Litmus Press

12/29/2024

Highlighting one of our favorite projects this past year:

The Witch Box. A limited-edition artists’ edition of the book by Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen.

Spectral Evidence is the result of a meeting between Willis, descendent of one of the convicted and executed “witches” of the Salem witch trials, and Bowen, descendent of Samuel Sewall, a prominent judge in the trials.

In this special artist’s edition each boxed set contains 46 silkscreen printed cards at 5″ x 6.5″ with images by Nancy Bowen and texts by Elizabeth Willis, as well as a silkscreen printed Evolon wrapper, a glazed ceramic object by Bowen, and a pamphlet containing an afterword by the authors and Litmus editor E. Tracy Grinnell, all housed in a vintage cigar box.

Spectral Evidence: The Witch Box was printed and assembled at Shoestring Press by Master Printer Lane Sell and Nancy Bowen, with Erich Erving, Merisa Skinner, and May Hernandez.

Produced in a limited edition of 26 copies. 🧙

Find out more about the artist box and Spectral Evidence through our website!

12/29/2024

Highlighting one of our favorite projects this past year:

The Witch Box. A limited-edition artists’ edition of the book by Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Bowen.

Spectral Evidence is the result of a meeting between Willis, descendent of one of the convicted and executed “witches” of the Salem witch trials, and Bowen, descendent of Samuel Sewall, a prominent judge in the trials.

In this special artist’s edition each boxed set contains 46 silkscreen printed cards at 5″ x 6.5″ with images by Nancy Bowen and texts by Elizabeth Willis, as well as a silkscreen printed Evolon wrapper, a glazed ceramic object by Bowen, and a pamphlet containing an afterword by the authors and Litmus editor E. Tracy Grinnell, all housed in a vintage cigar box.

Spectral Evidence: The Witch Box was printed and assembled at Shoestring Press by Master Printer Lane Sell and Nancy Bowen, with Erich Erving, Merisa Skinner, and May Hernandez.

Produced in a limited edition of 26 copies. 🧙

Find out more about the artist box and Spectral Evidence through our website!

12/22/2024

Support experimental poetry and translation and gift a Litmus Press membership this year!

Memberships come at five different tiers:
📖 Book Lover
🌱 Sustaining Member
🌹 Friend
🌓 Alchemist
+ an option for purchasing memberships through your institution.

Swipe to find out more about each tier & sign up through our website.

12/20/2024

We're excited to announce the presale of two new books coming out early 2025:

Voyage, War and Exile by Etel Adnan

Controlled Demolition by Ammiel Alcalay

Available for pre-order through Asterism now.

Link in Bio! 📚

12/11/2024

Newsletter Alert! 🗞

Delivered to your inbox or through the link in our bio:

- find out more about our end of year fundraising!
- get a copy of the Witch Box and support the work of Litmus Press
- announcing Ammiel Alcalay's book with Litmus Press next year
- ... and more!

12/11/2024

⚡Support Risk-Taking Literature this Holiday Season⚡ -

Here at Litmus, we think every day is a good day to support the ecosystem of small presses that keep our poetry communities vibrant, vital, and engaged! For nearly 25 years, Litmus Press has done just that, and we can't do it without you...

12/10/2024

Introducing Viscera:

"This book aims to offer a range of innovative Polish women writers who give voice to formal, intellectual, and social concerns that twist, turn, diverge, and overlap the present. The goal is to provide more expansive entries from the work of particular women writers to create a kind of dialogue, the focus being on those who are emerging or under-translated; writers whose work presents differing doorways for possible futures of Polish writing and vigorous and unashamed critiques of the not-so-distant past and complicated present."
– Mark Tardi in the Introduction

📖 Featured Authors:
✨ Anna Adamowicz
✨ Maria Cyranowicz
✨ Hanna Janczak
✨ Natalia Malek
✨ Joanna Oparek
✨ Zofia Skrzypulec
✨ Katarzyna Szaulińska
✨ Ilona Witkowska

Available now via Asterism (US) and Hopscotch Reading Room (GER)!

