reading Hartman, reading Moten, reading all of these people who all were talking about the same thing—and that is whatever violations power attempts to make, those violations are immense, but they're never totalizing. That's literally not possible. Because if power were totalizing, we wouldn't be able to name it. And of course, many people in the context of this novel are not able to name the power that RSCH has over them. Because RSCH, the imagination in this novel is a database that is never complete, and never searchable, fully. And there are words and there are linguistic turns of phrase that are only able to be thought about in very particular ways. And that's of course a way of narrowing the forms of thought that are allowed. And therefore, like the possibilities of resistance. But as someone who is not… I mean, we're getting closer and closer, but we're not quite here. And by here, I'm pointing to the cover of my very scary book. (Diamond chuckles) We still have the ability to a degree to think, to think at the frayed edges and the borders of power, to think at the edges of legibility and common sense. And all of these writers that I was reading were kind of talking about how do we step beyond this or how do we at least peek? And so I'm interested in thinking about what is archive, thinking about what is sensical, what is history, what is normal. In being like, okay, what if we just rip that? Like these stickers here (Cavar grabs a set of stickers from the table). There's wax paper and then there's plastic. And so what if we just do this? You know what I mean? For the audio people, I'm peeling the sticker off of the wax. And so I'm thinking about how to write a book about archives and about memory that does that.
February 28, 2025 at 7:17 PM
cavar.bsky.social
You can support me (+other trans/disabled/Mad authors) by requesting our books at your library/ordering them at your local indie or on Bookshop, as well as just spreading the word.

I'm also excited to announce that FAILURE TO COMPLY is available from the @queerliblib.bsky.social as of this month.
The libby listing for Failure to Comply
February 11, 2025 at 3:20 AM
cavar.bsky.social
I write with & an informed by my experiences with trans, disability justice, and Mad scholar-activism. You can see some of my thinking/genealogy in this interview for Archer Magazine.

"I'm concerned about who's already trapped in the future."

archermagazine.com.au/2025/01/arch...
KS: I’m thinking of this passage near the end describing a last generation of activists who used slogans such as, ‘THINK ME WEAK/BUT I AM POWER.’ Like their bodies, they deviantly grammared. I wonder what your thoughts are on claiming, using, reusing, breaking or fragmenting language? Cavar: I first learned that grammar could talk about something other than parts of speech when I read the paper ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ by Hortense Spillers, which is subtitled ‘An American Grammar Book’. It talks about this process during the Transatlantic Slave Trade by which African persons were transformed into chattel as the founding grammar of US American society, and this thinking about the world was extremely influential for me. Poetry has been really helpful. Reading more about variations to English like pidginisation has helped with that. Also, in my sophomore year of college, a beloved professor told me that I was allowed to make up my own term if there was no term, and then I saw that reinforced within the trans communities that I moved through – being in a place where it was completely normal and expected to change your name, change your pronouns, change your signifiers. Go by something no one else understands. All these things together – even if they aren’t direct super-material means of Resistance ™ – illustrate cracks in a grammar that society presumes to be natural. Calling attention to those cracks is extremely important. KS: The uses and abuses of technology – for surgery, for surveillance, for medicine, for data collection – are a major theme in the novel, both in the oppressive setting and in characters’ resistance and liberation. What are your thoughts about the state of technology now? Cavar: I owe a lot of my thinking about the drawbacks of technology under systems of neoliberalism and racial capitalism to people like Ruha Benjamin and, more recently, to Legacy Russell. These are Black feminist theorists talking about the brokering of data as an expansion of chattel slavery, and the accumulation and usage of data as a means of controlling populations more broadly. Also, Simone Browne writes about contemporary policing and surveillance practices and their relation to slavery and settler colonialism, and the literal ones practiced in prisons and psychiatric institutions. Anything understood as speculative, if it is imaginable, is happening somewhere, to someone, even if it looks different. My fears around new technologies are less about what the future could look like, and more about who the future is already happening to. In the example of climate change, it is discussed as something that might happen in the future, when entire islands are already going underwater. I’m concerned about who’s already trapped in the future.
February 11, 2025 at 3:20 AM
cavar.bsky.social
my outfit for the bluesky pajama party
February 9, 2025 at 4:23 AM
cavar.bsky.social
made this the other day
how do you do fellow kids meme; text reads "how do you do, fellow makers of degenerate art?"
February 8, 2025 at 9:37 PM
cavar.bsky.social
Check out this interview I did for Archer on noncompliance, abolition, fucked-up tech, Madness, and more.

