translation

The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz Translated by Adrian Nathan West Dorothy, 2015 144 pages – Dorothy / Amazon   When reading The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz, I…

What does small press publishing need most? Apart from many wealthy benefactors, small presses need more (reasonably affordable) venues to generate visibility for themselves and their authors. AWP, SPD, and bookstores are all great (most of the time), but their cost and cuts are often large enough that presses like ours can’t afford to take advantage of them. We could really use a soulful Amazon that doesn’t take 40% of the book price, which is sometimes the entire profit margin of our books. While small presses are trying to globalize the voices we represent, we also need a more localized book economy, including more readings and independent literary conferences, especially as AWP becomes more inaccessible and hostile to organizations and people who aren’t already in power in the lit world. We see small presses as a destabilizing and disruptive force, maybe even socialist in a way, and we would like to see that becoming more visible.

  It’s hard for me to write scholarly work, though I’ve been told by poets and scholarly writers alike that I’ve a scholarly mind. I’m sure this stems from what…

Canarium’s editorial vision changes with the ongoing conversation between the editors, which is increasingly informed by our growing list. We’ve been fortunate to publish quite a few first books, and the support of emerging poets is definitely central to our mission, as is the publication of works in translation. I don’t want to impose any framework on the individual collections, which together constitute a rather large aesthetic field, but I will say that I think they all grapple with language and history in fascinating ways. I’ll leave the rest of the adjectives for the critics.

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.

It may not be evident from the questions posed below, much less whatever line they may be drawing, sinking, etc., but Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014)…

Every person who purchases a Two Lines Press subscription is a godsend. They’re our core, and they’re just so so important. It’s money in the bank, and it’s people who are giving us a huge vote of confidence by saying they trust whatever we’re going to put out there. We like to thank them whenever we can—for 2014 we printed up special, signed chapbooks from Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon, and this year we collaborated with the translator Jan Steyn to produce a really cool, hand-pressed erasure/translation/mutation broadside. There were definitely some eyes popping from sockets when those things arrived in the mail!

It’s fantastic to have so many readers enthusiastic about poetry and about physical/print books. We have many people writing to us, wanting to visit, wanting to work in our office, inviting our authors to do events—there is just an outpouring of love and enthusiasm all the time, and not just from younger writers or from MFA programs but from poets around the world, actually. It’s great to be part of this community. And nice books coming from all over the place—small and micro presses doing such beautiful work and inspiring each other. It’s really cool.

Somehow we manage to balance the productive tension of being a volunteer-run collective with the demands of producing an output (24+ books a year) comparable to that of a much larger publishing house. A huge part of it is the fact that we are nonprofit, and therefore don’t define success according to profit margins. Because we have a tiny paid staff and limited financial resources, we are always trying to be more efficient with how we spend money. It’s a question of proper management of our resources, the most valuable of which is the energy of our interns, apprentices, volunteers, and editors.

Well, something I love about Anomalous: it’s not just out for experimental writing (which is more and more my aesthetics), or essays about the Icelandic penis museum, or e-lit. It’s a home for writing that may not, for whatever reason, find a good home elsewhere. My influences are varied and wide, but I read primarily translated poetry, and so I tend to have a really international sensibility. I find a lot of American poets really insular, and so I’m always looking for things that broaden the possibilities of poetry in English.

My mission is to create beautiful, strange little books that a grad student studying the small press movement of the early 21st century will find in a special collections somewhere and they will make her head explode.

We wanted to design the books to make them visually striking and desirable as objects, because that’s how we believe books will survive in the new media age. It’s difficult enough to sell books, and good design makes you stand out from the crowd. With this in mind, each book is published as a paperback original with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface (called Fitzcarraldo) drawn by Ray O’Meara.

Actually, if there were anything of a stated mission behind the books we acquire, it would be to avoid ever having to compete against another publisher for a title. If someone else wants to publish a book I’m interested in, that’s fine by me. I can’t afford to engage in that sort of competitive scenario, and my general interest is to explore writers and books that have fallen through the cracks over the last couple of centuries.

What follows is an installment from the weekly discussion blog for the graduate poetry workshop I taught this past semester at the University of Notre Dame. Along with the reading…

So we decided to become the press for poems that go ‘too far.’ Now I think we’re the press for gorgeous, strange, sticky, spectacular, be-wigged, weaponized and lit-up work in English and in translation.