At most $187,000 to pay at least $564,000 owing
October 12, 2024 3:27 PM Subscribe
On October 3, Judge Elizabeth Riles of the Superior Court of Alameda County (Calif.) granted, with a few caveats, Small Press Distribution’s motion to consolidate all claims in their dissolution, totaling $316,000 owed to 163 publishers, most of whom are unlikely to receive much of what is owed them (previously). Under the fold, a roundup of 25 new books by former SPD presses.
All Lovers Burn at the End of the World by Janna Miller (ELJ Editions, 8 Nov 2024): A collection of 50 micros and flashes that straddle our world and beyond in a voicy mix of speculative and literary fiction. (Amazon; Itaska)
Apicality by Jean Day (Atelos, 5 Oct 2024): Day concerns herself with morphologies writ large--those of creative plant and animal life, historical thinking, knowledge, sound patterning, shapes of optimism and its opposite. The book's two sequences ("Ex Ovo Omnia," "And Now This") are part of her larger, as yet unpublished The Elements, a work that probes first (and lost) causes. (Amazon; Asterism)
Arctic Play by Mita Mahato (3rd Thing, 8 Oct 2024): A drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows. (Asterism)
Bone | Fish | Girl by Megan Alyse (Game Over Books, 24 Sept 2024): A bold collage of tenderness and ferocity that examines an inner and outer world through the lens of a speaker whose journey is nonlinear. Layered with humor, grit, and a unique vulnerability, Megan Alyse’s debut collection explores heartbreak, motherhood, polyamory, queerness, identity, and complexity of the self as an artist. (Asterism)
The Book of Skies by Leslie Kaplan, trans. Jennifer Pap & Julie Carr (Pamenar, 15 Sept 2024): Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating. (Asterism)
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia, 24 Sept 2024): Joan Kwon Glass’s collection travels from the early twentieth century Japanese occupation of Korea to the landscapes of 1980s suburban Detroit, from Jeju Island’s caves and the DMZ to Connecticut’s shoreline, and from the winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the pews of midwestern churches. (Asterism)
Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, trans. Patrick Greaney (Winter Editions, 17 Sept 2024): Austrian poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker's essays, collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his investigation into the memory of the Holocaust. (Asterism)
Dominion + Selected Poems by Dennis Hinrichsen (Green Linden, 1 Oct 2024): Dennis Hinrichsen’s eleventh full-length collection gathers his best work from forty years of publishing. Formally adroit and lyrically rich, Hinrichsen’s poems unerringly map both the zeitgeist and the subjective psyche. (Asterism)
The Dying Sun and Other Stories by Syed Afzal Haider (Weavers, 15 Oct 2024): Thoughtful and provocative short story collection by the author of Life of Ganesh. (Asterism)
The Escapades by Marie-Noëlle Agniau, trans. Jesse Hover Amar (World Poetry, 3 Oct 2024): French poet Marie-Noëlle Agniau’s English-language debut is a surreal and haunting work of transfiguration and rupture inspired by Ovid’s Ocyrhoe. The Escapades builds on the Greek myth of a woman transformed into a horse by the obscure machinations of the Fates to tell the story of a human soul, both man and woman, that wanders among animals and children, haunted by the loss of its name, body, and voice. (Amazon; Asterism)
Guerrilla Blooms by Daniela Catrileo, trans. Edith Adams (Eulalia, 4 Dec 2024): Winner of the 2019 Santiago Municipal Literature Prize, Daniela Catrileo’s first poetry collection written in both Spanish and Mapudungun is a masterwork of contemporary indigenous literature. Love and warfare intertwine, creating a reality that interweaves territories, languages, and chronologies, collapsing time and space to draw an enmeshed lineage from the arrival of the conquistadors to ongoing state violence against the Mapuche people. (Asterism)
Gwenda, Rodney by Olivia Cronk (Meekling, 1 Oct 2024): An exquisitely genre-ambiguous “poetry novel” scintillating with art, ardor, and decay, a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. (Asterism)
Junior by Jon Boilard (Livingston, 14 Oct 2024): Set in rural western Massachusetts, this novel follows Junior Beauchamp, who has a good shot at art school if he can just stay out of prison. All he’s got to do is keep his nose clean for the summer. When his mother disappears on a drug-fueled bender, Junior shacks up with a gun-toting Black hermit called Bluepriest who teaches him and his kid brother a thing or two about living off the grid. Junior makes friends with some Puerto Ricans and then falls in mutual love with one of their sisters. His kid brother is learning to handle himself as well. Life is shaping to look up. Then the situation flounders with his mother and matters move from bad to worse when a skeleton from Junior’s past threatens his future and he’s accused of murder. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
