Between these covers you will find haunting unconventional narratives that push the boundaries of genre & form in poetry, fiction & essays. This is our first transmission. Welcome to Black Telephone Magazine.

I'm From Nowhere follows Claire as she mourns the sudden death of her husband. She has no child, no job, no agency. She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self. She puts herself in the hands of men--some of her oldest friends--who may have come to save her, a contemporary Penelope with a raft of suitors and unspent erotic capital. Is it possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission? At once intimate and sprawling, this book is an examination of the stories we are told--and the stories we tell ourselves--about identity, permanence, and meaning in our beautiful, hostile world.

Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation.  Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back. EXCERPT“You exist in an endless series of iterations. You keep spinning out and out and out. Sometimes you take the form of a person and people, but you don’t stop there. You are the places where people go to enact every hidden, silent fantasy—the cruelty and the beauty too—and you are the fantasies themselves, and the economies that shape and regulate them. In my dreams I never fly, but I do breathe underwater.