Essay by Mary Margaret Alvarado

Images by Corie J. Cole

64 pages, link-stitch with attached jackets

9.25” x 7” (closed)

Risograph (text pages, covers, endsheets) and letterpress from photopolymer plates (jackets)

Edition of 200

2024

$35

25% of profits from the sale of this book will be donated to RAWtools

This title is included as part of the 2024 NewLights Subscription.

Available here

From the author:

"I have written from dream, from image, from urgency, from sound, from a beat, from a question, from a conversation with the dead, from time keeping or a desire to keep time, from grief, from scraps.

'American Weather' began in anger. I was angry that we could all so fail one of our number that that person could arm himself with long guns, walk down some blocks designed for humans to walk, shoot people, and kill them.

This happened on Halloween, in 2015. There was a girl trick-or-treating as a jellyfish that year. She wore strings of lights and stood under a clear umbrella with iridescent streamers hanging from it. Who isn’t a lantern? But there she was, so visibly a lantern, moving up and down the block, and the beauty of that, on a holiday of such trust and vulnerability—strangers begging candy from strangers—it did me in. I thought about how much worse (a familiar and grotesque calculus) it would have been had our neighbor, the shooter, walked out in the evening instead of in the morning. I tried to make sure my children didn’t even know what had happened in our neighborhood, that morning, all they needed to know was what could be, what must be: a world where they never have to hide from a “shooter,” or become a shooter, and neither do you.

To write this essay-turned-book I joined the NRA, and learned how to shoot a gun; thought about public space ('front porch' vs. 'back-yard culture'), and race; interviewed the neighbor who owned the Kwik-Mart and the one who owned Catch ’A Fade; interviewed my older sister after a mud-covered man shouting about a war broke into her home; read a great deal about District of Columbia v. Heller, and the history of the NRA; took my employer’s active-shooter training on a college campus that has since lost students to gun violence;and so forth.

A shorter form of the essay was published by VQR. As part of their editorial process, I worked with a fact-checker so thorough that she ended up fact-checking The Atlantic in the process. Only primary sources stood.

Aaron Cohick, founder of NewLights Press, noted some years later that this long-form essay remained sadly relevant, and suggested it be a book. That book—which will be published next month—became a collaboration with the artist Corie Cole, who made finely detailed monochrome underglaze paintings of guns being chopped, melted, forged, and smithed into garden tools by Mike Martin and the good people at RAWtools. I wrote the book’s afterword—another essay—after hanging around that shop, and its radiant people, and after attending a gun buyback.

American Weather is, first, an artist book. It is art, in Corie’s illustrations, made first on ceramic tiles. And it is a book-length essay, by me, in refusal of gun violence as a kind of 'American weather,' and one that points toward other ways that we might live, through the heroism, that Halloween, of an unarmed veteran of war; my unarmed sister, trained to treat violence as a public health problem; a man who enjoyed recreational shooting but gave up his arms after suffering the loss of his wife and son."

From the artist:

"My spouse Aaron and I were on a rare weekend vacation with friends when the Halloween shooting started a few houses down from ours. The cat sitter arrived an hour after the incident and texted us that our block was cordoned off with police tape.

Mia wrote American Weather in the aftermath of that event, and for several years re-reading it had become a coping ritual while each mass shooting echoed through the news cycle. After the  shooting at the King Soopers store in Boulder, Aaron decided that he wanted to make the essay into a book and asked me to collaborate.

Working on the images for this book I realized I needed to carefully negotiate the boundary between depicting the essay ’s subject matter and neutralizing the gun as a symbol. In conversation about my artist ’s block with Mia, we arrived at the idea to weave another community member into the project. RAWtools has been reclaiming, disabling, and repurposing weapons for more than a decade. Documenting their buyback and blacksmith shop and presenting it alongside Mia’s writing felt like a little redemption — showing that people are doing this work in Colorado Springs — thoughtfully, daily, steadfastly."

Broadside by CJ Martin

No. 1 in the Fragments series (see below)

Collagraph and metal type

11” x 18.75”

Edition of 100

2024

$25

Available here

This is the first in a new series of experimental broadsides. Writers/artists are asked to send a “fragment” of something: parts of a larger whole (that may or may not be published, that may or may not exist); fragmentation from acceleration, cropping, magnification, damage, decay, palimpsest, editing, translation/mistranslation, etc. That fragment is used as a space to play with printing as an open process, as opposed to making a final design for rigid replication.

The colors for the text came from photographs of the sky at dawn and sunset, and I made a rule that I could use any color except blue. In terms of design I printed all of the different “moves,” the temporary positions of each element as I gradually improvised them into place. Those “moves” would normally be hidden away in the process of proofing and not visible in the final print. The large text is printed from handcut matboard, the counters are gel medium collagraph, and the small text is 12 pt. Garamond metal type. Printed on a Vandercook SP-15, the first print in my new home of Louisville, KY.