The Light That Burns Us by Jazra Khaleed, various translators (World Poetry, 10 Oct 2024): The English-language debut of Jazra Khaleed, one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices—now in an expanded edition—is an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization. (Amazon; Asterism)
Like a Bag Trying to Empty by Kaleem Hawa (Wendy's Subway, 15 Oct 2024): In a sprawling essay about Palestinian prisoner and political intellectual Walid Daqqa's life and writings, the Palestinian writer and organizer Kaleem Hawa theorizes elements of the Palestinian captives’ movement, turning to prisoner exchanges and hunger strikes, the psychoanalytic dimensions of imprisonment, and temporal theories of the prison. Considering the ethnically cleansed town of al-Majdal and Asqalan prison, which was established there as its fulcrum, the essay traces the story of the land and struggle, with Daqqa coming in and out of focus at critical moments in Palestine’s history. (Asterism)
The Monsters Are Here by Lori D'Angelo (ELJ Editions, 31 Oct 2024): Thirty stories which can be described as Kelly Link meets Bram Stoker and Nathaniel Hawthorne in a forest or an alternative universe with aliens. (Amazon; Itaska)
O by Judith Kiros, trans. Kira Josefsson (World Poetry, 26 Sept 2024): Swedish poet Judith Kiros’s widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare’s Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. (Amazon; Asterism)
Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert, trans. John Taylor (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 15 Sept 2024): The first appearance in English not only of a selection of the young Belgian poet Charline Lambert’s writing, but indeed of her first four books in their entirety. The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four sequences of verse poems and poetic prose pieces respond to each other. (Amazon; Asterism)
Permission to Settle by Holly Flauto (Anvil, 30 Oct 2024): Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration - the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy - all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler. (Asterism)
Radium Out Cold by Clark Coolidge (Lithic, 21 Sept 2024): For those who are drawn in, Coolidge's work takes on an importance that permeates how we think and hear and see and live, complete with an ongoing sense of play and utter joy in the manipulation of words. (Asterism)
So Long This Wound Stayed Open by Juliana Chang (ELJ Editions, 18 Oct 2024): In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. (Amazon; Itaska)
Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road, 24 Sept 2024): Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.” (Amazon; Asterism)
Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones (Meekling, 1 Oct 2024): With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones’s voice is playful and pithy, simultaneously reimagining the past and reveling in the absurd contemporary—her gaze never straying from social inequity, nor from the personal scales of fate. (Asterism)
Terra Lucida XIII-XXI: Música Callada & Near Star by Joseph Donahue (Verge, 25 Sept 2024): In this two-volume installment of Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue extends the work from Dark Church, the previous installment of his ongoing serial epic poem, whose mysterious edifice made sanctuary for memory, the funereal, and oracle, something both of these new volumes, Música Callada and Near Star, continue while also shapeshifting the work into something sinewy and new. (Asterism)
The Tomb of the Divers: A Novel by Francine Masiello (Bordighera, 15 Oct 2024): Moving beyond stereotypical tales of poverty and deprivation in southern Italy, The Tomb of the Divers weaves an immigrant yarn about small-time artists and crooks who, over the course of a century, wend their way from Basilicata to the anarchist enclaves of Paterson, New Jersey and from fascist Italy during World War II to Buenos Aires a er its "dirty war" of the 1980s. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop; MIT)
*
Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads), 7 (writing craft books), 8 (SPD update), 9 (Hawthornden grants), and 10 (no theme).
