I’m thrilled to announce that depress, the print deploy­ment of dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion, is launch­ing today with the pub­li­ca­tion of Joshua Baldwin’s Poems and Fake Book Reviews. Josh’s fake book reviews have long been one of my favorite fea­tures of this site, and I couldn’t be hap­pier that a book full of them con­sti­tutes the first emis­sion of what promises to be a wildly spo­radic pub­lish­ing enterprise.

Poems and Fake Book Reviews includes fif­teen fake book reviews (includ­ing six not avail­able online), “Red Hook Frag­ments,” “Los Ange­les Series,” and “Four Archi­tec­ture Poems.” The forty-​page, limited-​edition chap­book fea­tures a let­ter­press cover, teal end­pa­pers, and strik­ing illus­tra­tions by the author. All that, plus ship­ping and han­dling, for just ten dol­lars. Buy one now!

For more infor­ma­tion, check the new depress web page:

http://www.digitalemunction.com/press

I don’t talk about it much, but I spent part of my child­hood in the care­less & tacky con­di­tion of the very poor. Small town Col­orado was where I learned what an evic­tion notice is, what food stamps could & couldn’t buy, & what the terms “dry out,” “blackout,” & “bail bond” mean. I also learned, by watch­ing & lis­ten­ing to the adults around me, about grow­ing, buying, sell­ing, & smok­ing mar­i­juana. And I learned how to make myself very small, nearly invis­i­ble, during the seem­ingly random explo­sions of casual vio­lence that I spent much of my time dreading.

But besides the humil­i­a­tion & anx­i­ety, I remem­ber the aes­thet­ics. I remem­ber over­sized t-shirts printed with styl­ized uni­corns & wolves.

Just a note to say I have a new poem up at The Morn­ing News, which recently started pub­lish­ing poems (by the likes of D. A. Powell & Andrea Cohen, no less). “Slider” is from my “bad romance” period. Hope you dig.

A port­fo­lio of recent trans­la­tions of mine from the Ital­ian is fea­tured in the spe­cial Trans­la­tion issue of Cam­bridge Lit­er­ary Review.

The selec­tion is titled “Four Gen­ovese Poets,” and con­tains an excerpt from Labor­in­tus by Edoardo San­guineti, the late lumi­nary of the neo-avant-garde in Italy, and shorter pieces from younger poets who bear the stamp of his influ­ence: Piero Cad­e­mar­tori, Paolo Gen­tilu­omo and Mar­cello Frix­ione. (My attempt to invoke the Cam­bridge School in a short note therein may be strained but is apt.)