The Library Never Closes

Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place by Mauve Perle Tahat

(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026, digital and hardcover editions available)

The work of Mauve Perle Tahat raises our consciousness to serendipities—documented and inspired. Like assemblage, their work takes from different containers of experience—film, books, oral histories, zines, the warning labels on plastic bottles, fictive and all-too-real worlds—and pieces them together to explain our place in the world. Spatial Residue, Tahat’s second book, arrives at just the moment that we find ourselves equally maneuvering toward and away from an idea of the past—a place of comfort and discomfort, simultaneously, asking what we will make of the worlds we inhabit.

Tahat has been an extremely productive intellectual voice as both a writer and publisher. In the past fifteen years there have been three online publishing projects with Tahat at the helm (Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Rag Queen Periodical, and Terse. Journal), two audio/visual podcasts (Revisions and Explorations of Identity), and several edited anthologies of critical writing (including the upcoming Subtle Body Horror, edited with poet Kailey Tedesco). Their first book, Ecologies of Incarceration, came out in 2024. Throughout their intellectual journey, there have been projects outside of the media landscape—academic courses taken and taught, a longstanding involvement in community organizing, a restaurant, a communal play space, and a family. There is now even a Substack, the delightfully named Th0t Cr1mes, where Tahat presents short-form work, reflections on the writing/educating/publishing process, and glimmers of projects to come. Each project has informed the other, no matter where Tahat has existed in the physical world. These are texts that engage in the academic world without becoming jargonized and lost in the navel-gazing recurrence of theory: one can make something of this. One can write to a prisoner and learn their story, one can visit the parking lot of a former Rite-Aid and see the relationship between people and their landscape after the anchor store has left. One can be a critical body at work.

The world around us is both one that is created for us and one that we create through our experience. For Tahat, the ever-lasting plastic that surrounds us is a starting point for exploring the human relationship with the planetary world. “Plastic, as both a material and a metaphor, signifies a future that is already embedded in the present—a pervasive, synthetic inheritance that is reshaping our bodies, spaces, and emotional landscapes in ways we have yet to fully grasp.” (16) We don’t know our future; we can choose not to know our past. But landscapes and the buildings, vehicles, and products that fill them up—are forever.

Spatial Residue proposes an affect for our time. In placing and defining what they mean by the “plastic affect” of the subtitle, Tahat addresses the different types of knowledge that enter into the development of such a project. This is not a prescription for other writers, but it is a good place to start: clarifying what is found and valued in the text, be it a text by Arundhati Roy, Walter Benjamin, or a former Playboy playmate; the song “Bitch Where” by Chief Keef, an episode of Atlanta, or a motel turned into a clown museum:

“[…] plastic affects are not confined to a single mode of inquiry. They emerge through the layered ways we engage with space, through both formal and informal research, through both credentialed and non-credentialed lenses. […] Anyone who interacts with a place (through writing, music, art, gameplay, or wandering) is already participating in spatial storytelling.” (12)

We exist in the physical space that we share with others—we live in what was once termed “The Plastic Age.” Places are a part of us on both a physical and emotional level. Lidia Yuknovich speaks of what she calls “Corporeal Writing”—a writing practice that comes from the body, experience, and place, developing the themes and metaphors that effect the writer deeply and will always be present in their work. With and without our knowledge or consent, plastic is in our minds and bodies. We carry microplastics and forever chemicals in our blood. The illnesses inherent to the lands we live on and travel to are not simply carried with us in memory alone. “[…] Space is never just geography; it is always encounter, always atmosphere, always affective terrain.” (22) Space, as Sun Ra would have it, is the place. Whether it is a pressed penny from a turnpike rest stop or the collected radiation in the body of a Chernobyl disaster tourist, we live in a world where the elements of the natural world are changed by humanity and have to negotiate our place within it.

The chapters of Spatial Residue move from concept to embodiment. A place—mostly physical but sometimes digital—receives a brief summary of its relation to Tahat’s inquiry. This covers a great deal of ground without becoming bogged down in one location for too long—a spiritual tramping. There are many places Tahat visits—those built for mass consumption, those that have outlived their usefulness or original intent; those that have been reclaimed by a community. “Good” and “Bad” value judgements are not particularly what interests Tahat in a place as example. In a section about the former Woodcliff Condos in Whitehall, Ohio, Tahat reflects:

A place becomes “bad” in the public imagination not because of architecture or layout, but because of how it’s perceived and policed. Often, this shift is rooted in racialized and class-based narratives. If crime rates rise (or are said to rise), if there’s visible poverty or a change in who lives there, if media narratives frame it as “unsafe,” the psychic charge of the place shifts. It crosses an invisible threshold and becomes what you might call a negative portal, a space no longer imagined as a site of possibility, but of danger, contamination, or despair. Yet for many people, it probably never stopped being a good place. The problem is, those memories don’t hold economic weight in redevelopment plans. (42)

Some of these sites are places of hubris and human failings shone under a harsh light. Others are claimed (reclaimed?) by the earth in disaster and the decay of abandonment. Still others manage to find salvation (be it temporary or long-term) through communal efforts. “Like The Bottle House, stacked together from what remains, you live within something flawed and still let the brightness get through” (190).

