Check out Laura Madeline Wiseman's "'necessity is the mother of experimentation': chapbook interview: Brenda Sieczkowski on research, experimentation, and goodness"::

The brilliant and wildly attentive, much loved, Brenda Sieczkowski talking about the way experimentation and presence extend to community, small press culture, her incredibly good books WONDER GIRL IN MONSTER LAND (dancing girl press, 2012), LIKE OYTERS OBSERVING THE SUN (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), FALLOUT & FLOATATION DEVICES (forthcoming from Little Red Leaves' Textile Series). There's even a special shout-out to Ark Press amongst so many other presses and people we admire!

We've sold out of Pepper Luboff's And when the time for the breaking (2012) 

Ark Press is pleased as punch to announce that we’ve sold out of Pepper Luboff’s And when the time for the breaking (2012).

In related news, we are also incredibly grateful to Jen Hofer for featuring Luboff’s chapbook alongside a collaborative essay/ chap about our first summer running Ark Press and the Ark Press Summer Reading Series in Todd, NC (Summer 2011), Country Music (DoubleCross Press: Poetics of the Handmade series 2013), in her CalArts Literary Citizenship: Tiny Press Practices class.  

It’s a real honor to be featured in a class alongside MC Hyland’s DoubleCross Press, Brian Teare’s Albion Books and his essay Paradise Was Typeset (DoubleCross Press: Poetics of the Handmade series).

Thanks to small press wunderkind MC Hyland for her tremendous, inspiring generosity. May sweet echoes of all the time and energy that she pours into the community return ten-fold. 

Check out Jen Hofer’s rad Literary Citizenship blog here.

Country Music, an essay about Ark Press

"Historically, friendship has housed poetry not only in terms of readerships (think of all the poetries born of friendship), but also in terms of presses. When good work was not/is not able to find an equally good home for too long, friends start their own press. They publish their friends' work; they make new friends in the process. These small presses are the no kill shelter for experimental writing."

We are tremendously grateful to MC Hyland for publishing COUNTRY MUSIC, a collaborative essay about our first summer running Ark Press and the Ark Press Summer Reading Series in Todd, NC (Summer 2011) with such tenderness and patience as a part of her stunning DoubleCross Press Poetics of the Handmade series.

Also, we are just tremendously grateful to have a document of this time as it has been so dear to us. Thanks and much love to everyone who has been a part of our experiment so far. 

Check it out at DoubleCross Press.

"Pepper Luboff is so brilliant it breaks my heart. Get a copy of her chapbook. Weep, rejoice. Rinse, repeat. It's the sort of work that I find totally generative — it propels me to respond."

—Joseph Massey on Pepper Luboff’s And when the time for the breaking

Limited edition. Letterpress printed on 100 lb. Mohawk Superfine Paper. Metallic gold vellum fly sheet.

Sneak peak::

New Chapbook!

We are pleased to announce the arrival of our second chapbook, Pepper Luboff's And when the time for the breaking. 

Letterpress Printed on 100 lb. Mohawk Superfine Paper 

Visually and linguistically acrobatic, And when the time for the breaking meditates on the fracturing,  "can't say uh-merica / without splintering" ("Versus"), and resilience of community in Oakland and the surrounding San Francisco Bay area as it calls us to consider our culpability to one another: 

if we 

look into 

the ingredients (makers & 

pasts) of 

those around us 

words we reproduce

our laws & manners 

places we work & live

what we wear & eat

distanced 

how to go about it

either, or, or as ("the lack of distance, a kind of closure") 

Here are some sneak peaks: 

metallic gold vellum fly sheet 

Here are some pics of our Ark Press Marathon Reading (6.22.2012).  Thanks to featured readers for making it a HUGE success: Halina Duraj, Eryn Green, Caroline Klocksiem, Esther Lee, Pepper Luboff, Christine Marshall, Hazel McClure, Gina Myers, Brenda Sieczkowski, Mike Sikkema, and Jen Tynes.  And special thanks to Lauren and LOW for hosting the reading.  Sure was dreamy to have so many loved ones, old and new friends alike, mixing it up in the same place.  

