Tonissa Saul and I had a great time handling the rinky dink press table at the AWP Philadelphia bookfair.
We launched a brand new series featuring (clockwise in photo) Ann Pedone, Kurt Mikhael, Eric Dovigi, Michael Buckius, Jamie King, Halsey Hyer, Veronica Jarboe, S.G. Maldonado-Vélez, Emily Hoover, and Jessica Rich.
We made some special "bite size" AWP packs that were pretty popular and sold out on day two.
And we had a stellar offsite reading Upstairs at The 700 that was organized by our friend Lindsay A. Chudzik for Feels Blind Literary
We were proud to have four rinky dink press authors (Halsey Hyer, Michael Buckius, Susan Nguyen, and Jesse Sensibar) and they were terrific.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by our table and came to our offsite 💙
Our final blurb for Gravity & Spectacle was from the first person we asked: Matt Hart
Like Rosemarie's blurb, this was also too big to fit on the back of our book cover, so here is the full unedited version:
Who’s weirder than all of us? And why does it always feel
like our “alienation is being filmed before a live studio audience”? If you’ve
ever asked those questions, or if you’ve ever had a cactus for a head with eyes
all over it, blinking wildly in the sun—or, if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t
stop going to punk rock shows, even though everyone else thinks you’re too old
for punk rock shows, so you stand in the back feeling odd or invisible or both
of them at once—well, the photographs and poems in Gravity and Spectacle
are a biography, a field guide, a hymnal, and battle plan of, and for, the rest
of your life. Yeah, you might just be that strange. I know I am, and as a
result this book is somehow a great comfort to me, even as it complicates and
celebrates my bewilderment. It reminds me just how bizarre (in the best ways) being
alive right NOW really is—a reminder to attend to it with ferocity and joy, but
most importantly with imagination and empathy by any means necessary.
~ Matt Hart, author of Everything Breaking/for Good and editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety
We first met Matt Hart when he came to town on a Southwest tour with another memorable poet named Jeff Sirkin in 2016. I hosted a poetry reading for them at an art gallery in Phoenix and we were able to hang out before and after the event for food, drinks and stories. Jia and I were only 1 year into this project, but we showed him some of our early photographs and he didn't laugh or scoff. In fact, he encouraged us, which was extremely important at that stage of development.
Surprised but stoked that our Punk Rock Presses panel got selected for AWP 2019 in Portland.
Of course it was pretty much a last minute thing, but so are most of our best projects. I was contacted by my friend Rosemarie Dombrowski (founder of Rinky Dink Press and reigning Poet Laureate of Phoenix) because another panel that she was involved with fell apart. She asked if I would be interested in helping her put together a panel on presses with a punk influence/ethos (probably because she remembered that I used to perform with my friend Rocky Yazzie and his bands Turquoiz Noiz and The Skinwalkers). We both got excited about the possibilities and the three other presses we wanted to approach in hopes that they would join us and it all worked out.
Punk Rock Presses: rinky dink, Forklift Ohio, Cardboard House, Wax Paper
Punk is a style of music, a state of mind, and a subculture of the
small press world. Though punk is often perceived as nothing more than
an anti-establishment posture, a punk ideology espouses a DIY ethos, is
non-conformist in its productions, and resists
selling out under pressure. These four presses define what it means to
be punk publishers, and they’re thriving in a world of better-funded,
perfect-bound counterparts…and wondering how long before the raw becomes
the cooked.
