o•blēk editions is a micro press dedicated to publishing chapbooks of emerging poets. edited by Peter Gizzi. titles distributed courtesy of b l u s h.
ASTROTURF is a collection of poems, what Wendy Xu has described as “a post-Disney gender-odyssey,” a re-mapping of young memory that unfurls a foreboding landscape of childhood programming, provoking us to question constructs of choice in queerness; what is plastic and what grows; who has sponsored this message; how do we keep footed on a perpetually slipping carpet of gender; what stars do we follow; what villains do we foster; how do we find a place we know; do we need to know, or can we live?
JAYSON KEERY is a writer and arts coordinator based in Western Massachusetts. Their recent work has appeared in Overheard, The New Guard, Metatron Press, blush lit, and Peach Mag among others. They’ve been anthologized in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat) and A Queer Anthology of Rage (Pilot Press, UK).
THE SALVAGEMAN is a long poem, a love poem, a daydream of a city. It’s a meditation on love, money, labor, and the insurmountable distance between two people. It asks what we can salvage of each other, and ourselves.
REBECCA VALLEY is a poet and essayist living in Cambridge, Vermont. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Black Warrior Review, Permafrost, poets.org, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Drizzle Review and curates writing prompts on performing and making art in your home on Instagram @living_room_theatre. You can find her online at rebeccavalley.com.
BLACKTHORN is a selection of prose poems written in the weatherboard discotheque of an Essex housing estate. Rooted in mythology, cultural heritage, and art, language and rhythm become a new way of seeing. Surreal and domestic, these poems create worlds of our kitchen sinks.
PAIGE PEARSON is from Aberystwyth, Wales. Her work has appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Stand, Cambridge Literary Review, and the Chicago Review. She works in an art gallery and lives on an estuary.
STATE OF MY UNDRESS is an elegy for the body, an interrogation of its worth with its contractions and expansions of ache. The poems possess a formal magic and are by turns thwarted and beguiling, menacing and humorous, haunting and earnest. That is to say they can turn any which way and every turn is stunning. Nothing is as it seems.
STEVIE BELCHAK is a poet and writer currently living in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and non-fiction can be found in Hobart Pulp, blush lit, Third Coast, Feelings, and The Quarterless Review, among others.
Chapbook. Poetry.
5.5” x 8.5”
20 pp.
MARIE DE QUATREBARBES is the author of Aby (P.O.L, 2022), Les vivres
(P.O.L, 2021), Voguer (P.O.L, 2019) and Gommage de tête (Éric Pesty
Éditeur, 2017). She hosts the review La tête et les cornes with Maël
Guesdon, Yohanna my Nguyen, and Benoît Berthelier. She lives in Paris.
KIT SCHLUTER’s hybrid book of poems, Pierrot’s Fingernails, was
published by Canarium in 2020. His acclaimed translations from the
French and Spanish include books by Olivia Tapiero, Anne Kawala, Jaime
Sáenz, Michel Surya, and Marcel Schwob. He lives in Mexico City.
TWO POEMS. It is not easy to label or situate Quatrebarbes’ poetry.
Most striking is her resolutely experimental approach, her tendency
towards estrangement and her powerfully developed use of form. Those
characteristics might be related to her studies at several Paris art
schools, but in any case, her poetry bears both traces of Gilles Deleuze’s
theory and Marcel Duchamp’s art, of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, of
the language of women’s magazines and Internet speech.
Chapbook. Poetry.
5.5” x 8.5”
36 pp.
27 POEMS ON DEATH is a selection of poems written by the philosopher Georges Bataille during the Nazi occupation of France, aka Vichy France, 1940-1944 – Bataille’s most poetically active years, when out of recurring attempts to approach ‘the impossible,’ aka the poetic, he shifted the majority of his creative output from criticism to the poetic form. Rahmé worked on these translations during the height of the Covid lockdown, among the sirens, a period that too poignantly coincides with the fascist Trump years. These harrowing poems ache. They are haunted by a dark spirit and are driven by a desire for the abyss as well as the redemptive connection through eros.
26 copies signed/numbered by the author.
read an excerpt here.
RACHELLE RAHMÉ is an independent scholar and poet. She is the author of Count Thereof Upon the Other’s Limbs (72 Press, 2019), and the chapbooks Puce Commodity (earthbound editions, 2020) and Bataille’s Eggs (b l u s h, 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, the tiny,Fonograf, and The Recluse, among others. She is a St. Mark’s Poetry Project fellow, 2021-2022, and a Lebanese-American born in Jounieh, based in Brooklyn, NY.
Chapbook. Poetry.
5.5” x 8.5”
36 pp.
ENTER SANDMAN is a book of poems dedicated to the timeless death metal of the id. A radio tuned between static and ecstatic. Ode to the voices in between. Throughout spiraling visions of the present, there is a restless imagination at play. Off to never-never land.
26 copies signed/numbered by the author.
read an excerpt here.
JON RUSESKI is the author of the chapbooks Sporting Life and Neon Clouds. He is co-editor and founder of b l u s h, an online poetry journal and publishing imprint. Recent work appears in BOMB, jubilat, Dirt Child, and The Quarterless Review, among others
Vinyl LP.
Published by Students of Decay studentsofdecay.com
digital available via studentsofdecay.bandcamp.com
SPEECH ACTS FOR A DYING WORLD is a generous selection of Peter Gizzi’s acclaimed poetry of the last decade. There are new poems alongside poems from the collections, Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics, (2016), In Defense of Nothing (2014), and Threshold Songs (2011). These poems strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth, and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi’s work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. As Ben Lerner has written, “Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition.” These recordings were made in November of 2021 at Sonelab in Easthampton, MA. In these poems we discover a deep intimacy, where thinking and feeling, searching, cresting, turning, loving are all knotted and happening together.