"What is so magical about this collection is that we are not left hanging and lost in the dense material of this ambitious project; we are shown abundance and astounding imagination in what remains. This project is love."
Founded in 2001 as a poetry collective, Marsh Hawk Press has evolved into a self-sustaining publisher that prides itself on its authors’ involvement in every stage of the publishing process. Our books' forms and sensibilities assimilate modern and post-modern traditions of poetry and memoir but expand from these without political or aesthetic bias.
"What is so magical about this collection is that we are not left hanging and lost in the dense material of this ambitious project; we are shown abundance and astounding imagination in what remains. This project is love."
You are invited to read Annalise Nassani's contribution to "Chapter One" with her essay on erasure poetry HERE. Here's an excerpt:
It was just after lunch when the poetry graduate student teacher dumped a pile of discount books onto the table. There were only ten of us, all high school students, sitting in an air-conditioned classroom of some Columbia University building. She handed each student a random book plus some Sharpies. I remember mine had yellowed pages and chewed-up corners. The lesson that day was on erasure poetry. She demonstrated this by ripping a page out of a book and blacking paragraphs of text until only a handful of words were visible. At once, it felt thrilling and blasphemous to be permitted to destroy literature, even if it was books no one wanted. That August afternoon provided plenty of light through several open windows as we began. Sounds of ripping paper and the strong scent of markers filled the room. I don’t remember the title of the book I had nor the poem I created. Yet. I never forgot the joy of taking words from a page to create something new.
Congratulations to David Lehman whose new "Chapter One" book, THE BIRTH OF THE BEST, is on SPD's Recommended List!
Congratulations to our Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize recipient Brian Cochran whose book Translation Zone was noted in Poets & Writers' feature "Ten Questions for Cintia Santana." You can see it HERE but here's an excerpt:
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently rereading a couple of things. Hugh Raffles’s poetic and encyclopedic The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a book that came to my attention early in the pandemic, thanks to a beautifully written New York Times review by Parul Sehgal. I’m also rereading Translation Zone, winner of the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. It’s a first book by a friend, Brian Cochran. His poems are these acts of emotional and linguistic magic. I’ve been his fan for a long time, and over the last few years his work has reached a level such that I’m always asking myself after reading a poem, “How did he get there?” I also just returned from CDMX, where I did some catching up on contemporary Mexican poetry—recent works by Sara Uribe, Tedi López Mills, Eva Castañeda, and Elisa Díaz Castelo.