13 July 2010

Minus A Press

Barbara Claire Freeman, editor of Minus A Press, just sent me a copy of Graham Foust's long-poem To Anacreon in Heaven wherein Foust writes in sentences! I think he's imagining the majority of the poem as a long parenthetical (the paren opens on page 2 and closes on the last page) which leaves the following nonparenthetical statement:


"World without anything, dark without stars—and
then the poem, some imagined glass, half full of its
own shards.

(Paren=the rest of the text)

Stay figure."

[My parenthetical: It's immediately apparent that Jeff Clark designed this one (as it so often is), and while I love his work as much as anyone (really!), I miss the days when poetry presses had an autonomous identity (even if its "trademark" was poor design!). Remember when Joel Kuzai glued on squares to the Meow covers? Or when Guy Bennett did all the design work for Sun & Moon? Or Leslie's collages for O Books? Or Burning Deck's black and white covers? So many contemporary presses employ Clark (Ashata, Flood, Kenning, Kelsey Street, etc.) that they begin to lose their identities; I'm just saying I miss the days when poetry presses wore their editors' aesthetics on their sleeves, you know? Minus A makes this book its own, however, with the gloss wrap-around and the commitment to gift economy...]

Which is to say that this book is FREE! Send a note to Barbara and she'll get one out to you!

Minus A Press
Barbara Claire Freeman
1160 Glen Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94708
bcf1@earthlink.net

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