This broadside was sent out as part of the 2023 NLP Subscription.

Poem-drawings

Risograph and mixed drawing media on paper

7.5" x 13.25" (dimensions vary slightly)

2024

Distributed as part of the 2023 NLP Subscriptions

Poem-drawings

Risograph and mixed drawing media on paper

7.5" x 13.25" (dimensions vary slightly)

2023

Distributed as part of the 2023 NLP Subscriptions

(No. 6 was donated to the In Cahoots Residency 2024 Fundraiser Auction.)

Text-image poem by Aaron Cohick

48 pages

Sewn-boards binding, clamshell box

12.5" x 7.5" (closed)

Risograph and mixed drawing media

Variable edition of 12

2024

Drift • Fragment is an editioned, hand-painted text-image poem about reading, memory, time, labor, and rest. Each copy contains the same text but the construction of each page spread varies from book to book, obscuring some fragments and revealing others.

The twenty-four page spreads track the hours of the day using a changing palette of colors. Three threads of text move through the book, each rendered in a different size of an experimental set of letterforms called the Threshold Alphabet.

The initial images on this page show the cover and various page spreads from Copy A. The last three images show the same spread in Copies A, B, and C.

The book also has a clamshell box (not pictured) that contains the colophon.

There is a video of the book (after the images) that shows a complete pagethrough of Copy A. There is another video, viewable here, shot at the 2024 CODEX Bookfair, that shows Copies A, B, and C being paged through at the same time.

Drift • Fragment is currently being offered for pre-sale for $2,000. The full price will be $2,500. Contact Aaron Cohick with any questions or to make a purchase.

Drift • Fragment will be the raffle item for the 2023 and 2024 NewLights subscriptions.

Poem-print

Collagraph and Risograph

8” x 12” (single panel)

Composable edition of 124 variable copies of 2 different types of panels

2022

$75

Available here

All of Days is a “composable edition.” The panels were grouped into sets of four at random and numbered x.1, x.2, x. 3, and x.4 out of 62. The print can be displayed in a multitude of groupings, as small as one panel or as large as the full 248.

You can view the entire edition here.

Artist’s book/poem by Aaron Cohick

8 pages, pamphlet stitch

13.75” x 9.5” (closed)

Delamination and mixed drawing media

Single copy

2022

$400

Out of print

Artist’s book/poem by Aaron Cohick

8 pages, pamphlet stitch

13.75” x 9.5” (closed)

Delamination, mixed drawing media, and letterpress ink

Single copy

2022

$800

Out of print.

Poem by Nico Alvarado

Images by Aaron Cohick

10 pages, accordion book with attached folios

9.25” x 6.25” (closed)

Relief-etched plates, collagraph, metal type, and hand-coloring with acrylic inks

Variable edition of 150

2021

$20

Available here

Poem-drawing submanifesto by Aaron Cohick

8 pages, one-sheet fold

4.25” x 2.75” (closed)

Digital print book made from scanned Risograph prints, an ink drawing, and digital type

Open edition

2021

Available for free from the Quarantine Public Library

Collagraph made from scrap cardboard and petroleum products

9” x 12”

Variable edition of 16

Printed for the Environment CBAA member portfolio exchange

2021

Poem-prints

Letterpress collagraph and mixed media on various papers

9” x 16.5”

2021

$200 - $250

Variant No. 1 is sold out

Variant No. 2 is available here

Variant No. 3 is sold out

Variant No. 4 is sold out

Poem-print

Risograph on delaminated paper

10” x 14.75”

Variable edition of 2

2021

$250

Out of print

INDIA COVID CRISIS FUNDRAISER

Poem by Divya Victor

Letterpress from metal type and collagraph blocks made from found pieces of sidewalk

16” x 10”

Edition of 50

Signed by the author

2021

Out of print

All proceeds (minus shipping costs) were donated to the MSU Students for Covid-19 Relief in India fundraiser.

The poem is from Divya Victor’s book CURB, published by Nightboat Books in April 2021.

Poem-print

Liquid collagraph and metal type

23" x 30" (big!)

Variable Edition of 75

2020

$75

Available here

Poem-print

Risograph and flexible collagraph

9.75" x 30" (big!)

