Para información en español, oprima aquí.
We are an indie press located in the border town of El Paso, Texas. We publish poetry in English and Spanish by new and established poets. We love innovative, experimental, and contemporary poetry with engaging themes such as gender, sex, culture, language, folklore, spirituality, politics and art. We believe writing is activism.
Cartas abiertas desde las tumbas andinas by Emilia Chuquin
Emilia Chuquin logra brindarnos versos rítmicos y luminosos
que están llenos de amor que siente por sus raíces. Su lenguaje
rico en metáforas, símbolos, irreverencias y referencias tanto
míticas como contemporáneas logra crear un puente entre
el corazón andino con lo del lector. La suya es una de
las plumas más conectadas al mundo ancestral indígena en vías
de desaparecer. En estos poemas se encuentra una consciencia
clara de las discriminaciones, adversidades e injusticias, las
cuales todavía están muy presentes hostigando a la cultura
indígena y al idioma Runashimi (quichua). Sin embargo
tenemos aquí una visión valiente y bella de este mundo
por el que la poeta lucha con elocuencia y amor.--Victoria West, UCLA Department
of Spanish and Portuguese
Hummingbird Mind by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
Reading Shannon
Elizabeth Hardwick's poems is like finding yourself alone on the Texas plains
listening to the wind purse and hum across the distant expanse. There's a tone,
a flutter, a persistent echo that guides you, unexpectedly, toward moments of
clarity and release: "Search out stars, a wheeling compass, / tumbling
happens. I want weightlessness like that." Hardwick doesn't waste time
building tension for uneventful payoffs, but confidently---and keenly---lets
each line play out whatever dynamite it holds. From the opening page, she tells
us, "At the root of everything there's violence. / Like drilling for
oil," and by the end of Hummingbird
Mind we see not only the only pain we
inflict on ourselves but also the wonder. The choice in these pages isn't how
to manage our ills and loneliness, but what to do as we move through the
wastelands in search of the "origin of [our] ache." --Jeff Simpson, author of Vertical Hold
This is a book that sows words like seeds in the breach of
sense and language, body and place, monument and ruin, self and nation. "There is material here that will start
the rebuilding," Gabe Gómez assures us, and that material is found in the
"the foreign/ body," the "broken English of immigrants," a
"patois," and in "our mother tongue," where "a kind of
melody/stifled by letters" tries to "sound out the new world."
These seeds, "find patterns/ in the mayhem/ from patterns in their
flight." The Seed Bank
offers hope, then, in the very materials discarded, splintered, unvalued,
forgotten in the wake of natural disaster or assimilation or Monsanto: what
each of us holds in our hands, our ancient seeds, our memories and nouns, our
desires and verbs, our individual and hybrid voices, which can take root
anywhere and disrupt the order with a field of wildflowers. We need this book
to remind us, again and again, of our strength, our flexible syntax, our
"hard breath blooming" against a grammar of destruction. --Rosa Alcalá, author of Undocumentaries and
The Lust of Unsentimental Waters
Killing Current by John Pluecker. Chapbook. Buy Now.
"Can you bathe in the space between these thick lines segmented as if worms climbing down the remains of fields or bandages criss-cross in patterned bliss," writes John Pluecker in his debut chapbook collection of "Killing Current". Pluecker dwells in a space of language and terrain explored and documented by Spanish explorers in what is now the state of Texas. He appropriate texts and maps to create a new interpretation of exploration in a language that dissects and breaks linear history.
Codex of Journeys: Bendito camino by Liliana Valenzuela. Buy Now.
