Full-Length Books
ALL OF IT, TINGED / Diana Fisher & Asako Shimazaki ($12)
All of It, Tinged is a curated juxtaposition of the photography of Asako Shimazaki and the writing of Diana Fisher. Shimazaki’s quietly charged images from her solo wanderings across Northern Japan reflect and inflect Fisher’s diligent poetic narrative about a novitiate and her convent absorbing the results of a catastrophic national election. What is revealed is a weaving of conversations: between the narrator and God; the clash and complement of religious and elemental magnitudes; the private stance and the happenings of the public space. The register of this book is both grand and personal, interrogating affiliation and isolation, muteness and divine speech.
Diana Fisher has worked as a waitress, bartender, Lyft driver, child therapist, addiction counselor, and English teacher. Raised without religion, she has always been fascinated by it in its many forms, especially for its incantations and rituals. Having spent most of her life in California, she still treats water as a precious ration, though she now lives in rainy Oregon with her dog, a stone’s throw from a Buddhist temple.
Asako Shimazaki was born in Tokyo. She is the author of Ayu no Kaze (TBW Books, 2019), and her photography is represented in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Asako moved to the Bay Area 35 years ago and studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute under Henry Wessel. A Montessori teacher, she lives in San Francisco with her son.
BELATED POEM / Heidi Van Horn ($20)
Belated Poem is a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs distilling landscape, color, and language into a poetics of interiority. Van Horn’s spare lines and arresting photographs are narratively linked yet marked by rupture, elusion, and unsettledness. Deploying vocabularies of intimacy and ephemerality as deftly as those of abstraction, physics, and geologic time (volcanic island-building; fault-block mountains), Belated Poem ultimately speaks in human terms: perception and consciousness, shadow states, and severance at the seam of Self and Other.
“Belated Poem speaks in a mesmerizing incantation of precision and haunting as it seeks to observe and record the vast geographies of the interstices between people. A poet with a barometer, a scientist in a fugue state, Van Horn converges photography, text, and space in order to trace the complicated textures of intimacy and distance, attachment and rupture, amid the debris of an altered relationship. From the subtle doubling in her photographs and the spatial undertow of her lines emerges a lyrical sequence that, in its unearthing of “your body next to mine at the event horizon,” also unearths the inconsolable beauty of the interior terrain and those places that are hardest to voice.”
—Jennifer S. Cheng
“Belated Poem greets time after its becoming—exceeding a certain intensity—a relational experience or a lesson that befalls us in space. In the aftermath of ‘the jade- / blue slope of a line’ or ‘the cusp of the caldera,’ we become offspring of the ‘event horizon.’ Here are vital forces—landscape, creative, combinatorial—shifting, intimate, foreshadowing and spilling us into ‘catastrophic events’ or ‘a nest / out of dark matter.’ Image and poem in this beautiful sequence confirm the open-ended aliveness of traces and our distributed brave interface with the world.”
—Hazel White
HEIDI VAN HORN is a poet who takes lots of photographs. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores the complexity of selfhood and the space of the encounter. Heidi recently joined the editorial staff at Drop Leaf Press, where she will be focusing on artist + poet collaborative works. She is also co-authoring, with David Makaaha Kwon, “House of David,” a poetic assemblage exploring the personal and political geography of mass incarceration. Heidi received her BA in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She has worked as the assistant director of the UC Berkeley Public Service Center and currently serves as a youth justice mentor. She lives in San Francisco with her children. More at hvanhorn.com.
PRIMA VERA / Jill Tomasetti $10 (Orig. $15)
“The precise and vivid poems in Prima Vera ‘sing across dark spaces’ and map the world anew. She carries me to the cave of forgotten dreams, the lost coast, a schoolyard, the center of all hope. Through her vision, I come to understand some ‘heavy-booted first truth’ that returns me to myself. A fine debut!”
—Camille T. Dungy
“Jill Tomasetti’s spare and beautiful poems are a careful investigation of moments of encounter, of the complex and ever-shifting relations of I, you, we, and the inhabited world beyond the human. Here, ‘she’—a bird, an absence—‘makes islands out of us/ or branches, and the leaf-shape of a fallen word’ drifts down and off each page. These poems posit a thicker idea of belonging, of ‘home,’ one that isn’t to be found ‘out there’ but instead is created and recreated with each word and line, ‘to keep and unkeep you.’ Prima Vera offers a vital alternative to our all-too-human tendency to possess the natural world, to remake it in our own image, and instead traces the edges of something much more hesitant and crucially willing to concede the unknown: ‘but half-waking/ half-dreaming we seem to see them/ bears and shadows of bears pacing// liminal, patient’”
—Laura Walker
“[A]n evocative collection, filled with yearning, quiet contemplation, defeat, and hope.”
JILL TOMASETTI learned how to walk among oaks and maples in a small town in Connecticut. She learned how to love books at Bennington College and how to make poems in the graduate creative writing program at San Francisco State University. She learned how to love the ocean in San Francisco, where she lives, writes, and teaches preschool. Jill is a founding member of Drop Leaf Press. This is her first book.