Variable Edition of 50

2020

$60

Available here

Poem-print

Delamination and collagraph

9.5” x 16.5”

Variable edition of 12

2020

$200

Available here

Poem-print

Double-sided

Collagraph and metal type

5.5" x 8.75"

Variable Edition of 120

2020

$25

Available here

Poem-drawing-comic book by Aaron Cohick

28 pages, pamphlet stitch

8” x 5.25” (closed)

Risograph and flexible collagraph

Variable edition of 150

2020

$25

Available here

Liquid collagraph

9” x 12”

Variable edition of 75

Part of the Codex Foundation project, Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss

2020

$20

Available here

7 pages

15.39” x 11.69”

Scanned risograph prints and digital type

Originally published in OEI magazine #86/87.

2020

Read the digital version

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

Delaminated poem-print

10.75” x 19.5”

Variable edition of 11

2019

$200

Available here

Poem-drawing-print

Stencil, gesso, ink wash, and brush collagraph from the hair of a loved one

12” x 19.5”

Variable edition of 16

2019

$200

Available here

Drawings and text by Corie J. Cole

36 pages, pamphlet stitch with attached jacket

8” x 6.5” (closed)

Risograph interior with letterpress printed jacket, cover, and endsheets

Edition of 150

2019

$25

OUT OF PRINT

From the text:

“Constipatriarchy (n.): The cultural norm of reticence and lack of emotional expression used to maintain an outward appearance of strength or dominance. This often results in emotional outbursts within the confines of religious ceremony, domestic life, sports events, and drunken rages. Identifiable in individuals through the physiognomic trait, the constipatriarchal brow, most often seen in elders at the top of the hierarchy.”

Poem-print

Flexible collagraph and risograph

9” x 14.5”

Variable edition of 75

2019

$20

Available here

Poem-print

Flexible collagraph and trace monoprint

9” x 15”

Variable edition of 25

2018

$25

Available here

This print was made while I was a teaching a letterpress workshop at the Penland School of Craft.

Poem-print

Flexible collagraph

23" x 30" (big!)

Variable Edition of 55

2018

$50

Available here

Poem-print

Flexible collagraph and metal type

23" x 30" (big!)

Variable Edition of 55

2018

$50

OUT OF PRINT

Letterpress from flexible collagraph and laser-cut relief blocks over gesso on paper.

9” x 21.5”

Variable edition of 70

2018

Not for sale. Produced as part of the subscription for the NewLights Press founding members.

REAEDR is a magazine of one word poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Each issue is built around a particular theme, and that theme, as well as the pieces inside, determine the form, shape, color, material, processes, etc. of the issue. This is the first issue, and the theme is WAR.

52 pages, pamphlet-sewn

16.5" x 10" (closed)

Risograph, collagraph, and linoleum print. The typefaces used throughout are from the Lo-Res family, designed by Zuzana Licko and published by Emigre.

Edition of 150

2017

$30

Available here

Contributors (in alphabetical order):

Aaron Anstett

Thérèse Bachand

Anselm Berrigan

Rosa Byun

Chris Dunsmore

Craig Dworkin

Sam Gilpin

David B. Goldstein

Bob Heman

Gretchen E. Henderson

Jen Hofer

Peter Rutledge Koch

Clifton Meador

Luis Othoniel Rosa

Natanya Ann Pulley

Jessy Randall

Timmy Reed

Han Sayles

Kyle Schlesinger

Justin Sirois

Susan Smereka

Divya Victor

Poem-print

Produced as part of the End of Times 2 broadside portfolio

Letterpress from flexible collagraph, ink wash, and gesso on Cranes Lettra Fluorescent White paper provided by Neenah Paper

8" x 10"

Variable Edition of 80. Seventeen AP copies are available outside of the portfolio

2017

$20

Available here

20 pages, saddle-stapled

6.5” x 5.5” (closed)

Risograph, letterpress/collagraph, and hand painting

Unlimited, iterative edition

2017

$5

Print book available here

Click here to purchase a high-res PDF for classroom use

"The book is a dangerously unstable object // It is a series of edges // Once clustered and knotted //  Now open and spreading // Now cutting and bending // Mostly // The book betrays // Mostly // The book howls // The book falls apart in the face of our anguish // In the face of our quiet // In the silence of our slipping // Mostly // It will also always be something else // That we did not // Can not yet // See //

The book is a remarkable technology // It is a shimmering substance // It is a noise of the hands and thought // The book is perhaps now a dead thing // In the hands of the dead // So be it // We never mattered much anyway // Beyond our capacity to consume // Our capacity to labor // We are fuel // So be it // We remain in the dark // With these books // The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through // At // In // Against // With care // The book returns our labor to us //"

Letterpress printed from woven collagraph blocks, on newsprint

28 pages, saddle-stapled

5.5" x 6.5" (closed)

Edition of 250

2017

$5

Available here

This is the companion book to the third iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. It shows the complete Threshold Alphabet, in order, in condensed and full form.

