MIASMAMIST: A Poetic Display of Egoist Anarchy
As the narrative begins, a nameless figure hands over their business card, yet no name or job title appears—instead, the card bears a grimly honest statement about the reader’s life: “trust me, i’m a mortician: / when you grow tired / of dragging around / your own corpse, / call me” (9). The figure knows the static and meaningless feel of self-repression, the way living and dragging one’s corpse through eternities of control seem to lose all difference, and they want to change that. Like any mortician, they can’t raise the dead or repressed, but they can at least try to make things beautiful.
MIASMAMIST by tommy wyatt blake.
Querencia Press, 2023.
This exchange comprises the opening vignette of tommy wyatt blake’s MIASMAMIST, out in 2025 with indie publishing house Querencia Press. blake, a queer and disabled poet who has authored over twenty books, wrote this collection as a high school student and now refers to it as “the duality of disappearing while becoming entirely whole.” Every work in MIASMAMIST is relatively short, full of primal and synaesthetic imagery, and often uses humor to make a deeper emotional or political point, yet the theme of ego death—of self-negation, embracing personal transformation, and living outside linear time—remains a focus throughout. blake may spend the collection in “a daydreamer’s void” (11), but this negation makes their writing all the more raw and joyous.
In “hypnagogia,” the third poem of the text, blake describes a surreal experience without a clear narrator or self, naming “a half-lucid / luck of the draw” (11) as the conceptual space of the poem. This space, where sapience is an afterthought and imposed order fades into the background, is not framed as a mental health challenge but as the speaker’s place of rightness, in which they do not need a self to live uninhibitedly. The next few poems continue to explore the liberatory potential of altered states, with the speaker saying they are “hung from the moon, / stunned by insomnia” (12), witnessing “a vision in microcosms” (14), and eventually “caved into / vintageburned floral / wallpaper—” (17). Throughout the text, blake shows the loss of self, or what Renzo Novatore dubbed the creative nothing, as a generative space where the speaker can become everything.
This text, seemingly a queer teenage confessional full of angst and extended metaphor, also embodies the very soul of egoist-anarchist theory. Despite its name suggesting otherwise, egoist anarchism is more focused on self-negation than an individualism-glorifying mindset, and moments of ego death—such as coming out as queer, finding oneself in conflict with capitalism and statism, and the all-important concept of jouissance (that is, meaning that transcends a pleasure/pain dichotomy)—are considered the most transformative and anti-hierarchical. blake’s speaker, like the egoist-anarchist ideal, lays no claim to a fully formed self or objective reality; instead, they constantly transform through the sheer intensity of being destroyed. Rather than being defined by a past and future, a set of labels, a strictly defined positionality, or a sense of hierarchical duty, they are driven by what the Mary Nardini Gang referred to in their zine Criminal Intimacy as “desires, affects, power, ways of acting, and infinite possibilities”—the internal realities that do not add to a sense of self, but are instead there to negate one.
At around the halfway point, MIASMAMIST makes a brief nod toward respectability and its inherent longing to be cared for—“did you know i would give you / the universe if you wanted, / make every dimension / in your image? i am so sorry / your world is too small / for us / to exist in it” (18)—but then quickly veers back into anti-assimilation, with three poems in a row describing a queer desire for intimacy. The speaker describes their dismay at transphobia in the face of the utter beauty they see in their queer form. In the poem “creation myth,” they once again point to a supernatural experience, this time “the void / beyond the sky” (28), as a symbol of their transformation. Thus, MIASMAMIST averts the stereotypical form of queer liberationist poetry; blake’s short, experimental works are not anthems or declarations of identity, but instead, negations of it, creating a world where categories are irrelevant, and jouissance is everything.
mk zariel (it/its) is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at https://mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.
