Chapbook Series II
WE COULD HANG A RADICAL PANEL OF LIGHT / Sarah Rosenthal ($14)
Sarah Rosenthal’s we could hang a radical panel of light embodies the visibility of the poetic process, in which the tangible and intangible are held in counterbalance. Words and phrases from Rosenthal’s dream journal have been broken apart, rearranged, and placed by hand on the page, each cut-out white rectangle becoming its own panel of light. The compositional practice of collage builds a tenuous sense of structure and evokes a shifting subjectivity, a revolving, scintillating sense of meaning. “Estelle,” “she,” and “I” are all points in a constellation of a self grappling with pain and identity as they mirror, overlap, and depart from one another, traversing the vast space in which each panel has been carefully affixed.
SARAH ROSENTHAL is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, forthcoming), The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019; collaboration with Valerie Witte), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She lives in San Francisco where she manages projects for Collaborative Classroom, works as a Life & Professional Coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.
OF RESIDUE / Barbara Tomash ($14)
With the distinct visual presentation of a collage or painting, language in Barbara Tomash’s Of Residue cascades in layers down the page, generating energy, forming pockets and adhesions within its columnar container. In her commitment to a process of research and assemblage, Tomash draws our attention to the materiality of words: how they link up, flow together, and resonate across time and space when the usual structures of punctuation and syntax are removed and a different frame is made to house them. Begun as a memorial to fellow poet, editor, and social activist Marthe Reed, the poems in Of Residue contain tender examples of a wondrous natural world entwined with the destructive reality of climate change. Tomash invites us to move freely through the eternal life cycles of our own planet, appreciating the motion and beauty in the remainder, the coalesced.
BARBARA TOMASH is the author of four books of poetry: PRE- (Black Radish Books 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), and Flying in Water, winner of the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award. An earlier version of PRE- was a finalist for the Colorado Prize and the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
MUSTARD / Raul Ruiz ($14)
Like a breathless friend on a busy corner, Raul Ruiz’s Mustard lifts our gaze, winks, and gestures towards the sky, which is somehow filled with hummingbirds. Surreal, big-hearted, and playful, this series of prose poems documents one jaded (or maybe not yet?) poet's employment at the Libreria De Amplio Margen, "a little bookshop on a street that time was beginning to erase from us," punctuated by the author’s original line drawings. With shrewd and companionable tenderness, Ruiz catches us up in the inextricably strange and hungry experience of being human—loving, dreaming, writing—amidst the buying and selling of books.
RAUL RUIZ is a public health worker who lives and works in San Francisco. He is at work on his first full-length manuscript. More about him can be found here.
DREAM LIFE / Eloisa Amezcua ($16)
DREAM LIFE is a selection of poetic collages by Eloisa Amezcua, entrusted to Drop Leaf Press editor Jennifer S. Cheng for collating and assembling in four distinct volumes, with only the request to be surprised. The materials and process of assembly echo the nest-like textures and sensibilities of Amezcua’s collage practice in gathering her dreams. Each collage is printed on a neutral palette of heavy coverstock, handmade paper, rice paper, or heavy vellum. The papers are variously sized and enclosed in a glassine envelope. Each envelope features a sewn embellishment made with scrap materials from Cheng’s own environment.
Note: In keeping with Amezcua’s desire for surprise, book buyers will receive one randomly selected edition out of the four. If you order more than one, you will receive different editions, unless you request otherwise at check-out.
ELOISA AMEZCUA is from Arizona. Her debut collection, From the Inside Quietly, is the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limón. A MacDowell fellow, her second collection of poems, Fighting Is Like a Wife, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press (April 2022).