Punch Press

Untitled Broadside
Luke Roberts

Handset and printed on Magnani Pescia scraps with Roberts during the brief December stop in Buffalo punctuating his winter 2009 tour of the Northeast, Florida panhandle and Midwest. By plane, train and foot. Diffikilted.

13.09.08
JOW LINDSAY & POSIE RIDER

Handset and hastily printed in three colors on scrap approximately four hours before Lindsay and Rider read at Rust Belt Books on Allen Street in Buffalo, June 25, 2009.

Two Ballads
Richard Owens

Two ballads: "Wayfaring Stranger" and "Foreign Lander." Printed on Stonehenge scrap using handset type and photopolymer plates.

Kintsugi
Thomas Meyer

"Sit so you don't hurt the grass," says Meyer. "An impossible grace." Robert Kelly remarks in his foreword, "Tom calls the forty-eight threnodic pulses of his observation of Jonathan's dying, his own surviving, by a curious Japanese word, kintsugi, which he describes as the 'practice of repairing ceramics with gold-laced lacquer to illuminate the breakage.' So the very rupture is what is highlighted: the error becomes the meaning of the text."

Three-color letterpress on Fabriano wraps. Hand-stitched. Celadon letterpress images appearing on the cover and within the book are based on resin images generously produced for this project by Erica Van Horn in August, 2008 at Coracle Press, Tipperary, Ireland.

Implicit Lyrics
Ben Lyle Bedard

"I have seen the splendor of my leaving," writes Bedard in the third of twenty-four poems which make up Book One of Implicit Lyrics, a disjunctive and highly cavalier journey through concerns surrounding silence, the lyric, and the role of love in coming to terms with the decentered shreds of the fractured subject. For Bedard meaning resides in the spaces between words, between sentences, in the disjunct, the gap, the silences that resonate in the burning whiteness of the page. These are the splendor of his leaving.

"It's not that I don't love you, I Do. I only want to stop the sun."

Saddle-stitched with two-color letterpress wraps folded over a black bristol cover.

Susquehanna
Dale Smith

This book contains the first part of Dale Smith's Susquehanna, a sustained meditation on the value of failed vision-particularly the inability of a young Samuel Taylor Coleridge to fully realize his Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the early 19^th century. Thinking this failure through the cultural and technological developments of the present moment, Smith develops a methodological approach within the body of the poem grounded partly in Walter Benjamin's materialist historiography and David Antin's talking meditations on anthropology.

Perfect-bound with three-color letterpress wraps. Like the Wingbow Press edition of Ed Dorn's Slinger, parts of the book were set in Caslon Old Face. Parts of the book were also set in Baskerville Old Face, Palatino Linotype, and Georgia. Interior images culled from various 18^th century New England primers. Front cover image of Britain culled from John Sellers' 1690 Hydrographia Universalis. Rear cover image from Sellers' A New Systeme of Geography, 2^nd Edition, also printed in 1690.

Repatterning
Brian Mornar

Comprised of four poems of moderate length, Repatterning sees Mornar synthesizing the mundane, meditations on the mundane, and the poetry and critical work of others encountered while wandering through the mundane. Thinking and writing through the everyday, Mornar comes out in these poems on the other side of the everyday with the musicality of a lyric sensibility in hand. He comes "Stately, outside waiting for the bus doors to open" and finds himself situated "Between the spaces public and private". As he states in "Kleist's Puppets", "Where the garage meets the road/ I do tell the people my name".

In the foreward to this inaugural collection, Lisa Fishman writes, "The intelligence of this collection is formidable and hopeful, alive to lyric utterance, margin note, and notebook entry as themselves events and as sites of hearing: Shelley's West Wind cutting through Chicago's Hawk wind; Mornar's Oakland refuting Spenser's Ireland, everywhere the self stricken but not stricken out...."

Assembled by hand, this book includes two-color letterpress wraps folded over and bound to a black bristol interior cover. Where else can fine letterpress poetry be had for the cost of a pack of smokes.

Soundless
John Phillips

John Phillips' Soundless is a sequence of six short poems concerned with the relation between silence and quiet, interior and exterior, the world apprehended through the ear and consciousness of that world. Working within a tradition further developed by Cid Corman, with whom the poet corresponded until his death in 2004, and Theodore Enslin, with whom the poet continues to correspond, Phillips' practice is unique in the British context.

This project began as a mercenary printing mission. Our aim was to produce an interesting book, appropriate to the work contained in it, quickly and using inexpensive materials. Guts printed on a laser jet printer. Covers printed on Wassau gray bristol and mounted to a heavier weight, sandy stock selected in haste. Two-color letterpress. Hand-stitched.

BILL GRIFFITHS, 1948-2007

Printed on scraps from previous projects, it was our intention to include a copy of this broadside with each copy of Damn the Caesars, Vol. III. Bill Griffiths, whose work appears in Vol. III, passed away while the journal was at press and it seemed essential that we acknowledge this in it. Unfortunately, due to a printing error, only 16 of the broadsides appeared as they should. These 16 were sent to friends of the poet.

BEL & THE DRAGON
RICHARD OWENS

Letter-press on Magnani Pescia. Spray-stenciled image of Southeast Asian puppeteer.