archermagazine.com.au/2025/01/arch...
KS: The uses and abuses of technology – for surgery, for surveillance, for medicine, for data collection – are a major theme in the novel, both in the oppressive setting and in characters’ resistance and liberation. What are your thoughts about the state of technology now? Cavar: I owe a lot of my thinking about the drawbacks of technology under systems of neoliberalism and racial capitalism to people like Ruha Benjamin and, more recently, to Legacy Russell. These are Black feminist theorists talking about the brokering of data as an expansion of chattel slavery, and the accumulation and usage of data as a means of controlling populations more broadly. Also, Simone Browne writes about contemporary policing and surveillance practices and their relation to slavery and settler colonialism, and the literal ones practiced in prisons and psychiatric institutions. Anything understood as speculative, if it is imaginable, is happening somewhere, to someone, even if it looks different. My fears around new technologies are less about what the future could look like, and more about who the future is already happening to. In the example of climate change, it is discussed as something that might happen in the future, when entire islands are already going underwater. I’m concerned about who’s already trapped in the future.
January 24, 2025 at 1:18 AM
cavar.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics, where are you mentally?
January 24, 2025 at 1:11 AM
cavar.bsky.social
Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy

Tankie moment?!???
January 12, 2025 at 4:08 AM
cavar.bsky.social
hi #sfwa ppl, this is my 1st year ever being ~awards eligible~ so i wanted to share 2 qualifying pieces!

my debut novel, FAILURE TO COMPLY. sf body horror abt trans Mad dykes at the limits of the imaginable, languagable, & possible.

sfwa members can download here:
www.sfwa.org/forum/profil...
failure to comply cover Prelude the long necked axe struck clean out of me my most beloved memories. Had my beloved been here with me, they could not have helped. There are things, I learn, that they cannot do. As for me, there was never hope for correction, as all my impurities have long known love. T h e r e comes a time when the bad is loved so much it can neither be corrected nor lived without. Love is like a binding seal, a wax to keep the imperfection in, thick enough for water to skim yet never penetrate. Without the love, we become easy to replace. What is to be replaced when the eyes are shut. When the eyes are on other things An axe turned me from a loved into a a silence. This was final cut, the thing to separate me from all I loved. Here I was at the brink of every- thing real. Nothingness wrung cool and sure in its wake, but I would not know, because by then I was long gone. Slated for replacement, I was naked: an Uncitizen. Eventually I would receive a gown, light as air, translucent and white, all white, so white it hurt my eyes even when the lids were shut. The opacity of a Citizen’s clothes turned when I wore them to a jokelike gauze, transparent as but I ahead myself. Know I was wrapped in a gauze that served no purpose but shame. With the swing of an axe, one makes a Citizens’ arrest. a process by which the one swinging reasserted hisor- her status as Citizen by stripping an Impure body of its own
January 8, 2025 at 12:28 AM
cavar.bsky.social
my holes in electric lit! (lol)

electricliterature.com/two-poems-by...
When I taste blood my mouth don’t see it as a bad thing. See, every night I affront the mirror w/ sordid tales of glorified flossing. So ask me: Does all my narrow make this teeth look fat? / I don’t know about you, but I was born in the wrong episteime. My contrite gums are cherry, jaw fusty. &thus my slutty canines make lust to the sound of tribbing paradigms. &thus I have cavities in my cavities and also many unofficial holes.
December 20, 2024 at 2:37 AM
cavar.bsky.social
thank you from the bottom of my cold dystopian heart to @stromberg.bsky.social for this smart, generous review of FAILURE TO COMPLY. tbh, it doubles as a "reader's guide," and I am delighted that people are engaging rigorously but also on F2C's own terms.

buy!!: bookshop.org/a/81294/9781...
RSCH first founded its hegemonocosm on violent purges and maintains it through brainwashing and oppression, all justified on the grounds of being “evidence based” — the logic of which is naturally circular: the admissibility of evidence is determined by a regime whose overwhelming violence allows it to arrogate to itself sole arbitership of what is Real. This equivocal “heads I win, tails you lose” logic imparts power on the regime precisely by convincing its victims that it is they who are evil. Indeed, it appears almost nobody ever rebels or resists. Most seem cowed by the impossibility. But RSCH wouldn’t need all these laws against deviancy if people didn’t sometimes fail to comply.
December 15, 2024 at 4:28 PM