From the third iteration of The New Manifesto: "This is not a utopian program // This is not an alphabet for saving the world // Such a thing is a dangerous lie // This is one possibility // Not a tool // But a movement-between // An object-between // A growing // Changing thing // Meant to do just that // It is about attention and its revitalization // It is about structure and our being in it //"

Letterpress on chipboard

12.5" x 19"

Open Edition

2016

$15.00 individual prints

$75.00 for the set of 6

These posters were letterpress printed at The Press at Colorado College. All of the money raised from this project (after we cover basic material and shipping costs) will be donated in equal amounts to the following organizations: The Black School, RIP Medical Debt, Inside/Out Youth Services, the Chinook Center, and the Black Educators’ Network in El Paso County, CO. UPDATE: In light of the 11/20/22 attack on Club Q in Colorado Springs, all proceeds from these posters in 2022 and 2023 will be donated to Inside/Out Youth Services. UPDATE to the UPDATE: As of 4/20/23 the remaining posters have been given to Inside/Out Youth Services to use for fundraising.

The initial goal for these prints was simple: provide a space and an activity for people to come together to support one another and make a public statement against hate. Using the work and workshops of the printer Amos P. Kennedy, Jr. as a model, we opened up our studio at Colorado College and invited people to come in and print, and to change or add to the text as they saw fit. In the first two days we printed and distributed almost 700 posters.

We hope that these posters will be displayed to promote a continuing engagement in the work of social and racial justice. These are posters that stand against white supremacy, patriarchal oppression, and all of the cruelty and dehumanization of those systems. These posters are not enough. The work has always been going, and it must continue. Please stay in it.

Poem-print

Risograph in two or three colors on cover weight French Paper. Four variants inside the edition. Variant 4 has hand-drawn pencil over the print.

12.25" x 19.25"

Variable Edition. Variant 1: 8 copies. Variant 2: 6 copies. Variant 3: 6 copies. Variant 4: 3 copies.

2016

$20

Available here

Risograph on newsprint

32 pages, saddle-stapled

8" x 11" (closed)

Edition of 200

2016

$10.00

Available here

Coloring Book was made from four pre-existing coloring books. Each book was reproduced in its complete page order and registration by placing the original cover and pages on the stage glass of a Riso MZ-990. The cover paper is from the French Paper Company, and the pages are newsprint sourced from various places.

This is a book for children and adults, and we definitely encourage you to use it for actual coloring. If you or your kids or your students or your pets do color any of the pages, please take a picture and email it to us. We would love to see what all you readers do with these things.

Risograph with hand painting

12 pages, saddle-stapled

6" x 8" (closed)

Edition of 100

2016

$10.00

Available here

Days Open Air is an artists' book/poem thing by the NewLights Press/Aaron Cohick. It is an experiment: with our new Risograph, with the alphabet, with writing, with random numbers, and with noise.

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2014, No. 3

Poems by Alexis Almedia, Oren Silverman & Sara Renee Marshall

36 pages, saddle stapled pamphlet

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, cover letterpress printed from lead type and chipboard collagraphs

Edition of 100

2014

$8

Available here

ABOUT THE BOOK:

This book was made for a reading by Alexis Almeida, Oren Silverman & Sara Renee Marshall on July 5, 2014, part of the Say Hello to Your Last Poem! series. The text pages were laser printed. The covers were letterpress printed from lead type and MDF/chipboard collagraphs. All of the paper is from the French Paper Company, made with recycled content and hydroelectric power. The text typefaces are Adobe and ATF Garamonds. The modular titling lettering is another variation of a design by NewLights.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Alexis Almeida teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, where she is at work on an MFA in poetry. Her translations and poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in Likestarlings, La Vague, The Ampersand Review, Aufgabe, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver.

Oren Silverman lives in Denver. His most recent work can be found in the critically-acclaimed chapbook Alexis, Oren & Sara's Halves from the NewLights Press.

Sara Renee Marshall hails from the southwest. She is the author of a chapbook, Affectionately We Call This The House, and her poems appear places like Colorado Review, Omniverse and Octopus. Sara is headed to Athens, Georgia to pursue a PhD at the University of Georgia.

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2014, No. 5

Poems by j/j hastain & Noel Black

32 pages, saddle stapled dos-a-dos

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, laser and letterpress (collagraph & lead type) cover

Edition of 100

2014

$8

Click here to purchase

From the colophon(s):

This book was made for a reading by Noel Black and j/j hastain, the fifth in the 2014 Say Hello to Your Last Poem! series, on August 9, 2014 in Manitou Springs, CO. [...] The covers were printed using a combination of letterpress printed lead type, chipboard and vinyl collagraphs, and digitally printed photographic images. The text pages were laser printed. All of the photographs forming the title lettering are by j/j hastain. The paper is from the French Paper Company, made with recycled content and hydroelectric power.

