They’re titled only on the contents page, each named with the number of the swim, so when you are reading them, you move from poem to poem as a swimmer might turn after touching the wall, fluidly, to the side of the pool from which they started. Jennifer Firestone’s Swimming Pool is a series of reflective poems in which the speaker’s musings during her daily swim become poems. They were looking for work that toed the line between poetry and prose, work that examined the relationship between these two genres. And each round yields a bit of knowledge” (9).Īnother series that DoubleCross Press put out books for this year is called Prose-ish. The answer is in the process, in the “perpetual cycle of investment and renewal, an expenditure of energy that yields enough momentum to carry the next round of expenditure. The product of the apprentice, administrator, and editor can only answer that so much. “Are we better off for all these emails?” (19) they ask. It moves from the heavier more philosophical attitudes towards process to the everyday realities of “the small printer broken” (25), “packing etiquette” (18), and “email chains” (18). They struggle between what it means to be an editor, to love something so much that this time spent apprenticing is worth it, but to devote time to the creative side of that labor of love: “When we agree to be editors, we choose to occupy the space between creating and publishing, where work (administrative) meets work (creative)” (24).Īnyone who has ever worked on a small press project will relate to Newton and Russo’s essay. The apprentices in this chapbook, though, value their labor as it teaches them how to be the next round of administrators. The word “apprentice” seems antiquated today we have “interns” who, more often than learning the trade, run errands and perform menial tasks so that the administrators can perform tasks more smoothly. The major theme in this essay is the difference between an apprentice, an administrator, and a creator. There are direct addresses from Newton to Russo and vice versa, lists, instructions and directives, dialogue, and also the more standard elegant blocks of prose you’d imagine from an essay. The essay is almost like two people thinking aloud, and it takes different forms. Poetics of the Handmade is a DoubleCross Press series edited by MC Hyland that publishes essays written by “contemporary hand-bookmakers and writers who engage with the handmade book as publishers, promoters, or curators.” Eternal Apprentice is the fourth chapbook in this series, and in it Russo and Hyland address what it means to work as a team on a project. Each of these chapbooks, and others they’ve put out recently, are worth spending time with.Įternal Apprentice by Michael Newton and Emmalea Russo To do so, I not only read them but spent time running my fingers across the textures of their covers, admiring their smart design and classy paper choices, and generally being legitimately impressed at the variety of beautiful things this press put out in 2016. But these aren’t just pretty faces it’s what’s on the inside-poetry, poetics and “prose-ish” pieces-that counts. DoubleCross Press makes gorgeous letter press chapbooks.
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