random access memory

by Nat Raum

'random access memory' is an exploration of trauma-related memory loss through nat raum’s digital footprint, personal library, and external backup drive in use from roughly 2011 to 2015. Intended as a reflection on this early period of their life, from which they remember very little, chaotic snippets of tangible memory ask what resolution looks like—if it even exists at all.

80 pages, Unknown Binding

Published July 1, 2023

About the author

nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on occupied Piscataway land in Baltimore, MD.

They graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 with a BFA in Photography and Book Arts and they are currently a second-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore, where they have also served as managing editor of the school’s literary journal, Welter.

nat’s personal creative practice centers primarily upon their lived experience with loss and sexual trauma and subsequent C-PTSD diagnosis, often taking the form of small-edition image/text books and zines.

nat is the founder and editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press, a queer literature and art publishing space. nat's artwork has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Human Achievement, ICA Baltimore, Blackrock Center for the Arts, and the Griffin Museum of Photography. Past publishers of their writing include Delicate Friend, ANMLY, and Corporeal Lit. Their recent published books include you stupid slut (dream boy book club, 2022), the abyss is staring back (Querencia Press, 2023), random access memory (Bullshit Lit, 2023), and several chapbooks and photography publications.

Reviews

[Ami J. J. Sanghvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In random access memory, Raum sheds finesse for total authenticity—and fashions a satisfyingly challenging work of art in the process. This book is more than just a journey paved with poetry, pops of color, and immaculate design elements. It’s an accomplishment, a courageous albeit devastating feat by which the reader is stunned in an ice bath of code, toner, and honest sentiment. The reader is made to question what is artificial versus what is real, and even reckon with the likelihood that there is no real distinction between the two when it comes to the sentient mind.

In these pages, Raum gives us work that is human and simultaneously sublime, sublime and simultaneously computerized, and in doing so, leaves us wishing random access memory might double as an unauthorized data chip we can inject into ourselves and let live beneath our skin—glitch after glitch, and over a wonderfully uncomfortable, but deeply necessary, period of time.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

as much an art project (the book itself is beautiful and a true labor of love from a printing perspective) as a book of poetry... and oddly enough the acknowledgements pages rewrite the entire experience. the conceit of RAM and trauma definitely resonates. as ever nat raum is a force of nature