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2014, No. 4

Poems by Jen Hofer and TC Tolbert

32 pages, saddle stapled dos-a-dos

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, laser and letterpress (collagraph & lead type) cover

Edition of 100

2014

$8

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

There is no colophon in the book, because there is no space for “end matter,” but if there was it might go something like this:

This book was made for a reading by Jen Hofer & TC Tolbert, the fourth in the Say Hello to Your Last Poem! series, on July 29, 2014 In Manitou Springs/Colorado Springs, CO. Corie Cole helped with proofreading, and CJ Martin & Julia Drescher helped with binding.

The covers were printed using a combination of letterpress and digital processes: the pattern on the interior was laser printed, and the rest of the colors/elements were letterpress printed from chipboard collagraphs or lead type. The text pages were laser printed. All of the paper is from the French Paper Company, made using hydroelectric power and recycled content. The typefaces are Adobe and ATF Garamonds. Title lettering and ornament design by NewLights. 100 copies were made.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary activism collaborative Antena. Her books are available from numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath Press, Dusie Books, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations.

TC Tolbert is a feminist queer, a poet, and a teacher. S/he’s the author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press) and the chapbooks i:not he:not i (pitymilk press), spirare (Belladonna), and territories of folding (Kore Press). S/he co-edited Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books), and is Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, where s/he lives.

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2014, No. 2

Essay by Julia Drescher and poems by CJ Martin

40 pages, saddle stapled dos-a-dos

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, cover letterpress printed from lead type, chipboard collagraphs and unfixed vinyl strip collagraphs

Variable edition of 100

2014

$8

OUT OF PRINT

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The text pages were laser printed and the covers were letterpress printed from lead type, flexible vinyl collagraphs and chipboard collagraphs. All of the paper is from the French Paper Company, made with recycled content and hydroelectric power. The text was set in Adobe and ATF Garamonds. The modular title lettering was designed by NewLights.

This book was made for a reading by CJ Martin and Julia Drescher on Saturday, June 21, 2014, as part of the Say Hello to Your Last Poem! reading series in Colorado Springs, Chris and Julia’s new home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Julia Drescher is the author of the chapbooks Plural Bell (LRL Textile series) and Birds Of Paradise (Ypolita Press) and her most recent poems may be found, or are forthcoming, in Aufgabe, Dusie, Likestarlings, the *belladonna chaplets series and Omniverse. She lives in Colorado Springs.

C.J. Martin is the author of Two Books (Compline, 2011), as well as four chapbooks: 2012 (Supersuperette, 2013), Unused Cover (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2013), 1978 (Self-published, 2010); WIW?3: Hold me tight. Make me happy (Delete Press, 2009); Lo, Bittern (Atticus/Finch, 2008) and CITY (Vigilance Society, 2007). For the past two years, he has been working on broadside collaborations with poets who do visual art. His essays and reviews have appeared in ON: Contemporary Practice, Jacket2, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Colorado Springs, CO, and works as a bookbinder. With Julia Drescher, he publishes Further Other Book Works.

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2013, No. 1

Poems by Anna Moschovakis and Anselm Berrigan

36 pages, saddle stapled dos-a-dos

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, cover letterpress printed from lead type and vinyl collagraph

Edition of 100

2013

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The interior pages were printed on a home laser printer and the covers were letterpress printed from vinyl collagraph blocks and lead type. All of the paper is from the French Paper Company, made with recycled content and hydroelectric power. The text was set in Adobe and ATF Garamonds, and the titling type is a modular face designed by NewLights.

This book was made for a reading by Anna Moschovakis and Anselm Berrigan on Friday, July 5, 2013, as part of the Say Hello to Your Last Poem reading series.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Anna Moschovakis writes and translates from the mountains of upstate New York and sometimes from Brooklyn. Her most recent books are You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and The Jokers by Albert Cossery, which she translated from the French. She teaches at Pratt Institute and is on faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is also a long-time member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse.

Anselm Berrigan is the author of six books of poetry, including Notes from Irrelevance, and Skasers (with John Coletti). A new chapbook, Sure Shot, has just been published as a little magenta thing by Overpass Books. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail & lives in New York City, where he was supposedly raised.

Editor’s Note: You may notice that the colors in the images look a little strange. You are correct. The covers of the book were printed in fluorescent pink ink on pink paper, which caused the automatic color correction on the scanner to do strange things. But I decided to keep those strange effects, because they seemed more “accurate” than the muted pinks resulting from removing the color “correction.” They’re hot pink—that’s all you really need to know.]

