Children of Another Hour

by Mara Pastor

Translated by Noel Black

Letterpressed, Hand-bound chapbook / $10

“Come, astronomer,/ and tell me your abysses./ That static that smashes/ into our heads every time we mend// a beginning.”

In this collection of twenty intensely imagined poems, Mara Pastor has built a whole universe of post-futuristic melancholy. These poems, despite their brevity, take on the human condition – love and death – in a world of cosmonauts, scientists, space travel, and post-apocalyptic gloom. They are concerned with the fleeting nature of our time here on earth (and in space), our inability to connect with each other, and also with our fate as a species. The poet Noel Black has rendered this work in an American English so natural and fine that it almost feels inevitable. This is the kind of book you keep in your pocket and your head for a very long time.

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Mara Pastor (San Juan, 1980) is a poet, editor and translator. Her works include the books of poetry: Poemas para fomentar el turismo (La secta de los perros, 2012); Candada por error (Atarraya Cartonera, 2009) and Alabalacera, (Terranova, 2006). Mara’s creative and critical writings have appeared in several magazines and she is featured in such anthologies as Hallucinated Horse: New Latin American Poetry (Pighog Press, 2012) and Red de voces: poesía puertorriqueña (Casa de las Américas, 2012). At this time, she lives in Mexico City.

Noel Black lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, artist Marina Eckler, and their two sons. Co-founder with Ed Berrigan of LOG Magazine and publisher of Angry Dog Midget Editions in the late 1990s, he has since worked as a writer and producer for a wide variety of media outlets including The Stranger and WNYC. He currently works as a producer for KRCC public radio. He is the author of half-a-dozen chapbooks including Hulktrans (Owl Press) and In The City of Word People (Blue Press, 2008).

Swan

By Karin Gottshall

Letterpressed, hand-bound chapbook / $10

In the hundred//years I was nine I solved ten thousand math problems/ but no one asked me what I loved, so I just//unbuckled my shoes each night, alone with it.

–from “Forecast”

Karin Gottshall’s Swan finds extraordinarily vivid patterns of emotion evident in the materials of the “everyday.” In the tradition of great American female life-lyricists—Lyn Henjian, Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Guest—Gottshall generously allows readers not only to think about childhood, the passage of time, and the vulnerability of objects, but to feel those phenomena. Her deft handling of the lines between interior and exterior—and between “then” and “now”—merits reading and re-reading. The transformative nature of these poems invites the reader to study Gottshall’s language closely, and to study the emotional syntax of her own life in turn.

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Karin Gottshall is a poet, fiction writer, and creative writing instructor. Her most recent book, The River Won’t Hold You, won the 2014 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize, and will be published in late 2014. Her first book, Crocus, was published by Fordham University Press in 2007. She is also the author of the poetry chapbooks: Flood Letters (Argos Books, 2011) and Almanac for the Sleepless (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). She teaches poetry writing at Middlebury College, and has also taught at Interlochen Arts Academy and the New England Young Writers’ Conference. Karin live in Middlebury, Vermont.

The Writing

by Franz wright

Letterpressed, hand-bound chapbook / sold-out

Gloomerang

gloomerang

BY dagmara kraus
translated by joshua daniel edwin

HAND-BOUND CHAPBOOK / sold-out

Exuberant, darkly funny, and very smart, this long poem by German poet Dagmara Kraus makes music from a state of mind. Its voracious attitude to form and diction is both timeless and completely of this moment. Joshua Daniel Edwin has vividly brought Kraus’s neologisms, music, and rhythms into English with wit and authority. An extremely strong debut from two young poets.

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Dagmara Kraus was born in Poland and raised there and in Germany. Her poetry and translations appear widely, including the poetry collections kummerang (KOOKBOOKS, Berlin, 2012) and kleine grammaturgie (Urs Engeler/roughbooks, Solothurn, 2013). She currently lives in rural France and is translating the diary of Polish poet Miron Białoszewski.

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Joshua Daniel Edwin’s poetry appears in a variety of publications in print and online. His translations of Dagmara Kraus’ poetry were awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a 2012 ALTA Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the editorial board for the magazine Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

2014 Argos Poetry Calendar

hand-bound

HAND-BOUND CALENDAR

12 MONTHS

$15+ shipping

Sold-out

Poems are something we live among every day. They surround us in ways we don’t always expect, and ground us in time and space as nothing else does. An exploration of poetry’s relationship with time—how language settles and shifts over the course of moments, hours, seasons—that is what this annual project is meant to invite. Our lives transpire in their ordinary and extraordinary way, with the curious presence of our shared language running like a thread throughout.

