Celina Su’s microseries chapbook, Plurality Decree, is now available for pre-order. The third chapbook in our microseries,Plurality Decree contains three poems that comment on uses of space, question ideas of public and private, and insist that their readers look at what is often kept ‘sanitized’ and invisible. Su’s poems reflect the frantic multiplicity of life in a time where laws, documents, decrees, texts both official and subversive, scientific objects, maps, and the possibility of individual actions/inaction seem to overlap one another more and more.
* * *
The microseries chapbooks are 10 cm square; covers are printed inside and out in full color by the wonderful Tompkin Press in Nottingham, UK. They’re ideal for presents and fit inside standard greeting cards. Long live the postal services of the world! Order here.
Dimensions: 10 cm square
Printing: full color
Binding: staple
Pages: 16
Edition: 100 (25 to writer)
Every time I set out with a new manuscript—heading for the precipice marked make a book—although I have the accumulated knowledge and abilities gained from the process of all the books that have come before, it feels like starting over from scratch. I have to remind myself of, or relearn, order-of-operations (where to cut first? Where to fold first?). I have to refamiliarize myself with the mathematics of Illustrator and my printer and the persnickety paper cutter. And this means trial and error, and frustration, a little panic (oh my god will this ever work?!), and, eventually, the satisfaction of seeing the book come together as I imagined.
How Absence was no different; in fact, it is an ideal case-study of this process. Everything that could go wrong in the printing process has gone wrong: printing errors and supply chain blockages, miscommunications and undelivered goods. Math errors. Misestimations. Last-minute changes.
This morning, I folded the first of the 140 covers (there are 120 + 20 marked e.a., for Rachel—édition d’artiste), and I trimmed the green endpapers and nested the textblock into them, and then these into the cover, and it was, suddenly, real. Here is How Absence, the latest book from our 2015 list. Rachel’s poems are mysterious and elegant, like dreams. The language moves through them with the sureness and care that has been a hallmark of Rachel’s writing since I first encountered it (more than ten years ago).
How Absence is also available as part of our limited-edition motherhood bundle, a collection of chapbooks which deal with motherhood, child(ren), and the interrelation of parenting and art-making. Of course, if you’d like to receive books like How Absence in your mailbox all year, you might consider one of our subscription options. Thank you for your support!
Rachel Moritz’s How Absence (now available for pre-order; shipping early April—or subscribe, for a whole year of books) has been praised by Sarah Vap as “a stunning collection that lurches with open arms, seemingly in slow motion, seemingly quietly, and seemingly with a surfeit of pause, pause, pause—toward her infant son’s creation, and toward her own mind’s creations. The language here, like the infant’s making, like everything that’s invisible, (like absence), becomes the immensely weighty presence: ‘Something transparent, we know/ still contains.'”
The poems in How Absence, like shards of pale pottery from an archaeological dig, tell us about what time does to human beings: all we are, all we make and do, and how it falls into dust. But Moritz, in the face of time, offers us not despair but the mercy of genetics and the terrible beauty of the fine line between the born and the dying.
* * *
24 pp.
21 x 12.5 cm
French flaps
Cotton paper cover
Green endpapers
Hand-bound in Belgium by MIEL
Edition of 120
Printed in Nottingham, UK, by Tompkin Press Co., Ltd.
