Chicago

Melt is a poet and artist who was born in Chicago. Their work proudly documents Chicago’s queer and trans communities. Their writing has been published in many places including Lambda…

We are as delighted to publish a single sentence as we are in publishing a novel-length work. What matters is language, playfulness, openness to the encounter, the way it creates a space that’s very much its own. In this way we envision the process of bookmaking as creating a physical space for the words, where the book is not just a repository or vehicle for these words but is considered just as essential to the work. The materials at hand (whatever we can afford), the printing process, and the text itself are the major influence on the aesthetic of our projects.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Joshua Young, Founder & Editor; Abigail Zimmer, Poetry Editor; and Ian Denning, Prose Editor How did The Lettered Streets Press start? Joshua: My father and I wanted…

Gint Aras’s second novel The Fugue is an ambitious, 500-plus page saga about Eastern European families who settle in the Chicago suburb of Cicero following WWII. Both the musical and psychological…

I want the press to have a sense of immediacy vital to a small-ish, specific contemporary reading audience that seeks literature with a what I call a visceral-mystical aesthetic—work that seeks a way to engage the big questions by examining the particular leaky, fleshy, grotesque difficulties, embarrassments, and traumas of being embodied.

co•im•press’s closest influences are Action Books, Black Ocean, Noemi Press, Spork, Birds of Lace, Fence, and Tarpaulin Sky. The editorial perspective of the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas is also a significant influence (Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, and Gabriel Bernal Granados, editors). I worked on production and marketing/distribution for Mandorla from 2009 to 2013 via Illinois State University’s Publications Unit, and through that work, I also learned of its forerunner in spirit, El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn (Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon, editors; there is a really great documentary on The Plumed Horn, too). I admire the way Mandorla’s editors and contributing editors created an open, networked community of writers across languages, borders, hemispheres, which can be divisive elements if we let them. Working with Kristin Dykstra when she was at ISU, I learned: that publishing can be a political act, to respect translators as much as authors, and the importance of translation as an art and practice. I also became attuned to the shameful dearth of translated works published in the US.

I will say that the beauty of a small press is that you can take small risks, and ideally use any limitations as assets. One of the things that I love about the stories of Black Mountain College is that they had little in terms of resources but nevertheless had a tremendous cultural impact. Of course it’s easier to think like that now that we have a degree of stability, but especially in the beginning we had little to no overhead. Which is a good thing, because it took about four years before the first two books we’d published paid for themselves. Since then the press mostly maintains itself, but definitely I would say it’s a lucky thing to break even on a project and any earned income goes into future publishing projects.

The idea of a set mission might rankle the three of us a little, despite our Olson-influenced name. But we do have goals—one of those, which is surely true of all small presses, is to participate in and encourage the growth of the poetry community. Another is to insist on the value of the “small” in small press. We value the handmade, the patience and attention to detail that the crafts of printing and sewing require. As objects, the aesthetic of our chapbooks lies happily between the DIY aesthetic of zines and the gorgeous history of book art and fine press. In content, we look for work that is formally experimental, but we try not to fall too firmly into one aesthetic niche. We don’t want everyone to write the same way! So some of our books will be austere or minimal, while others will be manic and exuberantly expressive.

From the start our focus has been poetry, primarily work that might be described as modernist, but far-flung and eclectic. Our sixty-odd books include British and Australian poets; translations from ancient Chinese, Greek, and Persian; innovative new work alongside lost modernist classics; the living and the dead. In this way we hope to find new paths to the present. Our mission is to present such work in finely made yet affordable editions.

Honestly if time is an illusion, as we all know it to be, and the ultimate victory of the internet is “collage,” then I guess it’s OK to sum up our influences, aesthetic, and mission as collage. Not that we aspire to be the internet. But when considering a new title, we take the entire back catalog into account and think, “Hmm, maybe we could use a smudge more of something like this over here” or “Oh, it’d be nice to have a little something like that” and upon that book’s release it foregrounds that aspect of the press, but soon enough it recedes to an equal relative weighting to the rest of the back catalog and contributes to the collage.

The aesthetic varies, but everything Kenning Editions puts out is explicitly involved in a negotiation between political commitment and aesthetic quality. I evaluate a work’s suitability based on the intensity of that negotiation. Work of that kind proves, in so many ways, that “experimental” is not a stylistic feature or set of effects. I think risk and deliberation are mutually ramifying whenever there is an experiment involved.

Prior to moving to Chicago, I made a promise to myself to listen to my body more.  Something that is literally impossible to do when you only know how to…

1 I want to begin by unpacking a fixed idea about transnational movement and influence. We tend to think about global influence as moving from the United States outwards. In…