poetry

Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in the Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as…

ND/SA publishes new poetry chapbook manuscripts by emerging, diverse New York City writers. We are generally excited by a unified text with a strong sense of voice and purpose and a startling use of beautiful, difficult language.

It’s simple really: I look for queer/trans writers who are making beautiful, powerful work. I love the weird, experimental, avant-garde work that is coming from the margins, and I want to center that work as best as I can. To tack down exactly what I’m after at Damaged Goods is something I haven’t done yet. I’m just publishing work that speaks the loudest to me.

We hope to continue publishing work that fuses, deconstructs, grafts, (re)imagines, connects, & disentangles the myths, customs, language, narratives, ideologies, apparatuses, & presuppositions of the contemporary milieu & moment. There’s so many incredible people making incredible art. We’re here to help bring it alive.

We’re dedicated to cultivating innovative and unconventional work by both established and emerging writers that pushes the bounds of literary norms. Everything we publish is an extension of our own interests: we want writing that’s a little off, views the world a little askew. We really like self-aware work that operates within a genre, but at the same time pokes at the molding a little. The hard-to-classify.

Last night I pretended that I was a Sultan and you were one of my many mistresses and I had summoned you in particular from the large-print catalogue of palace…

My parting words for anyone interested in publishing books: always trust your gut; prepare to spend a lot of money and make none in return; assume that you will experience some major setbacks; accept that you will disappoint others despite your best efforts to please everyone. If you still want to publish books after taking all of this into consideration, you are doing it for the right reasons, and you’ll likely be thrilled, just as we are, to publish titles that deserve to be distributed the world over.

Krystal Languell is from Indiana. She is the author of the books Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011) and Gray Market (1913 Press, 2016) and the chapbooks Last Song (dancing girl…

We started out of a framepack & computer screen tight-roping language, trying to figure out what can’t be said & how to say it. I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.

We wanted to model the press after a public space and create an open dialog with readers and writers. Our vision was—and still is—to make beautiful, lasting books and offer an old-world subscription series by mailing books directly to readers’ doorsteps. We wanted to publish new work, but we’re also committed to the backward glance in that we frequently re-issue great work that has fallen out of print. We want lost and obscure—but deserving—books to enter back into the cultural fray.

We’re interested in literature that is visionary—embracing or interrogating Mystery as it enacts a sense of ecstasy or otherworldly consciousness/experience. But I think that, in terms of aesthetics, there’s such a wide variety of ways to render that, and so many different topics or perspectives could lend themselves to that work. We are also interested in work that promotes interfaith and/or intercultural exchange.

So, poets who decide to go with Glass aren’t going to see their books on Amazon or in SPD. But they will have an editor who has selected their book because he loves it and thinks people need to read it. So, they will have a publisher that will champion their work for as long as it takes to get their book in people’s hands. And they will have an editor who will do everything possible to create a book that they are in love with. And they will never have to send a penny to me (the poets selected for the Glass Chapbook Series get, in return for letting me publish their work, fifteen complimentary copies plus a copy of the other chapbooks published in their year. They can purchase additional copies at cost but they are not required to purchase any). This is the basic agreement I make with my authors: Glass isn’t big and fancy but Glass will put in 1,000,000% in order to make your book a success.

Especially in a country run by Donald Trump’s administration, I think poetry and art are more important now than ever. Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that artists need money to survive and to continue creating art. I hope that Ghost City can help poets do that.

by which I think you mean—you’ll correct me if I’m wrong—that the arts aren’t really, if we get down to it, necessary. With that, I’m inclined to agree. Neither is…