Our second annual hand-bound, limited-edition calendar features one poem per month for 13 months (including January 2015). With poems by Kazim Ali, Sommer Browning, Christophe Casamassima, Don Mee Choi, Ryan Eckes, Farrah Field, Joan Kane, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Anna Moschovakis, Jared White, and Simone White. Artwork and illustrations by Essye Klempner.

Limited to an edition to 150.

[Painting by Essye Klempner]

Quarantine Reviewed in Rain Taxi

From Tivka Jakob’s review of Quarantine by Malachi Black:

The best way to read Malachi Black’s Quarantine may be to start at the end. Or in the middle. Of course, there’s always the option of starting at the beginning—if you can find it. As a collection of crown sonnets, this chapbook is extremely cyclical. Black trudges from desperate pleading to fervent gratitude, from solitude to singularity, from life to death to rebirth. He recognizes the inherent activity and monotony in the crown sonnet structure and utilizes it to explore a period of quarantine in his house, in his thoughts, and in his faith. He sees himself, his ailments, and his god as if through a shifting kaleidoscope: with vibrant colors, shapes, and variations of light, too fleeting to preserve but too impressive to dismiss.

Iris Cushing & Elizabeth Clark Wessel at the Poetry Society

From the Poetry Society website:

Could you talk a little bit about your own process of making and publishing chapbooks?

Liz: First we design the chapbooks on the computer. (Thank you desktop publishing revolution!) We make sure that all of the materials we use are of good quality, acid free, nice to touch, and not terrible for the environment when possible. We do a lot of the printing ourselves (guts on our laser printer, some of the covers on our inkjet printer).

Iris: We also letterpress some of our covers at The Arm in Williamsburg. We have a small studio in Brooklyn, with a large kitchen table in the center, which is where we assemble the books. Chapbook sewing is always a jolly good time. We fold, awl and sew the bindings, then trim the face of the book on a paper guillotine. I often thread needles, which I happen to be good at. Our wonderful intern, Grayson Wolf, often helps out, as well as Mårten Wessel (Liz’s husband) and the chapbook’s author.

Reveler

by Andrew Durbin

Hand-Bound Chapbook / Sold-out

The gazelle wagers

Its place in the chain

Of events

Because it loves a gamble

–Andrew Durbin

In this beautiful and hallucinatory long poem, Andrew Durbin wanders and wonders through life, love, sex and war, through the bucolic and the urban, startling us at each turn.

Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder, a publisher of art books, pamphlets, ephemera, and glossies. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Fence, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor ofConjunctions, curates the Queer Division reading series at the Bureau of Goods & Services–Queer Division on the Lower East Side, and lives in New York.

Argos Books featured in Small Press Points

From Poets & Writers:

“We wanted to contribute our own idiosyncratic visions of contemporary poetry to the greater conversation,” Clark Wessel says. Although Argos has released a few full-length books, it primarily publishes chapbook-length poetry collections, translations, and writer-artist collaborations, often in hand-sewn and letterpress editions. “We are interested in innovative poetry that takes risks with form and content and is attentive to the possibilities of the chapbook. We want to see work from writers whose identities and perspectives fall outside the mainstream.”

2013 Argos Poetry Calendar Featured at Rain Taxi

From Rain Taxi:

Still need a calendar for 2013? Check out the amazing poetry calendar from Argos Books—each month features a different poem by the likes of Eileen Myles, Mark Bibbins, Cecila Vicuna, Harryette Mullen, and other joyful noisemakers. It’s a chapbook you can hang on your wall, really—and it’s got a gorgeous letterpress cover to boot.

Quarantine

BY malachi black

HAND-SEWN CHAPBOOK / sold-out

Lord, you are the gulf

between the hoped-for

and the happening:

You’ve won. So what is left for me

when what is left for me has come?

In this crown of ten sonnets, based on the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, Malachi Black peels back each layer of his being and investigates what we are: “This tremolo of hands, / this fever, this flat-footed dance /of tendons and the drapery / of skin along a skeleton.” The tension and circularity inherent in Black’s form invokes the kinetic properties of the energy that surrounds and exists within us, and ultimately Black’s astute consideration of our condition leaves us hopeful and wanting.

Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press), and two limited-edition chapbooks, including Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). A recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Black has also received recent fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, and the University of Utah. He was the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in the Fall 2011 issue of the Academy of American Poets’ American Poet magazine.

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Quarantine reviewed at Rain Taxi 9/1/2013.

I Saw the Devil with His Needlework

By Bianca Stone
Hand-sewn Chapbook / Sold-out

The air was like a bullet made out of silk… so begins Bianca Stone’s I Saw the Devil with His Needlework. In the three long poems that make up this chapbook, Stone explores the double nature of love in ways that seem simultaneously timeless and new.

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Bianca Stone is the author of several chapbooks, including Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Argos Books), and the poetry-comic I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and Tin House. Bianca Stone is also a visual artist and her collaboration with Anne Carson, Antigonick, a new kind of comic book and translation, was published in spring of 2012 by New Directions. She lives in Brooklyn with the poet, Ben Pease.

Flood Letters reviewed by Aiden Arata

Aiden Arata reviews Flood Letters at the Pank Blog:

Gottshall understands both the appeal and the repulsion of giving up; each piece bristles with the quiet kinetics of keeping each in check. Starvation, cold, and the dead world strip away everything the narrator has, yet her weak grip on civilization seems more hopeful than pitiful. This is the magic ofFlood Letters: the speaker holds on. We see a soul one step beyond capitulation, the need to exist as a creator, the hope of futile correspondence. The reader is compelled to reply.

Legs Tipped with Small Claws

by Joan Larkin
Hand-Sewn Chapbook / Sold-Out

In Legs Tipped with Small Claws, Joan Larkin’s first collection since My Body: New and Selected Poems, poems rich in the strangeness and struggle of the natural world have a way reordering the reader’s attention. From the eye of the plankton to the shell of the Red-Eared Slider, creatures – both human and animal – glow with the radiance of hard-won attention. The twenty poems that make up this small collection are meant to be savored and lived with for a very long time.

Joan Larkin And Tony Leuzzi Discuss Poetry at HuffPo

Joan Larkin, whose chapbook Legs Tipped with Small Claws is forthcoming from Argos this spring, chats with Tony Leuzzi about poetry, sexuality, and their writing processes. The conversation is part of a series at Huffington Post called Voice to Voice, which “feature[s] intimate interviews between novelists, poets, playwrights, and writers as they discuss everything from the state of LGBT literature to sex and sexuality between the pages to the joys and challenges of writing about LGBT issues, themes, and lives.”

A New Form for Translation

David Varno takes a close look at If I Were Born in Prague and The Other Music at Words without Borders:

With both of these chapbooks, it is thrilling to look at the original lines and then back to the translation, a practice that can be exhausting with a longer book, usually leading non-academics to give up and rely solely on the translation (assuming the original is even available). Here in Argos’s chapbooks, the new or revised lines rise up from the surface of the page in a new dimension, allowing us to trace the translators’ work as writers. Having one of these books in hand, mentally charting its landscape, makes it hard to doubt the argument for old-fashioned reading. The book can and should be an object of art in its own right. As with all of the projects from Argos so far, some of which are hand- stamped or sewn, much care was put into their production.

Editors in the Spotlight at Coldfront

An interview with Argos Books’ editors E.C. Belli, Iris Cushing, and Elizabeth Clark Wessel is up at Coldfront.

If I Were Born In Prague

By Guy Jean
Versions by Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky

Perfect-bound chapbook/bilingual edition (French & English) / $10space

Guy Jean is a member of the first generation of French-Canadian poets to re-discover the cultural heritage of Acadia, which Jean describes as, “a folklore truculent with daily life, local lore linked to universal legends and songs handed down from generation to generation rich in 17^th century tavern songs and music going back to the troubadours.” This culture was devastated by the violent British takeover of the region. In Jean’s work the influence of this culture and history combined with the more familiar French poetics of Rimbaud and Michaux results in a work of haunting lyricism. The poems are both playful and mythic, while still seriously engaging in questions of inherited violence.

In If I were born in Prague Jean’s work is beautifully re-imagined in versions by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky allowing English readers an entry point into the vital work being done by one of our neighbors.

[Cosmic intercon-/nection of all beings?]

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from Notes from Irrelevance by Anselm Berrigan
artwork by Bianca Stone

Letterpressed Broadside/ $5 /Sold-Out

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This limited edition broadside was created for a reading at Metro Rhythm on May 13, 2011.

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The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s