Say Hello to Your Last Chapbook! 2014, No. 1

Poems by Divya Victor and Mathias Svalina

40 pages, saddle stapled dos-a-dos

7” x 5.25” (closed)

Laser printed interior, cover letterpress printed from lead type, gel medium collagraph and woven, vinyl lettering matrix

Edition of 100

2014

$8

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The text pages were printed with lasers and the covers were letterpress printed from lead type, gel medium collagraphs and a flexible lettering matrix woven from painted chipboard and vinyl. All of the paper is from the French Paper Company, made with recycled content and hydroelectric power. The text was set in Adobe and ATF Garamonds. The modular title lettering was designed by NewLights.

This book was made for a reading by Divya Victor and Mathias Svalina on Friday, May 16, 2014, as part of the Say Hello to Your Last Poem! reading series.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Divya Victor is the author of Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Partial Derivative of the Unnameable (Troll Thread, 2005) Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (2012) and PUNCH (2011) from Gauss PDF; and the chapbooks UNSUB (2014), Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011), and SUTURES (2009). Her book Natural Subjects is the 2014 winner of the Bob Kaufman Award, selected by Anselm Berrigan and is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press. Her poetry, poetics, and criticism have appeared in Dusie, Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, Crux, and P-QUEUE, among others. 

Mathias Svalina is the author of three books, most recently The Explosions from Subito Press. Big Lucks Press will release his book Wastoid in 2014. He is an editor for Octopus Books. 

Poem-print

Produced as part of a fundraiser portfolio for the Letterpress Depot in Englewood, CO

Gesso and letterpress printed collagraph on chipboard

18" x 12"

Edition of 100.

2014

Poems by Justin Sirois

84 pages, double signature pamphlet stitch with folded jacket

8” x 6.25” (closed)

Laser printing, letterpress from lead type, lead spacing material, and linoleum

Variable edition of 150 (three different jacket/cover/endsheet color combinations)

2013

$20

OUT OF PRINT

CA Conrad says: “The tattoo / underneath the tattoo / speaks the language I want to learn.” Justin Sirois has always been one of my favorite living poets. “You have / everything you need / when you’re naked”, I trust, I trust ALL his discourse with our throbbing excitement for communion. His poems are our best possible use for ears. If I don’t know you and you LOVE these poems as much as I do, let’s get together to read them out loud over a delicious slice of something. “Lick the window / & your reflection licks back” is a delicious something we all love. It’s important they know to have a copy of this book resting on my heart when they cremate me.

Dorothea Lasky says: The poems in The Heads by Justin Sirois make me feel so many things. They are not “temples,” but “squishy” things that “I love to put my face in.” I like it that way. These are poems that are part of life, constantly affirming and reaffirming it. A life that greets you with its magic. As when "What fits in the hand/ grows into armfuls." Or when you "sex this bathroom until the bathroom ain't for/ bathing no more." Everywhere is the “imagery” of life that “repeats in heaps of beauty." These are also poems that are part of the digital America we live in now and so they make that alternate existence beautiful. I hear echoes of Walt Whitman, Eileen Myles, and Blake Butler in these poems. I hear echoes of old folk songs. Most importantly, I hear the breathing of an indefatigable I in these lines. One that is living and listening. Let's follow it.

Mike Young says: When you realize the new Old Spice ads might be working on you, when you're trying to split the difference between desk jobs and shoulder licks, when you're old enough for raunch to go holy but still young enough for GIFs to go infinite—that's when you know you're in the LoS of Justin Sirois's barking and bounding poems. The Heads are singing to the super ugly animals that pace the medians. They are twitching to put back some magic. They are winking that the word "okay" is the most useful word in the room, and they are hoping to be together with you because the only way a head gets a name is when another takes it in.

[Please note that we will not be able to accommodate individual requests for colors. The books will be shipped as orders are received—red, green, blue….]

20 pages, saddle-stapled

6.5” x 5.5” (closed)

Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates and collagraph

Unlimited, iterative edition

2013

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

FROM THE TEXT:

[…] Now that the book is dead we can begin to divide up its remains. There is much work to be done. They used to say that the function of the book was to transmit information. Now they say that books are no longer the best way to do that, that computers and their strange, wireless spawn are the best way. They are right: a handheld device that can access any text from any place does a better job of delivering information. They are wrong: books and the writing-designing-printing-binding-distributing-reading of them have never been solely about delivering &or receiving information. They would also have you believe that you are, first and foremost, a consumer.

But the reader is both a consumer and a producer. The reader receives the text-book-art-object, and her reading takes it in, uses it up. At the same time she produces the text-book-art-object, putting its paths of meanings into play and driving them outward. The text-book-art-object is a unit of light, both particle & wave, energy transmitted, expended & still potential, waiting to be absorbed & re-produced in the reading. Energy creates energy. Production creates production. Production creates our shape in the world, is our shape-in-the-world in the movement-between of the world.