All Lovers Burn at the End of the World by Janna Miller (ELJ Editions, 8 Nov 2024): A collection of 50 micros and flashes that straddle our world and beyond in a voicy mix of speculative and literary fiction. (Amazon; Itaska)
Apicality by Jean Day (Atelos, 5 Oct 2024): Day concerns herself with morphologies writ large--those of creative plant and animal life, historical thinking, knowledge, sound patterning, shapes of optimism and its opposite. The book's two sequences ("Ex Ovo Omnia," "And Now This") are part of her larger, as yet unpublished The Elements, a work that probes first (and lost) causes. (Amazon; Asterism)
Arctic Play by Mita Mahato (3rd Thing, 8 Oct 2024): A drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows. (Asterism)
Bone | Fish | Girl by Megan Alyse (Game Over Books, 24 Sept 2024): A bold collage of tenderness and ferocity that examines an inner and outer world through the lens of a speaker whose journey is nonlinear. Layered with humor, grit, and a unique vulnerability, Megan Alyse’s debut collection explores heartbreak, motherhood, polyamory, queerness, identity, and complexity of the self as an artist. (Asterism)
The Book of Skies by Leslie Kaplan, trans. Jennifer Pap & Julie Carr (Pamenar, 15 Sept 2024): Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating. (Asterism)
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia, 24 Sept 2024): Joan Kwon Glass’s collection travels from the early twentieth century Japanese occupation of Korea to the landscapes of 1980s suburban Detroit, from Jeju Island’s caves and the DMZ to Connecticut’s shoreline, and from the winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the pews of midwestern churches. (Asterism)
Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, trans. Patrick Greaney (Winter Editions, 17 Sept 2024): Austrian poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker's essays, collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his investigation into the memory of the Holocaust. (Asterism)
Dominion + Selected Poems by Dennis Hinrichsen (Green Linden, 1 Oct 2024): Dennis Hinrichsen’s eleventh full-length collection gathers his best work from forty years of publishing. Formally adroit and lyrically rich, Hinrichsen’s poems unerringly map both the zeitgeist and the subjective psyche. (Asterism)
The Dying Sun and Other Stories by Syed Afzal Haider (Weavers, 15 Oct 2024): Thoughtful and provocative short story collection by the author of Life of Ganesh. (Asterism)
The Escapades by Marie-Noëlle Agniau, trans. Jesse Hover Amar (World Poetry, 3 Oct 2024): French poet Marie-Noëlle Agniau’s English-language debut is a surreal and haunting work of transfiguration and rupture inspired by Ovid’s Ocyrhoe. The Escapades builds on the Greek myth of a woman transformed into a horse by the obscure machinations of the Fates to tell the story of a human soul, both man and woman, that wanders among animals and children, haunted by the loss of its name, body, and voice. (Amazon; Asterism)
Guerrilla Blooms by Daniela Catrileo, trans. Edith Adams (Eulalia, 4 Dec 2024): Winner of the 2019 Santiago Municipal Literature Prize, Daniela Catrileo’s first poetry collection written in both Spanish and Mapudungun is a masterwork of contemporary indigenous literature. Love and warfare intertwine, creating a reality that interweaves territories, languages, and chronologies, collapsing time and space to draw an enmeshed lineage from the arrival of the conquistadors to ongoing state violence against the Mapuche people. (Asterism)
Gwenda, Rodney by Olivia Cronk (Meekling, 1 Oct 2024): An exquisitely genre-ambiguous “poetry novel” scintillating with art, ardor, and decay, a book about reading novels, ekphrasis, and the gaze, transcribed in a mode as ethereal as air filling a garment left to hang. (Asterism)
Junior by Jon Boilard (Livingston, 14 Oct 2024): Set in rural western Massachusetts, this novel follows Junior Beauchamp, who has a good shot at art school if he can just stay out of prison. All he’s got to do is keep his nose clean for the summer. When his mother disappears on a drug-fueled bender, Junior shacks up with a gun-toting Black hermit called Bluepriest who teaches him and his kid brother a thing or two about living off the grid. Junior makes friends with some Puerto Ricans and then falls in mutual love with one of their sisters. His kid brother is learning to handle himself as well. Life is shaping to look up. Then the situation flounders with his mother and matters move from bad to worse when a skeleton from Junior’s past threatens his future and he’s accused of murder. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
