The newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.

This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.

Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds, Boukaila offers us a chance to make mistakes, to be messy, to learn and unlearn the languages we use to survive.

Readers seeking “treasures yet to be uncovered” will find this and more in this expansive collection.

Imane Boukaila's profile page

Praise for Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes

"Hearing it is beauty itself. Boukaila is a dreamer who frees the reader freeing the mind to dream greet vex beauty. Make greeting freedom become reality by reading this treeing yearning freedom book yes yes."—Hannah Emerson, author of The Kissing of Kissing

“This is an astonishing, time-bending book that has me dancing in cyclonic cycles of questioning and in delicate eddies of sound. In poems that perceive perception and trace thought itself, Imane Boukaila makes kinesthetic what is static, and makes static what moves too quickly for us to attend. Within controlled vocabularies, she moves between verse and essay, polemic and visual storms, with pirouetting improvisation and deft concrete strategies. In this, she participates in aesthetic traditions that host poets interested in the material page—as distinct as Derek Beaulieu and giovanni singleton, bpNichol and Larry Eigner—and poets whose quarrel and quandary is with the cusp of meaning where thought sunders to sound—Jordan Scott, Susan Howe, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Douglas Kearney. This book moved me in the very places where I was made still.”—Divya Victor, author of Curb

“Words and letters swirl and eddy, weaving tresses of expressive intensity at the fracture zone between autistic thinking and the neurotypical ‘truths’ that rock and channel it. ‘Hacking language norms,’ as she puts it, Imane Boukaila ‘mistakes’ truth so as to trick it into restreaming into a resurgent dance of thought equal to the challenges and beauty of autistic experience. Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a turbulent achievement foaming with creative thinking and poetic inventiveness.”—Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the Virtual

Praise for Imane Boukaila

“Brimming with tumbling language, tactile sound, and vivid emotion, Imane Boukaila’s chapbook Truth OMG is a blend of sound and motion—a reading experience you can both hear and feel. . . . This chapbook unfurls, moving and stretching from the stiffness of isolation and institutional structures, through rivers of thoughts and trout, to a visceral expression of energy and selfhood. Reworking language and reshaping ideas in a continuous tumble, Truth OMG embodies the powerful motion it describes.”—PRISM International