Blight is often the word that comes up in conversations about the marks left by corporate and economic retreat. But there are other marks that come to mind. Blighted and abandoned spaces can become avenues for investigation. Tahat writes of Dead Mall videos as a séance (114). Writing of the poetry of Kailey Tedesco, Tahat reminds that what haunts us is, in part, the sense of aliveness behind the remains (104). There is a “slouching toward Bethlehem” quality of seeing historical examples (the old pictures, opening day news footage) against the urban explorer’s flashlight-guided, hand-held journey into an old mall.

Particular locations, such as Centralia or Love Canal, speak to the larger community impacts of our relationships with plasticity and the residue it leaves behind. There are also more intimate, personal interactions. One particular tale that sticks in my own mind, Tahat writes about a once-upon-a-time business of the 1990s called “Video Tanning,” which, as the name would suggest, offered both VHS tape rentals and tanning booths. Two different types of glow—two sets of tubes humming together, skin and screen being quite “in” at this time. (Try explaining this to anyone born after 2001.) These spaces can bring joyful personal nostalgia as bright as their uncanny fluorescent glow.

“I use the word ‘uncanny’ too much,” Tahat said when we spoke together recently. We were discussing the way that their writing has changed over the years.

Just before we talked, I’d dug up an anthology of essays edited from the Lehigh Valley Vanguard archives. Tahat’s piece in the collection, “The Language of the Law, A Question of Ownership,” laid out several presumptions and realities of moving through the court system—specifically the way in which the language used in court rooms disempower defendants. “The law then has victims, not beneficiaries. For we cannot be beneficiaries of a system we are not versed in, one that renders us helpless and in need of an appointed spokesperson and causal explanations for actions which defy causality.”

Tahat was excited that I found the essay. “Was this really me twelve, thirteen years ago?” They had just had their own archival find, recovering the website for Terse. Journal that had been offline for some time. “When I look back at the archive… call it imposter syndrome, but… I came to believe that this was not important. And then I see what we were writing about—capitalism and environmentalism and justice—and it’s like this was all cooked up in a stew together.” Time and experience have reenforced this desire to serve these ideas forward. “Now I’m able to say these things in a much more confident voice.”

When we talk about writing, we often wind up drawing comparisons between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of critical inquiry. “My maternal grandmother took me to a church class on Angelology and Demonology. It was based on finding literal, textual evidence in the Bible that they really existed. On her deathbed, my grandmother asked me, ‘Do you think I could’ve gone to college?’ She’d gone to nursing school and had to leave when she became pregnant but she meant she had wanted to become a scholar, to do the kind of thing I was doing.” Disciple and Discipline have always been interconnected words in my mind, spurred, like Tahat’s thinking, by the religious flavor of both our upbringings.

Tahat is a writer of connection and place, bouncing off the world as they experience it. “I feel like I have all these antennae when I’m out in the world—what’s this person’s material condition and where they come from.”

Tahat and I have kept up a semi-regular online correspondence through memes, often sent to each other without context. Because of this, I was interested in the way that the online world can also relate to the experience of place Tahat describes. They write of watching urban exploration videos or the quick changes of time as they slide through Google Map StreetViews of the places they wrote about. (Indeed, one could make quite a digital road trip by connecting the locations discussed on a digital map.) Digital space is an open frontier for Tahat: “It felt like when I was on AOL at 14. People can feel and share my feelings and thoughts without getting clogged up with my face and my body and my appearance. I do a fair amount of thinking on embodiment. Cyberfeminism lets me think about what you experience in another, non-physical environment.”

A recent video shared between us included a riff on how progressive authors seem to have difficulty finding an “uplifting” or positive ending for their books in the era of a second Trump presidency. Tahat ends Spatial Residue with a gathering of locations where unused or damaged spaces have been repurposed to community benefit. “These next examples are not utopias,” Tahat says emphatically. (Utopia, after all, means “no place.”) “They are remakings, re-groundings, soft rebellions against beige and erasure. Each of these projects resists the logic of disposability and the myth of inevitability.” (184)

After finishing Tahat’s book, I found myself spending the next few weekends bouncing around places I’d never been as well as my old hometown. The change of scenery would, one hoped, lift me from the recent funk of my day job and an apartment with bad air circulation. When I became blocked working on a piece, I visited somewhere I had not been in ages—somewhere I’d lived, somewhere I’d worked, or even something I just drove past. The “good” and “bad” value judgements of a space shift through the day—a worn-down, cheap motel in the summer sun can almost attain a “retro” quality that borders on charm. Visiting the same parking lot after dark, the lack of light coming from its burning-out sign placed it thoroughly into a category of “haunted” space. Walking around the same mall I had wandered in the early 2000s, I discovered that the mall had been turned into a series of anchor stores with entrances only from the outside. Any doorways or walkways that would’ve led into the main body of the mall had been obstructed and closed off. Through old glass sliding doors at a Boscov’s, I could see the dark, dead body of the mall, with light still shining in through its few large sunlights.

What I tend to value most from a writer is whether or not it inspires comment, reaction, or action on the part of the reader. Tahat places, displaces; reframes. The residue lingers in my mind. Walking through my neighborhood, I find a new (to me) store—only to find out that it has been there since I first visited the town as a student some ten years before. We are making and made now, in this plastic world, known in the light still shining over the old Rite-Aid parking lot.

(Photograph of Mauve Perle Tahat by Jon Blanchard Photography)