Stay tuned for a downloadable Mp3 recording of the event.

Eryn Green

Halina Duraj

Esther Lee

Pepper Luboff

Christine Marshall

Hazel McClure

Gina Myers

Brenda Sieczkowski

Caroline Klocksiem

Mike Sikkema

Jen Tynes and Mike Sikkema

Jen Tynes

MARATHON READING

poetry, fiction, + banjo

ARK PRESS      JUNE 22 7-9

At LOW (upstairs in Espresso News)

Downtown Boone

HALINA DURAJ

Halina Duraj teaches creative writing at the University of San Diego, and is so happy to be reading in North Carolina. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals including Witness, Third Coast, and Confrontation. Her novel, Fatherland, was a finalist for the 2010 UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction, and other work has been recommended for the 2009 PEN/O’Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize.

ERYN GREEN

Eryn Green is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. He has been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, and recently his collection Eruv was selected by C.D. Wright as a finalist for the 2011 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. Eryn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jubilat, Colorado Review, the tiny, Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Word for/ Word, Rhino, Iron Horse Review, Pheobe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Esquire.com and Denver Quarterly.

CAROLINE KLOCKSIEM

Caroline Klocksiem's poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Iowa Review; Hayden’s Ferry Review; The Pinch; BlazeVox; H_NGM_N; and others. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship recipient and 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Look for her chapbook, Circumstances of the House and Moon, from Dancing Girl Press this summer. Originally from South Carolina, she holds an MFA from Arizona State University and teaches English and Literature at the University of Alabama, where she lives with her husband, son, and orange cats. The first time language blew her mind was in kindergarten when she realized that "stop" is "pots" spelled backwards.

ESTHER LEE

Esther Lee is the author of Spit, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, The Blank Missives. Her poems and articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Hyphen, and elsewhere. A former Kundiman fellow, she pursues a Ph.D. in Creative Writing/Literature at the University of Utah and was awarded a Tanner Humanities Doctoral Fellowship to work on her second book.

PEPPER LUBOFF

Pepper Luboff is an Oakland-based poet, visual artist, and freelance writer/editor. She holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, And when the time for the breaking, is forthcoming from Ark Press.

CHRISTINE MARSHALL

Christine Marshall lives and teaches in Davidson, North Carolina. Her poems have been published in 2009 Best American Poetry, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, gutcult, Nimrod, and Western Humanities Review and featured on Verse Daily. Her current writing project involves poems about holes, others, and insomnia. The name, Marshall, is derived from her place of birth in a brightly lit corridor on the planet Mars, and she is, herself, descended from a majestic line of talking cats.

HAZEL MCCLURE

Hazel McClure lives and writes in Grand Rapids, MI, where she's an English and Writing librarian at Grand Valley State University.  She has a black belt in keeping it real and the t-shirt to prove it. Her work's appeared in Coconut, Mirage #4/Period(ical), RealPoetic and in the chapbook Nothing Moving from Lame House Press.

GINA MYERS

Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend, 2012). Hold It Down, her second full-length collection, will be published by Coconut Books in 2013.

BRENDA SIECZKOWSKI

Brenda Sieczkowski's poems and lyric essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals. Her chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, is available from dancing girl press. A full-length collection, Like Oysters Observing the Sun, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2013. 

MIKE SIKKEMA

Mike Sikkema believes in people who believe in cryptids, believes in cornbread, in swamp funk, in radical vernacular.  He knows that he is and is not his voice. He gathers poems and mushrooms, books and friends. These days he's writing a documentary with Jen Tynes about two mystical/mythical figures often accused of rowdyism, Pepper and Whiskey.   

JEN TYNES

Jen Tynes is the founding editor of Horse Less Press. She is most recently the author of The Black Mariah (DoubleCross Press) and, with Michael Sikkema, Autogeography (Black Warrior Review). She has chapbooks forthcoming from Projective Industries and Dancing Girl Press.