Without a Face: Prologue II

Infocalypse Press exists because I am interested in energy—not pedigree, not prize lists, not who reviewed whom in 2019. Energy. Voltage. The thing that makes you sit up mid-paragraph because something just shifted. I am drawn to the unstable edge where disciplines stop behaving: where a science writer slips into poetry without apology, where a tattooist is theorizing culture through skin, where a physicist sounds faintly metaphysical, and a mystic diagrams like an engineer.

Issue 2—Without a Face—pushes that inquiry further. It isn’t just about anonymity; it’s about authorship, masks, institutions, and the strange mechanics by which identity gets built, flattened, branded, and erased. If that is the theme, then structure cannot be neutral. Form has to participate in the argument. The way the work appears, accumulates, and confronts itself must echo the ideas inside it.

I think of an issue less as a container and more as sculpture. I don’t simply gather material; I shape mass, tension, and negative space. Pieces are placed in relation so that weight shifts across the whole. One work changes how you read the next. Sequence matters, design matters, and cadence matters. Meaning doesn’t sit inside a single piece; it forms in the pressure between them. An issue is something built so that a reader can move around it, noticing how the meaning shifts depending on where they stand. It is shaped.

But every sculpture begins before the first visible mark. There is a moment before the chisel meets stone. The air tightens. The hand settles around the tool. The body leans forward. That is the prologue. It is not a preview or a consolation prize. It is not the smaller thing before the real thing. It is the first strike—the moment force enters material.

Welcome to the Prologue for Issue 2—Without a Face. The full issue lands April 15, 2026.

-The Editor