12/06/2024

Ammiel Alcalay is featured in today's poem-a-day via

"My Apologies
after Bulund al-Haidari

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorous and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again."

Thank you for you words, Ammiel. Read more about the poem at

We are also in the final stages of production for Alcalay's book 'Controlled Demolition' out with Litmus Press in the new year. Keep your eyes peeled.

12/06/2024

Give Back to Poetry 💞 Donate Today! - https://mailchi.mp/litmuspress.org/give-back-to-poetry-donate-today

Here at Litmus, we think every day is a good day to support the ecosystem of small presses that keep our poetry communities vibrant, vital, and engaged! For nearly 25 years, Litmus Press has done just that, and we can't do it without you...

Join us today.

12/05/2024

TODAY! The inimitable Will Alexander will be in conversation with Tilghman Goldsborough to launch the 30th anniversary edition of Asia & Haiti.

Join us at 192 Books

RSVP through the link in our bio & find out about livestream. 📡

In Asia & Haiti, Will Alexander’s poetry functions as syncretic engine—combusting Indigenous history, esoterica, and spiritual practice, with postcolonial criticism, political theory, and modern science—to generate a densely woven re-visioning of history. This 30th-anniversary second edition re-presents a classic book with new artwork by Alexander’s longtime collaborator, Byron Baker. It also includes a new preface by the author contextualizing the work within the present-day Tibetan liberation struggle and considerations of Haiti as a powerful symbol of resistance vis-à-vis “our contemporary political un-settlement.” “Asia & Haiti,” he writes, “takes up the tenor of continuing solar presence . . . far beyond calculable political fatigue, being alive as grammar via a living future.

12/03/2024

Embroideries launching in Sweden this Friday!

via

Nordbooks is continuing their talks on books that have been translated from Swedish to English. On December 6th the shop is welcoming Burcu Sahin and Jennifer Hayashida to celebrate the release of Embroideries (Litmus Press, 2024).

📚

In Burcu Sahin’s acclaimed poetry debut, Embroideries, poem-threads are using memory, fragments, and loss of meaning as a way of speaking. Mothers and daughters take turns in sewing and caring for one another as they abandon and return to their work with longing and grief, “memory of the palm / hardens the skin.”
This first full-length English-language book of Sahin, translated by Jennifer Hayashida, is finely wrought without sentimentality: what gradually appears in these poems is a genealogy of laboring daughters and mothers who are also daughters – their care, political commitments, and loyalties. Through the dual concepts of sewing and language the poems account for women whose lives and solidarities have not been documented in official histories or institutions, but in stitches.

Burcu Sahin is a poet and literary critic based in Stockholm. Embroideries (Litmus Press, 2024), that has now been translated into English by Jennifer Hayashida, was originally published in 2018 and awarded with the Winter Prize by the Society of the Nine, and the Catapult Prize for Best Literary Debut by the Swedish Writers’ Union.

Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist based in Stockholm. She is currently a PhD candidate in artistic research at HDKV, the Academy of Art & Design at Gothenburg University, and teaches in the creative writing program at Biskops Arnö Nordens Folkhögskola.

So come by on Friday and listen to Burcu Sahin and Jennifer Hayashida talk! Poems will be read, questions can be asked, a glass can be drunk and books can be signed. The event starts at 18:00 ish. Looking forward to seeing you then!

Photo of Burcu Sahin: Chai Saeidi

11/27/2024

The John Ashbery Poetry Series, Written Arts Program, Center for Ethics and Writing, Human Rights Program, and the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College present a Reading with Will Alexander.

On Tuesday, December 3, at 5:30pm, in the Bitó Conservatory Building Performance Space, poet Will Alexander will read from his work. Introduced by David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature Ann Lauterbach, this reading is free and open to the public.

