Announcing: DOCUMENTS

A new series and a new book coming next month

There are many changes afoot at Invisible HQ this year, among them a new look and a (slightly) new name. And while you’ll have to wait a little longer for those announcements, we’re just as excited to be announcing a new series today.

Beginning next month, we’ll be welcoming the DOCUMENTS series into the fold.

DOCUMENTS is a series emerging from the collaborative work of the Centre for Expanded Poetics in Montréal. Our aim is to publish texts attesting to the multiplicity of practices, techniques, and modes of theoretical intelligence that inform contemporary poetics. If poetics refers to the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, critical categories), it is also the theory of poiesis (of making), and this larger field draws it beyond the boundaries of poetry as a specifically literary activity. As we study this tension between poetry and poiesis, we want to document its contemporary transformations by publishing texts that have shifted and sharpened the focus of our attention to philosophical problems, embodied histories, political contradictions, artistic experiments, and scientific models of structure and form.

DOCUMENTS is helmed by editors Michael Nardone and Nathan Brown. In the series’ previous iteration (from 2018–2023), they produced eight publications in editions of 250. These beautiful books, designed by LOKI, were printed in house on the Centre’s Risograph MZ1090 and bound and distributed by their collaborators at Anteism.

In its new iteration at Invisible, we plan to release one new book annually and new editions of six previous DOCUMENTS books—Obsidian Situations by Tricia Middleton, Modernist Affect Grid by Alisha Dukelow, Poor Fridge by Mark Francis Johnson, The Book: 101 Definitions edited by Amaranth Borsuk, Thee Display by Nora Collen Fulton, and Dead Time: Intolerable Images and the Politics of Banality by Devin Wangert—over the next few years. The two remaining books from its original run are available in other editions: m. nourbeSe philip’s Looking for Livingstone is available in our new edition and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Slow Scrape is available in a 2022 second edition from Talonbooks.

In its new home, the series will maintain its distinctive blue interior text and gorgeous cover stock, with a slight adaptation of its original cover design system. You won’t have to wait long to see what we mean, because the first new DOCUMENTS book will be published on May 5, 2026: Baby Face/Face de bébé by Sallie Fullerton, with photographs by Suzanne Girard.

Constructed with the tools of poetic and documentary convention—fragmentation, oral history, rhythmic and imagistic leaps—Baby Face / Face de bébé weaves a portrait of Denise Cassidy, known as Baby Face, the first woman to own a lesbian bar in Montréal.

Iconoclastic and authoritative, revered and feared, Baby Face’s story remains nevertheless largely undocumented. Yet for those in the know, the Montréal queer scene is nearly impossible to recount without her. The story of Baby Face is, too, the story of a formative time and place in North American lesbian culture and a testament to those who have worked to preserve her history.

Blending photographs by Baby Face’s personal photographer Suzanne Girard with archival clippings, spliced interviews, audio from independent films, and other marginalia, the book offers a window into a particular moment in queer life—and a nod to the DIY methods often used to preserve histories relegated to the margins.

Eileen Myles said about Baby Face/Face de bébé: “I love the thing – of this Baby Face. The sparse faded type, the gallant photos leaning in door ways, in her leisure suit, kind of Mark Wahlberg working class swagger, plus the poetry made from these shavings scraped from interview and conversations, the brief pages of crazy romantic elven portraits – the dykes memorialized under lights flash outside for a few weeks. I think of what such bars were like in the seventies, already a faded glamour from an earlier time, Baby Face / Face de bébé is a helluva aesthetic toast to human lesbian magic and ancestor worship, daggers, womyn and queers.”

And Elizabeth Willis said about it: “Sallie Fullerton’s lush, polyvocal documentary-collage-poem, animates the lived queer imaginary of late 20th-century Montréal club life with a brilliant curatorial eye. Centering the pleasures and risks of self-determination, exposure, entrepreneurship, and survival, Fullerton builds a fascinating collective portrait of dynamic worldmaking, inviting us to witness the rich life evolving around a singular star whose audacity and magnetism made new ways of being possible.”

Sallie Fullerton is a writer living in Hudson, New York. Their work has appeared in Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Hub, Pioneer Works Broadcast, Frontier Poetry, among other publications, and was anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles. Their work has been supported by a Fulbright Arts/Research Grant and a fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Baby Face/Face de bébé is their first book.

Suzanne Girard is a Montreal-based photographer who began amidst the social photography movement of the 1970s. Co-founder of the photography atelier Plessisgraphe with Marik Boudreau, they documented the emerging second wave feminist movement and a burgeoning lesbian cultural and political scene in Montreal in 1970s and 1980s. Her photographs have been published and exhibited in Canada, Europe, and South America. Some of her documentary photos are part of the National Archives of Canada collection. Suzanne also worked in the festival and events industry for over 30 years (Image & Nation and other various film festivals, the 5th International Feminist Bookfair and she directed Divers/Cité for 21 years). She also taught photography in the Media Arts department of John Abbott College for 25 years.