Our existence is a constant generating of text. We radiate text, reflect text, shed text like skin. We speak, we write. We send emails, text messages & memos. We fill in forms, we get a receipt with every purchase. Our world is bounded by, covered in, channeled through, text. The text-book-art-object is our sublime vision of the turbulent sea of language. It will be the death of us. It is our light-filled life.

We are only beginning to see. Let the book-in-the-world sit strangely in your consciousness, let it dissolve and disperse everything that they said you are. In this world you will be disciplined or you will be destroyed. But you have the choice: be disciplined by the tasks of what you produce, or by the tasks of the things that are being sold to you.

What has already begun is the New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. It is a collection of thoughts on and of the book, of what it can mean to make books, to produce the book, now. […]

Poems by Kyle Schlesinger

Letterpress printed in three colors from photopolymer plates

44 pages, double signature pamphlet stitch with folded jacket

4.375” x 8.75” (closed)

Edition of 100

2011

$20

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

Altered book by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al.

Mass produced art history book altered through delamination

220 pages, hardcover, casebound

11” x 18” (open)

Unique

2011

Purchased for a private collection.

The original book was:

Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art, (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). It is one of the best surveys of collage in modern & postmodern art that I have read.

The last image shows a detail of the text that was runs in a continuous line along the bottom of the book. It was written subtractively (by removing words) from the original text. But you, lucky you, can read the full text below:

The method of constructing from parts. It is the synthesis of colourless, white or grey-black areas of colour, or the arrangement of unexpected proportions. Written in the graphics of a powerful weapon aware of the very different demands of concluding that the system of montage is dialectic. It is a statement, after all, that neither Klutsis or Lissitzky could have made; nor Heartfield or Hoch, “Lyricism is the crown of life: Constructivism is its already existing soft-porn surfaces, even, on occasion, a castrating machine. Yet the most persistent motif is one that only collage as a device could generate: the softness of parts not only indexically presented but eroticized as a purely photographic contrast of textures: grass, gravel or wood, inside barbed-wire, in the midst of dry leaves, or, in one case, inverted on the body and placed against the austere brick superstructure.

Such works not attempted hitherto: the minutest visible variations in photographic color and tone, magnified by the tell-tale curves of the paper’s scissored edges. By systematically excising one and placing it against a subtly contrastive one, an interval, a gap, which is in itself stimulating. ‘It is sight’, he had suggested, proposing desublimation of the senses: ‘The optical environment in which ‘the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art…in which an intense detachment this detachment that enabled him to see a Cubist collage by Picasso or Braque in a radically anti-illusionistic way: ‘the Cubists always emphasized the identity of the picture as a flat and more or less abstract pattern rather than a representation’. To choose between them is preferable to ambiguity: collage had now attained to the full and declared three-dimensionality we automatically attribute to the notion “object”, and was being transformed, in the course of a strictly coherent process with a logic all its own, into a new kind of houses we live in and furniture we use’. rectangles littered with small pictures rectangles are references to technology, the industrial process, heavy machinery. Thirdly, as a physical object it occupies a kind of middle ground between the single, exhibitable object and the flickering succession of a moving film. Turning its pages is a one-person affair, addressed to relatively private experience as opposed to the collectivity of a show. Yet politics was never far away. To that extent it may be mourning the flowering of quiet defiance: she knew such works could not be exhibited. But she was increasingly vulnerable. She was being watched and possibly denounced, she managed to escape attention.

text written in opposition to works of ‘degenerate’ modernism is positioned close by. The art historian T. J. Clark has studied the problem: the work to annihilate the negation of the negation’. she boldly mangled several works to produce collage of her own. The background to this benevolent act of ‘completion’ is inevitably complicated by Krasner’s relationship to Pollock. ‘”Waste not, want not”, open it out and let space back in, it turns out that Krasner had her own adventure tumbling, thinking that Krasner soon became disenchanted with the work.

My studio was hung with a series of black and white drawings I had done. I hated them and started to pull them off the wall and tear them and throw them on the floor…. Then another morning began picking up torn pieces of my drawings and re-glueing them. Then I started. I got something going I started. People would just come and wouldn’t put on a show or entertain. They came happily and sat down and left four hours later: you’d listen to some music and you’d look at things. What I enjoyed was not the conversation but the things we looked at…there were evenings where there was not much talk.

Story by J. A. Tyler

Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates

36 pages, soft cover, pamphlet stitch,

5” x 8” (closed)

Edition of 200

2011

$15

Available here

Text/object by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al.

