Essay Press

15/02/2024

Aditi Kini's Oriental Cyborg is here! Pre-orders are ready to ship. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can order one here: https://www.essaypress.org/kini/

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

Oriental Cyborg Aditi Kini Preorder $12.00 Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries

01/02/2024

Happy pub day! Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer's Journal is here!

Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women’s suffrage and budding American conservation movements, this polyvocal book moves in multiple directions as it examines ases of women and birds from across cultures and time periods, from the Virgin Mary, to Leda, Swan Lake, and Alexander McQueen. As its connective thread, Feathers also follows one woman’s enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?

Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer's Journal Sarah Rose Nordgren Preorder $18.00 Winter 2024 Designed as a turn of the century women’s m

16/01/2024

Snow day reading—Sarah Rose Nordgren's Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer's Journal, out on 2/1! Preorder here: https://www.essaypress.org/nordgren/

14/01/2024

Thrilled to see an Essay Press title, Dennis James Sweeney's You're the Woods Too, included in this excellent list!

It’s almost 2024, another year, and I’m still a sucker for a year-end list. I love seeing what people enjoyed, adding to my TBR, and discovering new titles and authors. However, I also suffer…

19/12/2023

New book out this winter!

Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. Originating in the bird-hat controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which coincided with both the women’s suffrage and budding American conservation movements, this polyvocal book moves in multiple directions as it examines cases of women and birds from across cultures and time periods, from the Virgin Mary, to Leda, Swan Lake, and Alexander McQueen. As its connective thread, Feathers also follows one woman’s enculturation into the world of bird-women and its inherent violence. What might we learn about gender from the birds?

Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer's Journal Sarah Rose Nordgren Preorder $18.00 Winter 2024 Designed as a turn of the century women’s m

03/12/2023

Essay Press is accepting chapbook submissions through the end of December!

https://www.essaypress.org/submissions/

29/11/2023

Oriental Cyborg is available for pre-order now!

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Natasha Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inq...

22/11/2023

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, and Fred Moten. Afterword by Mónica de la Torre. Get your copy at essaypress.org/essays

06/11/2023

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre. Available now at essaypress.org!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzT2zzzrK7K/

03/11/2023

Tomorrow!

31/10/2023

Today’s the day! We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Essays!

In Essays, nine poets consider what an essay can do. The birth of Essays arose in a 2018 symposium at Columbia University called “More than a Manifesto: The Poet’s Essay,” where these same poets grappled with the concept of the essay and what it means to them. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s. It comes from the French word, essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool and where the knowledge that can emerge from this inquiry is boundless. This is in opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now, especially in classrooms, where having a thesis is a goal of the whole endeavor. Montaigne’s spirit is throughout Essays, as the form of his own essays allowed ideas to emerge from the imagination versus being controlled by a pre-set plan of points. In the work included in this volume by these brilliant poets, the poetic imagination governs the limitless places an essay can go.

Featuring essays by Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, and Fred Moten.

Edited by Dorothea Lasky with an afterword by Mónica de la Torre.

Buy your copy at essaypress.org/essays 🧡

Essays edited by Dorothea Lasky with Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon

21/10/2023

It's almost here! Essays, edited by Dorothea Lasky, will be released on 10/31 and is available for preorder now.

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now.
ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their ex*****on, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

Essays edited by Dorothea Lasky with Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon

14/10/2023

“A low hum spreads through the layers of Violence Beside, accurately sounding the collective terror of being a woman in a murderous world. A metronome in the catacombs, here is a book that keeps time—oracular time, all while calibrating lamentations for the missing, destroyed, and disrupted to a bold rhizomic feminism that imagines the limit of language, and what is beyond that limit. Jade Lascelles has written a stunning and visionary book.”
— Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher

18/09/2023

Congratulations Valerie! TO LOVE AN ARTIST is the 2002 Big Other Book Award winner for nonfiction! You can order it here: https://epbooks.square.site/product/preorder-to-love-an-artist-by-valerie-hsiung/29?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

Delighted to announce the winners of the 2022 Big Other Book Awards! All the books below are linked to their respective pages at Bookshop. Visit the Big Other Shop there. Without further ado, here …

26/07/2023

"What does it mean to write within a global economy where some possess a choice-giving mobility—like the ability to make art and travel—while others remain locked in grueling struggles for survival?"

