let / things be; add / words, but let / things be (Inger Christensen)
We are incredibly proud to share editor Heidi Van Horn’s recent interview with DLP author Sarah Rosenthal, on the subject of her latest chapbook, WE COULD HANG A RADICAL PANEL OF LIGHT.
Visit The Brooklyn Rail for the full interview.
Read, share, enjoy.
This event is FREE.
WE COULD HANG A RADICAL PANEL OF LIGHT
Sarah Rosenthal’s we could hang a radical panel of light embodies the visibility of the poetic process, in which the tangible and intangible are held in counterbalance. Words and phrases from Rosenthal’s dream journal have been broken apart, rearranged, and placed by hand on the page, each cut-out white rectangle becoming its own panel of light. The compositional practice of collage builds a tenuous sense of structure and evokes a shifting subjectivity, a revolving, scintillating sense of meaning. “Estelle,” “she,” and “I” are all points in a constellation of a self grappling with pain and identity as they mirror, overlap, and depart from one another, traversing the vast space in which each panel has been carefully affixed.
MUSTARD
Like a breathless friend on a busy corner, Raul Ruiz’s Mustard lifts our gaze, winks, and gestures towards the sky, which is somehow filled with hummingbirds. Surreal, big-hearted, and playful, this series of prose poems documents one jaded (or maybe not yet?) poet's employment at the Libreria De Amplio Margen, "a little bookshop on a street that time was beginning to erase from us," punctuated by the author’s original line drawings. With shrewd and companionable tenderness, Ruiz catches us up in the inextricably strange and hungry experience of being human—loving, dreaming, writing—amidst the buying and selling of books.
* Note [1/29/22]: Preorders for Dream Life are SOLD OUT and have been mailed. There will possibly be 2-3 copies added to the inventory, so check back soon!
This is a virtual Drop Leaf Press event that takes place over Zoom.
NOTE: Our reading will take place from 5:30 to 6:05pm (PST), followed by a (completely optional) Talking Circle, which will be from 6:10-7pm.
REGISTER FOR FREE IN ADVANCE. After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email with info about joining the event.
Drop Leaf Press invites you to celebrate the release of ALL OF IT, TINGED, 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. Supporting our featured reader, Diana Fisher, will be poems by Jennifer S. Cheng and an introduction to the book by Heidi Van Horn, editor, and Janet Bishop, Chief Curator at SFMOMA.
Following the reading, we invite you to join us for an optional 45-minute Post-Inauguration Talking Circle. In the vein of ALL OF IT, TINGED, this will be a facilitated safe space for anyone who wants to share how they are processing the impact of the recent election and the transition of power. All feelings welcome! <3
Get your own copy of ALL OF IT, TINGED, available in our store now.
Please join Drop Leaf Press as we celebrate our first chapbook author’s first full-length collection with our first-ever online reading! Tanya Holtland (Inner River, 2016)’s Requisite is newly out from Platypus Press. Joining Tanya is Aricka Foreman, whose first full-length book Salt Body Shimmer just came out with YesYes Books and features cover art by Lorna Simpson, the same artist who did Requisite’s cover. We’re also thrilled to host Tanya’s fellow Platypus author Richard Georges and Bay Area poet-friends Elizabeth Robinson and Monica Mody!
In a beautiful interview with Alta Magazine, author Heidi Van Horn discusses her book of photography and text, Belated Poem: “This particular poem—I consider it a book-length poem rather than a collection—is an investigation of the interior world: consciousness, memory, the complexities of selfhood. And of dark places: time and transience, shadows, stains, silences, the aftermath of failed intimacy. In other words, ‘belated’ as in ‘overtaken by lateness of the night; hence, overtaken by darkness; benighted.’”
We are ecstatic to announce our newest title, BELATED POEM by Heidi Van Horn, a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs distilling landscape, color, and language into a poetics of interiority. Join us in celebrating the book launch of this special project on November 9, 4pm, at The Bindery in San Francisco, where the author will be joined by DLP editor Sarah Heady and fiction writer Nancy Au!
Available now at our store.
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
Happy congratulations to one of our chapbook authors, Hailey Higdon, whose first full-length book, Hard Some (Spuyten Duyvil), just came out! We’re ecstatic for her!
We are proud to announce the fifth and final installment of our chapbook series is finished and up for sale on our website! With gorgeous watercolor art & lettering by Mary Lundquist, Kevin Varrone's REDEMPTION CENTER adds yet another texture to our press’ small shelf of offerings.
This collection feels like a nest woven from whatever’s on hand: twigs and grasses, but also unraveled cassette tape. The nimble music of Varrone’s poems is a pleasurable vehicle for the heavy matter of mourning extinctions—the passenger pigeon, the dodo—while attending to the given world with devotion and curiosity (all this looking, I thought I might see / a pair of chuck t’s thrown over a power line). The self set in motion by a long, solitary train ride accesses the redemptive quality of observation: a quality that both raises possibilities (a house for sale / along the tracks / by water // is that a life // of mine?) and makes home shine more brightly (harbor or harbinger, forsythia / I miss you). Like the eponymous site to which one brings spent bottles and cans, expecting a meaningful accretion of dimes and nickels, REDEMPTION CENTER is a humble and hopeful operation.
Available now at our store!
As a press based in the Bay Area, we are heartbroken about all the world’s recent devastations, including the fires in Northern California. One of our chapbooks, Sonoma by Lehua M. Taitano, is named for the region so heavily affected, and after hearing that Lehua was directly impacted, the editors of Drop Leaf Press have decided to donate all proceeds from sales from now until November 30 to benefit Lehua. Thank you for your support <3
Rob Mclennan interviewed us on why we do what we do, how we do it, and what sets us apart from other small presses; we provided incredibly truthful and loving answers.
“Operating without concern for ‘the market’ and lifting up material that feels vital, for its own sake…[is what] we do.”
“We have a passion for creating beautiful and spacious physical scaffolding - paper, ink, thread, spine - for the poetry and prose that our authors have entrusted to us. Over time we have learned that as a small press, we need to grant each other the same generous blank pages, the time to ponder, to get bogged down by life, to resurface, to find each other again.”
“I think of us as spearheading our own sort of ‘slow literature’ movement, which means we just do what we can, when we can, without driving ourselves and each other crazy.”
“I see our press as a very tiny stream making its way down the mountains, picking its way over stones, following the lay of the land, as the snowmelt of the previous winter. Our handbound aesthetic can be quite time consuming, yet is very personal and highly textured.”
