Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble aren’t the only booksellers online -- look here for online access to the independents, the underground, the hard-to-find sources of poetry books & recordings, as well as the big traditional poetry publishers.
An email interview with Bruce Isaacson, founder & publisher of Zeitgeist Press, an independent small press that rose out of the San Francisco Bay area spoken word scene of the 1980s.
Am Here's entire catalog has made its way online at
the Advanced Book Exchange (an online network of indie booksellers) & it's a
great source of poetry since 1945 -- books, broadsides, anthologies & little mags.
For 36 years, Black Sparrow published “the original, the counter-cultural, the avant-garde, and the overlooked,” cultivating a list that included many of the very best poets of the West Coast & beyond, beginning with Bukowski & on to Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman & Wanda Coleman. In 2002, John Martin closed up shop & sent his back list to
David R. Godine.
Cited by
Quill & Quire as “one of Canada’s most important literary presses,” Black Moss Press has been publishing poetry, anthologies, short stories, fiction and sports literature for 40 years. Their publications include the Palm Poets collectors’ series, several themed anthologies and “First Lines,” first books by new Canadian authors.
Incredible Librarian, Inc.’s site flies by.... It’s not a publisher, it’s not a bookseller, it’s Book Zen, the direct link between small presses, writers & readers.
John Buschek’s BuschekBooks is a micro publishing company in Ottawa, Canada whose list includes Canadian fiction, poetry and translations by Canadians.
Calaca Press, “dedicated to publishing, producing and promoting Raza writers and artists whom the main publishing companies choose not to publish,” is steadily adding publications to its poetry list of both
books &
spoken word CDs.
Wendy Battin, Charles Hartman, & their helpers at Connecticut College’s CAPA are providing a very heartening service: an Internet archive of out-of-print poetry books in text-only format. For instance, Edwin Honig’s
Time and Again: Poems 1940 - 1995 is now online for the reading, even as he has struggled to find a publisher for this massive collection.
Copper Canyon Press truly is the premier U.S. publisher devoted exclusively to poetry. Their author list speaks for itself: Pablo Neruda, Thomas McGrath, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Kizer, W.S. Merwin, Su Tung-p’o, Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Olga Broumas, David Lee...
Curbstone Press has been publishing “books that make a difference” for 20 years under the slogan “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” Their online catalog site is full of riches: descriptions & ordering info for poetry collections from the likes of
Devorah Major,
Margaret Randall,
Martín Espada &
Jack Hirschman.
This new Canadian publisher of books & spoken word CDs offers lots of samples on its site: iPod video clips from
Clive Holden’s
Trains of Winnipeg “film poems” &
a collection of mp3s, as well as a catalog of their books & other multimedia productions.
Daedalus is the best of the mail-order catalogs of remaindered books — their books are carefully chosen, their blurbs intelligent and entertaining. At their Web site you can read their catalogs online, or sign up to get their paper catalog by mail for reading at your leisure.
Dove Audio is the audiobook imprint of NewStar Publishing. Its brand-new Web store features anthologies of the best-known poets (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Yeats & Whitman) read by famous voices (mostly Hollywood actors), some with RealAudio samples & all at 20% discount.
International poetry from a press which maps the multiplicitous worldwide contemporary poetry landscape in its
print chapbook series, its
e-chapbooks & its
online archives of poetry books published elsewhere in print. Beyond all this, Duration also hosts a whole host of publishers of new writing on the Web.
Dan Machlin’s Futurepoem Books describes itself as “a New York City-based publishing collaborative” (note:
not collective) “dedicated to presenting innovative works of contemporary poetry & prose by both emerging & important underrepresented writers.” Ann Lauterbach & Charles Bernstein are the advisory board, so naturally the poets on Futurepoem’s list are an interesting & varied set of voices.
Green Integer publishes a great series of small-format paperbacks, “new works by contemporary artists... important but overlooked works by some of history’s greatest writers, and... significant international works which have never before been published in English.” Among their poetry titles are Vítêzslav Nezval’s
Antilyrik & Other Poems and Willis Barnstone’s translation of
Sappho.
Granary Books’ site epigraph says it all: “A book should be a ball of light in one’s hands.” (Ezra Pound) Lots of good things are in their list of “
Original and authentic” new books. Or you can search their inventory of out-of-print & rare poetry books, little mags & artists' books at
Advanced Book Exchange.
Despite their severe recent cutbacks, HarperCollins is still an imprint to look to for some wonderful poetry, from Ginsberg’s
Selected Poems 1947-1995 to Coleman Barks’
Essential Rumi and Jane Hirshfield’s beautiful & illuminating collection of essays,
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.
Opened on the Web in celebration of National Poetry Month 1999, the Knopf Poetry Center has
a complete catalog of poetry published under Random House imprints.
