In Commemoration of the Visit

Edited and introduced by Michael Cross, this book features an interview Cross conducted with Leslie Scalapino from 2007-2010, as well as Scalapino’s “Poetics” essay, both published here for the first time. 62 pages, side stapled. Cover art by Amy Evans McClure. Covers RISO printed by Aaron Cohick.

From Michael Cross’s introduction to this volume:

"I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets."

What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea.

SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS's stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire.

Contributors
DL Alvarez, Vera Blossom, Chloe Caldwell, Cristy Road Carrera, Sam Cohen, Tom Cole, Lydia Conklin, jimmy cooper, Lyn Corelle, Jenny Fran Davis, Cyrus Dunham, Hedi El Kholti, Robert Glück, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana, Taleen Kali, Cheryl Klein, Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Nate Lippens, Meredith Maran, Carta Monir, Amanda Montell, Carely Moore, Bradford Nordeen, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Kamala Puligandla, Brontez Purnell, Liara Roux, Andrea Sands, Daviel Shy, Jen Silverman, Anna Joy Springer, Laurie Stone, McKenzie Wark, Zoe Whittall.

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

"Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling is consummate masterwork by a singuarly perceptive and articulate poet. Deceptively quiet in manner, its intimate foci and tone make clear the ground of our contemporary lives, our 'being together' despite the distances of isolating thought. I love Kathleen Fraser's extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too"—Robert Creeley.

"Here is a language of poetry that recognizes, beyond its intimacies, the intellectual and elusively sensate aspects of visual and literary aesthetic connection"—Carla Harryman.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

Presented in a flip-book style, Man Unraveling consists of twenty-eight painted-on photographic images by Creative Growth artist Alice Wong. Wong's colorful palette adorns a group of photographs of the Italian fashion designer Valentino as he works at his desk. Identified only by the book's title, Valentino's image gradually evolves into greater abstraction with the paintings' general sequence. With colored edges and a textured softcover with flaps, this interactive book is a vivid journey into Alice Wong's imaginative world. 

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon is the first book in the Weaving Language series, which examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling, and poetry.

In Weaving Language I: Lexicon, weaving processes are mapped onto English grammar to suggest a method for reading woven works. Offering visual vocabularies as both discrete concrete poems as well as a collection of translatable terms, this book invites readers, writers, and weavers to participate by considering weaving as a system that can be decoded. Textile forms are broken into the basic building blocks of language, presented as a visual/textual lexicon.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon was initially self-published by Capone in 2012 and in 2015 re-issued in an edition of five as an artists’ book, which was awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize from Brown University.

Essay Press’s edition makes this important work available for the first time in a trade edition. The edition has also been newly edited and significantly expanded into a multivocal work that represents the contributions of a small collective of artists including Martha Tuttle, Allison Parrish, Sarah Zapata, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Amaranth Borsuk, and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, thanks to funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation. The book also includes an afterword by Kit Schluter and diagrams by Anni Albers (with permissions from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).

Plans are underway to similarly expand and reissue the two additional books in the series both previously published in limited editions currently out of print: Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018) and Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017). The Weaving Language project has been accompanied by numerous gallery shows, including “Material Memory,” a show running from October 7 through November 9, 2022, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, to accompany the release of the Essay Press edition of Weaving Language I.

Artists’ books from the Weaving Language series are held by the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, NY; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, RI; and at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.