Isabel Sobral Campos reviews Valerie Hsiung's hybrid poetry book TO LOVE AN ARTIST, now out from Essay Press: https://www.full-stop.net/2023/07/26/reviews/isabel-sobral-campos/to-love-an-artist-valerie-hsiung/

26/07/2023

“Eventually there is a sentence with enough muscle to wrap warmly around you and remind you that tenderness is still possible. That not all sentences are threats...

Or maybe all sentences are threats, and I don’t understand how to give a syntax to violence without inflicting more of it myself.”

Violence Beside by Jade Lascelles is now available for preorder:

Forthcoming Fall 2023Violence Beside responds to the overwhelming presence of violence Jade Lascelles felt creeping closer into her life. After a series of threats, assaults, and murders against multiple women in various proximity to her, these poems were first begun as a coping mechanism, a way to....

14/07/2023

Now available! Orchid Tierney 's chap LOOKING AT THE TINY: MAD LICHEN ON THE SURFACES OF READING

Traversing across the surfaces of Madness and lichen, looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading pursues the tiny entanglements of life, the weird intimacies of interpretation, and the cosmic complexities in the poem “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen” by the Beat poet Lew Welch....

03/07/2023

Saturday, July 2, 2023: Picton, day two (final day); moving through a stack of titles from Essay Press as the youngest one leaps into the pool,

07/06/2023

“Hayden writes about something that I understood in my bones, the coldness and fear and loneliness of a home, but had never talked about to anyone nor heard anyone else speak about, at least not in any way that felt real: feeling a kind of shame and then feeling a kind of shame for one’s shame. ...

24/05/2023

Two Essay Press finalists in Big Other's awards for nonfiction! Big congratulations to Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein for CLIMATE and Valerie Hsiung for TO LOVE AN ARTIST! & many thanks to Big Other for the love.

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced at the 2022 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtuall…

11/03/2023

Today from 3-4, Valerie Hsiung will be signing TO LOVE AN ARTIST at the Essay Press AWP booth (1622-24)! (https://www.essaypress.org/hsiung/)

11/03/2023

Min Kang is here at the Essay Press table at AWP (1622-24) signing copies of Darkly + Completely (https://www.essaypress.org/kang/) from 10am to 11am today!

She will also be reading with Essay Press author Olivia Muenz and others at Crescent Lounge from 3:30-5 today (followed by karaoke. . . )

10/03/2023

Dennis James Sweeney's YOU'RE THE WOODS TOO is now available for preorder! https://www.essaypress.org/sweeney/

Come hear him read tonight at AWP, along with EP author Valerie Hsiung & others: Common Area Maintenance (2125 2nd Ave Seattle) 7-9pm.

09/03/2023

We're here at the AWP bookfair booth 1622 with Kelsey Street Press and MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics - University of Washington Bothell ! Hope you'll stop by and say hi!

Book signing schedule at our table:
Min Kang Saturday 10-11am
Valerie Hsiung Saturday 3-4pm

EP-affiliated readings:
Friday 7-9pm Common Area Maintenance - Dennis James Sweeney, Valerie Hsiung
Reading Saturday 3:30-5 Crescent Lounge - Abby Hagler, Min Kang, Olivia Muenz

09/03/2023

MFA Min Kang's darkly + completely, the 2021 Essay Press Chapbook Contest Winner, is new from Essay Press! 🎊The essay poems of darkly + completely explore childbirth and matrescence within the expanses and demands of late-stage capitalism.

Says Kang of the chapbook: "This book navigates and negotiates with the inherently flawed nature of language and attempts to describe the intense, suffocating eclipse of a love that childbirth allowed me to experience."

Pick up a copy here:
https://www.essaypress.org/kang/