KotaPress is a Seattle-based independent press offering a quarterly online journal, semi-annual anthology contests (completely free and legit!), poetry titles available thru their eStore, and grief support through the Mrs. Duck Project in partnership with Seattle M.I.S.S.
Since 1998,
Raindog has been putting out this pocket-size series of books by such poets as A.D. Winans, Bill Shields & Gerald Locklin.
LSU Press publishes a good amount of poetry, including books in
the National Poetry Series and the winners of the American Academy of Poets’
Walt Whitman Award. Authors on the LSU list include Kelly Cherry, Lisel Mueller and Miller Williams.
Jennifer Joseph’s Manic D Press is
the San Francisco Bay area prominence among underground publishers. Her poetry list includes books by Jeffrey McDaniel, Kimi Sugioka, Sparrow 13 Laughing Wand, Juan Felipe Herrera, Beth Lisick, Justin Chin, Matt Cook & Eli Coppola.
Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions is a nonprofit literary press “publishing with the intent of making a humane impact on society” & known for its poetry list, which includes individual collections by poets such as Pattiann Rogers, Pablo Neruda, Ángel González & Lewis Hyde, as well as a number of topical anthologies.
Originally established by Carroll Terrell as a center for Pound scholarship, the
National Poetry Foundation is housed at the University of Maine and has expanded its focus “to include the entire tradition of innovative poetry from modernism to the present day.” NPF publishes poetry as well as scholarly books and journals.
Northwest Passages’ virtual bookstore has been updated with a comprehensive poetry section, where you can browse through anthologies, experimental poetry, “First Nations” poetry, translations from French to English and vice versa, and more.
Richard Hansen’s 24th Street Irregular Press in Sacramento, California publishes this series of tiny booklets to be “scattered around town — on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip, stuffed into a stranger’s back pocket...” or mailed on request for the cost of postage. Bravo!
Chris Mansell’s PressPress publishes “poetry in a time of fire” in Australia, and it’s the model for independent small publishing ventures in the new millennium: good looking books of good poetry printed on demand & distributed online.
Look here to order books of poetry & criticism from Princeton University Press, including work by Aeschylus, Alicia Ostriker, Robert Pinsky, C.P. Cavafy & Ann Lauterbach. Lots of good translations, too.
Pudding House has a long list of chapbooks in print, by many fine poets including Steve Abbott, Susan Terris, Will Inman & Stephanie Mathews, as well as two larger anthologies,
Prayers to Protest &
The Unitarian Universalist Poets, & a number of poetry resource & workbooks.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary press committed to quality book design & keeping their titles in print in order to provide “a real home” for their writers. They also sponsor the annual
Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry & a special project for teachers & students,
Sarabande in Education.
The Filipino Book Shop -- if you're intrigued & want to read any of the writers mentioned in
our 97 column on Filipino-American writers, order their books here.
SPD is “the only wholesaler in the country devoted exclusively to independently published literature” & now their entire catalog is searchable online. If you don’t know what you want to read but you do want intelligent recommendations, keep an eye on their SPD Recommends & Bestselling Poetry pages. Secure online ordering, & it’s
the place to look for poetry you can’t find anywhere else.
William Gillespie (of
Newspoetry fame) founded Spineless Books on 20.02.2002, and as you might expect, first on its publications list is
2002: A Palindrome Story. Spineless Books emphasizes “collaborative writing, formal experimentation, and utopian thought.”
Talonbooks began as a high school lit zine in Vancouver, whose editors brought it with them to the University of British Columbia & beyond -- it has been publishing “works of national and international excellence, whose authors happen to be Canadian” for 30 years now & its authors include such luminaries as
bpNichol,
bill bissett &
Adeena Karasick.
Tupelo Press has been publishing books since 2001 by poets whose names you may or may not know, like David Hernandez, Annie Finch, Catherin Daly & Ilya Kaminsky. “What we look for is a blend of urgency of language, imagination, distinctiveness, and craft. What we produce and how we produce it — from design to printing to paper quality — honors the writing...”
Ugly Duckling Presse is a Brooklyn haven for lovers of handmade art books
and, in its collaboration with the Loudmouth Collective, for “works off paper: these may be performed, or they may exist on digital video, CD, or tree bark.” Lots of interesting projects & objects in their catalog.
Read single-screen excerpted poems from poets like W.S. DiPiero, Susan Hahn, Robert Polito or critics like Marjorie Perloff, then order copies online, or jump into the
literature search page for all the American Association of University Presses, to find work by all the academic poets in the land.
John Bennett's wandering mimeo press (Washington, D.C. to Munich to New Orleans to Ellensburg, Washington) has produced the
Vagabond zine & anthology, a tribute to Henry Miller & a new tribute to Jack Micheline,
Ragged Lion, “a subterranean stitching together of the still alive and kicking Beat world.”
From Wesleyan University Press, this is the place to look for work by Heather McHugh, William Dickey and Sandra McPherson.