The Light That Burns Us by Jazra Khaleed, various translators (World Poetry, 10 Oct 2024): The English-language debut of Jazra Khaleed, one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices—now in an expanded edition—is an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization. (Amazon; Asterism)
Like a Bag Trying to Empty by Kaleem Hawa (Wendy's Subway, 15 Oct 2024): In a sprawling essay about Palestinian prisoner and political intellectual Walid Daqqa's life and writings, the Palestinian writer and organizer Kaleem Hawa theorizes elements of the Palestinian captives’ movement, turning to prisoner exchanges and hunger strikes, the psychoanalytic dimensions of imprisonment, and temporal theories of the prison. Considering the ethnically cleansed town of al-Majdal and Asqalan prison, which was established there as its fulcrum, the essay traces the story of the land and struggle, with Daqqa coming in and out of focus at critical moments in Palestine’s history. (Asterism)
The Monsters Are Here by Lori D'Angelo (ELJ Editions, 31 Oct 2024): Thirty stories which can be described as Kelly Link meets Bram Stoker and Nathaniel Hawthorne in a forest or an alternative universe with aliens. (Amazon; Itaska)
O by Judith Kiros, trans. Kira Josefsson (World Poetry, 26 Sept 2024): Swedish poet Judith Kiros’s widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare’s Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. (Amazon; Asterism)
Of Desire and Decarceration by Charline Lambert, trans. John Taylor (Lavender Ink / Diálogos, 15 Sept 2024): The first appearance in English not only of a selection of the young Belgian poet Charline Lambert’s writing, but indeed of her first four books in their entirety. The motivation for bringing forth this substantial corpus is that the four sequences of verse poems and poetic prose pieces respond to each other. (Amazon; Asterism)
Permission to Settle by Holly Flauto (Anvil, 30 Oct 2024): Permission to Settle fills in the blanks of the application for Permanent Residency with a series of memoir-based poems, capturing common aspects of immigration - the anxiety, and the bureaucracy of application, identity, foreignness, and inadequacy - all while exploring the sense of privilege that comes from the geographically and culturally close immigration journey from the US to Canada as a modern-day settler. (Asterism)
Radium Out Cold by Clark Coolidge (Lithic, 21 Sept 2024): For those who are drawn in, Coolidge's work takes on an importance that permeates how we think and hear and see and live, complete with an ongoing sense of play and utter joy in the manipulation of words. (Asterism)
So Long This Wound Stayed Open by Juliana Chang (ELJ Editions, 18 Oct 2024): In her poetry collection, Chang names core wounds like fear of rejection, loss of heritage and home, and welcomes them into her arms, saying: we need not let our scars turn us into islands. (Amazon; Itaska)
Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road, 24 Sept 2024): Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.” (Amazon; Asterism)
Television Fathers by Sylvia Jones (Meekling, 1 Oct 2024): With poems reminiscent of iconoclasts such as James Tate or Jay Wright, Jones’s voice is playful and pithy, simultaneously reimagining the past and reveling in the absurd contemporary—her gaze never straying from social inequity, nor from the personal scales of fate. (Asterism)
Terra Lucida XIII-XXI: Música Callada & Near Star by Joseph Donahue (Verge, 25 Sept 2024): In this two-volume installment of Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue extends the work from Dark Church, the previous installment of his ongoing serial epic poem, whose mysterious edifice made sanctuary for memory, the funereal, and oracle, something both of these new volumes, Música Callada and Near Star, continue while also shapeshifting the work into something sinewy and new. (Asterism)
The Tomb of the Divers: A Novel by Francine Masiello (Bordighera, 15 Oct 2024): Moving beyond stereotypical tales of poverty and deprivation in southern Italy, The Tomb of the Divers weaves an immigrant yarn about small-time artists and crooks who, over the course of a century, wend their way from Basilicata to the anarchist enclaves of Paterson, New Jersey and from fascist Italy during World War II to Buenos Aires a er its "dirty war" of the 1980s. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop; MIT)
*
Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads), 7 (writing craft books), 8 (SPD update), 9 (Hawthornden grants), and 10 (no theme).