Letterpress printed on newsprint, with additional elements added by hand

12 pages, no cover, saddle stapled

7” x 5.5” (closed)

Edition of 350

2009

Released as part of Issue #3 of Mimeo Mimeo.

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

FROM THE TEXT:

This is an essay about legibility, about legibility in printing. This is an essay that seeks to examine the notion of legibility, of readability, and to open it out onto a productive way of thinking through process in printing.

This is an essay about printing, about “good” printing and about “bad” printing, about how printing can articulate and make legible different modes of reading.

This is an essay about reading, about how things are read, how printing affects reading, and about multiple threads of reading in a multiply legible text.

This is an essay about writing, about writing for maximum and multiple legibilities.

This is an essay about writing-printing-reading as a single cluster of interconnected activities connecting and opening out onto other clusters of other activities.

This is an essay that attempts multiple legibilities, that is aware of itself as an act of writing-printing-reading as a single cluster of interconnected activities connecting and opening out onto other clusters of other activities.

20 pages, saddle-stapled

6.5” x 5.5” (closed)

Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates

Unlimited, iterative edition

2009

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

Image/Text by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al

16 pages, saddle stapled

4.0625” x 8.125” (closed)

CMYK offset of digital photographs, letterpress from photopolymer plates

Edition of 600

2012

Originally published as an insert in issue #31 of The Journal of Artists' Books.

Read the digital archive version here.

Poem by Divya Victor

Produced as part of a fundraiser portfolio for Small Press Traffic

Letterpress from photopolymer plates on found newsprint pages from the Denver Post

10" x 17"

Variable edition of 200

2011

$10

Available here

Poem by KC Trommer

Delaminated broadside

12" x 18"

Variable Edition of 25

2011

$200

Available here

Poem by Brenda Iijima

Delaminated broadside

12" x 18"

Variable Edition of 25

2011

$200

Available here

Poem by John Yau

Delaminated broadside

12" x 18"

Variable Edition of 25

2009

$200

Available here

Story by Brian Evenson

Delaminated broadside

12" x 18"

Variable Edition of 25

2009

$200

Available here

Text by Justin Sirois, excerpted from the book MLKNG SCKLS

Delaminated broadside

12" x 18"

Variable Edition of 25

2009

$200

Available here

Short story by Brian Evenson

Images by Aaron Cohick

48 pages, hardcover, casebound

8 ¼” x 5 ¼”

Letterpress printed text, digitally printed images with hand manipulation

Variable edition of 40

2008

$400

OUT OF PRINT (though there might still be copies available from our dealer, Passages Bookshop)

You can view three different copies of the variable edition in the DIGITAL EDITIONS archive

Text and images by Aaron Cohick-Gilles Deleuze-Eadweard Muybridge

56 pages, softcover with printed dustjacket, double signature pamphlet stitch

8” x 5”

Letterpress printed dustjacket and covers with digitally printed text pages

Edition of 50

2007

$20

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

Altered book by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al

224 pages, casebound

14.25" x 11.25" (closed)

Mass-produced photographic book altered through delamination

Unique

2007

$1200

Poems and images by Justin Sirois

56 pages, softcover, with printed and stapled dustjacket that adheres to book through a series of magnetic strips, double signature pamphlet stitch

8 1/8” x 5 1/8” (closed)

Letterpress dustjacket & cover, digitally printed pages, staples, magnets

Edition of 100

2006

$20

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.
 

Altered book with text and images by Aaron Cohick

180 pages, case bound

8.25” x 5.75” (closed)

Digital printing, collage, delamination, and mixed media drawing

Unique

2005

Owned by the Letterform Archive.

Read a complete digital facsimile here

Purchase a high-res PDF for personal or classroom use

Poems by Lauren Bender

32 pages, softcover, saddle stitched

8” x 5” (closed)

Cover is letterpress printed and hand painted on handmade sisal paper, text pages are laser printed

Edition of 50

2005

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

Found poem by Aaron Cohick

24 pages, softcover with printed dustjacket, saddle stitched

6” x 4” (closed)

Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates

Edition of 100

2005

$7

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

7 one word poems of 8 letters or less by various authors

Including contributions from: Lauren Bender, Anselm Berrigan, Aaron Cohick, Jeremy Sigler, Hunter Stabler, Nate Wilson, and John Yau

24 pages, softcover, saddle stapled

4 ¼” x 9”

Letterpress and screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages

Edition of 100

2003

$3

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

List poem compiled by Aaron Cohick

204 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound

5.5” x 4”

Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages

Edition of 50

2000

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.

Images and text by M. Bovie

76 pages (versos unprinted), softcover, perfect bound

5 3/8” x 4”

Screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages

Edition of 50

2001

$5

OUT OF PRINT

Read the digital archive version here.