This reading will take place one day after Will Alexander's Leslie Scalapino Lecture, Hyper-Spacial Rotation: Poetic Circular Deepening. This lecture will take place on December 2, at 6:30pm in RKC 103, for any who are interested.

Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. Alexander’s 2021 book, Refractive Africa, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and won the California Book Award in Poetry. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. She was cochair of writing in Bard’s MFA Program from 1992 to 2020 and is Ruth and David Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature.

For more information: Contact Megan Brien at [email protected].

11/24/2024

Thank you to everyone who joined us last Thursday at ’s Walt Whitman branch for a special poetry workshop featuring Litmus author Aja Couchois Duncan (). Hosted in collaboration with as part of A.R.T.’s 2024 Poulin Project, the workshop brought together Brooklyn-based writers, students, and poets for a rich discussion and generative writing session.

Facilitated by Litmus editors a.Monti () and E. Tracy Grinnell (), we explored themes from Duncan’s work, including nomenclatures, (un)learning language and writing through different lenses.

This event is part of our ongoing partnership with the Poulin Project and the Brooklyn Public Library, and we’re excited to bring more workshops and events to our local community in the future. Stay tuned for updates—and if you missed this one, we hope to see you next time!

11/21/2024

Announcing the Asia & Haiti Book Launch 📣

Will Alexander will be in conversation with Tilghman Gouldsborough to launch the 30th anniversary edition of Asia & Haiti.

Thursday December 5th, 2024
at 192 Books
192 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011

RSVP through the link in our bio & find out about livestream. 📡

In Asia & Haiti, Will Alexander’s poetry functions as syncretic engine—combusting Indigenous history, esoterica, and spiritual practice, with postcolonial criticism, political theory, and modern science—to generate a densely woven re-visioning of history. This 30th-anniversary second edition re-presents a classic book with new artwork by Alexander’s longtime collaborator, Byron Baker. It also includes a new preface by the author contextualizing the work within the present-day Tibetan liberation struggle and considerations of Haiti as a powerful symbol of resistance vis-à-vis “our contemporary political un-settlement.” “Asia & Haiti,” he writes, “takes up the tenor of continuing solar presence . . . far beyond calculable political fatigue, being alive as grammar via a living future.

11/17/2024

"📚✨ Exciting news, everyone! Today is the official PUBLICATION DAY for Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland! 🎉

Includes Anna Adamowicz, Joanna Oparek, Katarzyna Szaulińska, Zofia Skrzypulec, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, and Ilona Witkowska; translators include Mark Tardi, Lynn Suh, Małgorzata Myk, and Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi.

Order your copy of Viscera from the link in our bio!



"

11/15/2024

"🎉 Happy Pub Day to Embroideries! 🎉

The first full-length English-language book of Burcu Sahin, translated by Jennifer Hayashida.

In Burcu Sahin’s acclaimed poetry debut, Embroideries, poem-threads are using memory, fragments, and loss of meaning as a way of speaking. Mothers and daughters take turns in sewing and caring for one another as they abandon and return to their work with longing and grief, “memory of the palm / hardens the skin.”

Order your copy today ! Link in Bio !

"

11/12/2024

Will Alexander is visiting Duke this Thursday for a reading & multimedia performance 🛠️ Organized by

11/11/2024

This Thursday as part of the 2024 Poulin Project:

Poets and Litmus editors Tracy and Monti will be leading a generative poetry workshop at the Brooklyn Public Library, centered around two books of Litmus author Aja Couchois Duncan—Vestigial and Restless Continent. We'll do reading activities, writing exercises, and guided discussions around Duncan’s body of work, as we get to explore our own poetic vocabularies.

Free & open-to-all. Participants get to take home copies of both books. 💚

Thursday, November 14, 2024, 6:00–7:30 PM
Walt Whitman Library, 93 Saint Edwards Street, Brooklyn, NY