Featured
Fascist Pizza
Editorial
Fascist Pizza
Editorial

American fascism has a plastic shopping mall nostalgia. It is the fascism, not of a young empire thwarted, but an empire in decline. It is, at one level, a photograph of an abandoned Pizza Hut with the caption “This is what they took from us.”

Editorial
The Call is Coming from Inside the House (Call for Submissions)
Locust Arts + Letters Collective
The Call is Coming from Inside the House (Call for Submissions)
Locust Arts + Letters Collective

As part of a reorganization at Locust, we are seeking art, poetry and fiction, but also non-fiction, essays and reviews for the upcoming issue. Fiction submissions should be less than 3,500 words. Poetry submissions should be less than four pages. Non-fiction submissions should be less than 5,000 words for essays and less than 2,500 words for reviews. Images should be submitted in jpg format at 300 dpi, and at least eight inches in one dimension, and be accompanied by the title, date, and materials used in creating the work.

Locust Arts + Letters Collective
Featured
It Never Stops Exploding
Alexander Billet
It Never Stops Exploding
Alexander Billet

It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide. 

A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer. 

Alexander Billet
Featured
Controversy Stage Left: The Tragedy of Edward Bond
Alexander Billet
Controversy Stage Left: The Tragedy of Edward Bond
Alexander Billet

Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history. 

Alexander Billet
(Video) Critical Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy
Locust Arts + Letters Collective
(Video) Critical Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy
Locust Arts + Letters Collective

On November 12th, 2020, Locust Review editors Alexander Billet, Holly Lewis, Anupam Roy, and Adam Turl presented at this year’s Historical Materialism conference. As this year’s conference was online — due to the plague — it was streamed live on YouTube. Our presentations dealt with various arguments regarding critical irrealism as a key socialist cultural strategy.

Locust Arts + Letters Collective

selected editorials, articles, fiction + poetry

chapters 1-3

chapters 1-3

part 1

part 1

selected books + projects by locust comrades

Alexander Billet’s Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis was published by 1968 press in 2022.

Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism: Art Evited from Heaven and Earth is forthcoming in 2025 from Revol Press.

selected artworks

Art by Laura Fair-Schulz, Anupam Roy, Omnia Sol, Tish Turl + Adam Turl; click artists names for more of their work, click thumbnails below for full images.

recent fiction+

Featured
In the Marshes
Adam Marks
In the Marshes
Adam Marks

“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”

Adam Marks
An Attic in Prague, 1939
Alexander Billet
An Attic in Prague, 1939
Alexander Billet

Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.

Alexander Billet

recent poetry+

Featured
If Venus Were the Moon
Leslie Lea
If Venus Were the Moon
Leslie Lea

If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder 

Leslie Lea

recent locust radio

Featured
Locust Radio Ep. 29 - Dead Bees on Hot Cement
Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 29 - Dead Bees on Hot Cement
Locust Radio

In this episode of Locust Radio, Adam Turl interviews R. Faze, author of the My Body series published in Locust Review. This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with Locust members and collaborators on contemporary artistic strategies.

Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 28 - Anupam Roy + Irrealist Expressionism
Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 28 - Anupam Roy + Irrealist Expressionism
Locust Radio

In episode 28 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Anupam Roy – an artist based in Delhi and member of the Locust Collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. It is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene.

Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 27 - Escape from Capitalist Realism
Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 27 - Escape from Capitalist Realism
Locust Radio

In episode 27 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Tish Turl – writer, editor, artist, poet and member of the Locust collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. This series is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a late capitalist cybernetic Anthropocene. 

Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 26 - Omnia Sol + the Cinematic Rave
Locust Radio
Locust Radio Ep. 26 - Omnia Sol + the Cinematic Rave
Locust Radio

In episode 26 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Omnia Sol – a comic, video, and sound artist in Chicago. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. This series is being conducted as research for a future book by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene. The featured closing music / sound art, “Overview” and “Wilhelmina,” are from Omnia Sol’s forthcoming vs. Megalon. Check out their bandcamp.

Locust Radio
 
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Locust Arts & Letters Collective

Locust Review is a publication of the radical weird, catapulting itself into the future by way of the past. Published in anachronistic newspaper format four times a year and online, we are unapologetically socialist, experimental and irrealist in outlook, clinging to the hope of discovering a profane illumination out of the end times, E-mail us at locust.review@gmail.com

This is a journal for unemployed and underpaid artists, shamans, baristas, gas station attendants, cosmonauts, teachers, file clerks, servers, witches, electricians, mail carriers, actors, interdimensional hobos, dancers, sex workers, coal miners, art installers, dealers of licit and illicit drugs, copy editors, space pirates, musicians, call center employees, day laborers, couriers, mages, textile workers, folks engaged in social reproduction (paid and unpaid), tool and die makers, pest control workers, ghost hunters, librarians and all others, dead and living, who have participated in the alchemy of material being while having withheld the full fruits of their labor.