wenestvedt, I can't speak completely knowledgeably about this because my only experience with small press publishing is with poetry and genre sci-fi, and I have zero inside knowledge about SPD. Maybe others can weigh in!
But the joke is "if you want to make a small fortune in publishing, start with a large fortune."
The small presses that seem most stable from the outside are those that have a firm point of view that generates loyalty in readers, or who publish popular fiction, or who are attached to a university. Or have a founder with deep pockets who doesn't really care if they make money, but there aren't as many of this kind of press as there used to be.
I suspect that the presses least harmed by the SPD shutdown will be very small non-profit poetry presses, because it's extraordinarily rare for a poetry book to be something that makes money anyway, so people don't expect that and most books are hand-sold by the poet and most poetry presses are labours of love and/or non-profits, so whether or not they make money is beside the point. They also as non-profits can run gofundmes or other donation drives and can apply for grants. That said, I expect to have some high-profile presses in this category shut down over the next year or two when they can't recover. SPD had a lot of clients in this category.
Probably the presses that will be hurt the most will be the ones that have a large quantity of sales through bookstores, such that SPD actually owed them real money, or which happened to have a bunch of releases just coming out when SPD shuttered (so SPD kept the pre-order money, which can be a substantial portion of overall sales for a book).
I'm not aware of there being a list of their small press creditors (maybe it's in the court filings but I have no idea how to look that up). So I am really just guessing.
posted by joannemerriam at 7:16 PM on October 12 [2 favorites]
But the joke is "if you want to make a small fortune in publishing, start with a large fortune."
The small presses that seem most stable from the outside are those that have a firm point of view that generates loyalty in readers, or who publish popular fiction, or who are attached to a university. Or have a founder with deep pockets who doesn't really care if they make money, but there aren't as many of this kind of press as there used to be.
I suspect that the presses least harmed by the SPD shutdown will be very small non-profit poetry presses, because it's extraordinarily rare for a poetry book to be something that makes money anyway, so people don't expect that and most books are hand-sold by the poet and most poetry presses are labours of love and/or non-profits, so whether or not they make money is beside the point. They also as non-profits can run gofundmes or other donation drives and can apply for grants. That said, I expect to have some high-profile presses in this category shut down over the next year or two when they can't recover. SPD had a lot of clients in this category.
Probably the presses that will be hurt the most will be the ones that have a large quantity of sales through bookstores, such that SPD actually owed them real money, or which happened to have a bunch of releases just coming out when SPD shuttered (so SPD kept the pre-order money, which can be a substantial portion of overall sales for a book).
I'm not aware of there being a list of their small press creditors (maybe it's in the court filings but I have no idea how to look that up). So I am really just guessing.
posted by joannemerriam at 7:16 PM on October 12 [2 favorites]
joannemerriam, I just wanted to say THANK YOU for your excellent posts. As chance would have it, I (re)read through most of your small press posts just yesterday for inspiration on what to read next.
The work you put into these is really appreciated!
posted by bigendian at 4:31 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
The work you put into these is really appreciated!
posted by bigendian at 4:31 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
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posted by wenestvedt at 4:48 PM on October 12