"A Mex-Tex, border-crosser, Liliana Valenzuela's poetry is best appreciated
aloud. Poetry is her instrument, and the songs Valenzuela plucks are from
her voyage beyond borders, a vantage point called Nepantla, eternally a
visitor from the land in-between, even at home. Lyrical, lush, traviesa,
here is a woman's voice uncensored."-Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek, Caramelo
"Word by word, line by line, Codex of Journeys entrances with its crisp rhythms echoing in the heart and transfixes with its luminous images vibrating on the page. Marvelously spare, and full of light and shadow, each poem is like a tiny x-ray of the soul capturing so much of what’s not seen by the naked eye underneath the temporal flesh." -Richard Blanco, author of Looking for The Gulf Motel
"Sunflower Cantos feels like an ecstatic channeling, as if this poet had conjured our ancient, sacred wordhoard. These are stunning, mysterious poems." -Jennifer Clement, founder of The San Miguel Poetry Week, author of Newton's Sailor, The Next Stranger
"Sunflower Cantos is a book of poems as horoscopes and spells, prayers and incantations, as if the skeleton woman had stepped out of Native American pictographs and the Hanged Man left the Tarot deck to jazz along alienated highways...Robin has let a deep voice through her like nothing else in the world." --Tony Barnstone, author of Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, Sad Jazz: Sonnets
Spider Road by Amalio Madueño. Buy Now.
"Amalio's poetry is made for the mouth, not only because it is rooted in the oral traditions of Mexican and Indigenous American cultures, but also because it has flowered as part of the Jazz-influenced, spoken word and performance poetry of the late 20th and 21st century. When I read Amalio, I smell copal and juniper, and I think in three languages...." -- Donna Snyder, Founder of Tumblewords Project, author of I Am South
The Garden of Dresses by Katherine Hoerth. Buy Now.
"Whoever dreamed that peeling an orange or selecting a grapefruit could be such a sensuous experience? In these juicy poems of the Rio Grande Valley, Katherine Hoerth invites the reader into a world dripping with pleasure and delight. She is a poet willing to explore all the contours of the physical world and relationships, and we are the richer for it." --Steven Schneider, author of Borderlands: Drawing Border Lives, Prairie Air Show, and Unexpected Guests.
Hymnal by Linda Ravenswood. Buy now
"In Hymnal, Linda Ravenswood contemplates subject matter that is as disquieting as it is beautiful. I understand, as do you that we live in a world of superlatives, however hers is an incredible book." Geoffrey Gatza, Publisher, BlazeVOX Books
Entre la claridad by Elisa A. Garza. Buy now.
"In Entre la claridad, Elisa A. Garza continues her clear, intelligent exploration of Mexican-American identity with poems of family, romance, female power, and landscape. Interweaving English and Spanish, she constructs a spiritual self on the frontier, aware of honoring her origins but blazing a new trail...."--Karen Braucher
Read more about the author
Post Pardon by Arisa White. Purchase your copy. Read more.
"An astonishing lyricism accompanies the intuitive narrative that weaves throughout Arisa White’s Post Pardon. This stunning collection of poems arranges and deranges the post-partum experience, allowing the reader to witness its speaker grieve and celebrate the birth of a son who is at once ghost child and literal child. I am so very taken by the formal strategies that White ingeniously incorporates to redirect every stage of the poem’s experience, just as I am utterly persuaded by how her syntax creates a remarkable fluidity that results in the undeniable tonal achievement of the collection as a whole. In short, the poems in this sequence are, quite frankly, brilliant. Harrowing to be sure, image after image, Post Pardon is a breathtaking collection, and, as such, introduces Arisa White as a major new talent." Cate Marvin
passwords_ by Juan Manuel Portillo. Available now. Limited Edition. Read more.
"Portillo transforma la inmediatez del correo electrónico en la personalidad silenciosa del receptor que genera los mensajes. A través de passwords_ se revela una “voz” excluida, el silencio creador de una profunda presencia. En la superficie, respuestas con enigma por dentro; en totalidad la entrega personal de códigos que manifiestan la percepción de momentos particulares del ser humano ligado –lenta, angustiante y amorosamente- a nuestra vertiginosa realidad." Dolores Dorantes
Submissions are open for Chapbooks Only! Please see guidelines.
