DD: How did Glass Poetry Press come into being?
AF: Glass originally started as the journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry. It was edited by me and my wife, Holly Burnside, and we released our first issue in March, 2008. It started because we had seen a number of journals start up, release an issue online, and then disappear from the web. We wanted to see if we could create something more permanent. We had no real editing experience and no real plan beyond posting our info on a few sites and hoping people would send us work to consider. When we started, we used a free yahoo email account and a free blogger website and yet, somehow, people sent us their wonderful work. In 2014, though, we had to decide if we could keep Glass going. We were both going through career changes and we were having trouble responding to submissions in a timely manner. We felt we weren’t doing right by our readers and our writers, so we decided to close the journal. We kept the website up, though, and made a commitment to our poets that we would keep the site live on the web for as long as we possibly could.
Pretty much as soon as we announced Glass was closing, I started thinking about chapbooks. I love chapbooks. I love their size, their relatively small cost, their variety. I love the idea of working one on one with an author on a finished project. I love the idea of being a completely independent press that can take real risks on work that other presses might not be able to take. And I love the idea of this little book you can hold in your hands and put in your bag or purse and pull out to read, start to finish, during your lunch break. In 2016, I was awarded an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council and I decided to put a portion of that award towards pursuing my dream of running a chapbook press. I already had the Glass website, and people still remembered Glass: A Journal of Poetry, so calling it Glass Poetry Press made sense. I spent four or five months researching materials and other presses, talking with friends who run presses, and talking with poets who might be interested in letting me publish their chapbooks. And in August, 2016, Glass Poetry Press released Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain, the first entry in the 2016-2017 Glass Chapbook Series. I screamed when I finished stapling that first copy. And I’m not going to lie – I still scream a little when I finish the first copy of every new title.
DD: The motto of your press is Precision, Vision, Inclusion. Could you expound a bit on these aesthetic values and how the chapbooks you’ve published, so far, exemplify them?
AF: Those are three elements of glass that I admire most (one nickname for Toledo, Ohio, is The Glass City, because we were the glass capital of the world, which is why we originally named the journal Glass). Glass, as both object and art form, is incredibly precise. It also assists vision, whether through eyeglasses or telescopes or whatever. And glass can incorporate anything – it is a very inclusive object and medium. I also admire these features in poetry – precision of language, the vision of the poet, and the growing inclusiveness of the community. So, for the press, those are both what I look for in the work I publish and what I strive for as an editor.
I’m hopeful that these three elements can be seen in the work I’ve published. I think about Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain – the careful use of language in Francisco’s poems, whether his long poems or his very short ones. There’s incredible precision in his work. Similarly, Steven Sanchez (To My Body) and Kate Fadick (Self Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen) are incredibly precise artisans of words. Sanchez writes these absolutely stunning lyric narratives and each line is as tight as any I’ve ever read. Fadick’s lyric meditations are so precise, every single word carries the weight of fifty pages of prose. And there’s intense vision in these chapbooks. Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline is a visceral exploration of childloss, motherhood, and mental health (and love, which I think is often overlooked in her work). Givhan is a great example of the vision I admire because she has had a number of collections released in a short period of time (in addition to her Glass chapbook, she recently released two full lengths: Landscape with Headless Mama, from LSU Press, and Protection Spell, from University of Arkansas Press). Reading all of these together, you can see a clear vision of the world of the poet and of the world the poet wants to create. Lastly, as an editor, I am committed to equity in publishing. And I want that inclusiveness to be about both publishing underrepresented writers and about the styles of poetry I’m publishing. During the first two years, I will publish ten chapbooks. Six of the chapbooks are written by poets of color, three are by LGBTQ poets, and six are by women poets. They vary in style from narrative poetry to meditative poetry and Jennifer Met’s Gallery Withheld is a collection of concrete/shape poems.
DD: Tell us about the chapbooks forthcoming in your second year?
AF: I’m really excited about this second series of chapbooks. There will be five chapbooks again and four of the chapbooks are debut collections (though, one of the authors, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, also recently won the Kundiman Prize for her full length collection, Shahr-e- jaanaan: The City of The Beloved, which is a book I’m really looking forward to reading).
We just released Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost, which is just phenomenal. It’s a series of poems about love and loss and longing, hidden as a series of recipes. February is a real rising star from Nigeria and his poems in this collection (and his poems that is showing up in journals) are incredibly fresh and exciting.
Also, coming during this series are Malcolm Friend’s mxd-kd-mixtape, which is a fantastic collection of narratives about family and identity. Friend’s poems are heavy with music, which helps ground the work, and they’re full of intense depth and connectivity. I’m working on the first proof set of mxd-kd-mixtape right now and it’s really hard to focus on the layout details because I just keep getting drawn into the poems.
In Bad Anatomy, which will be coming out in February 2018, Hannah Cohen gives us poems about growth, womanhood, politics, and love. Cohen writes poems with a careful precision that allows us to really fall deep into her subjects, her speakers, and her images. She has this wonderful fresh voice that manages to mix elements of Plath and Olds and Sappho, but also with a truly unique tone and style. It’s a really outstanding series of poems.
Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s ghost exhibit is a sequence of prose poems with each one acting like a placard in a museum. The movement, sequencing, and pacing of each poem builds this amazing narrative of the family at the center of the poems. I remember reading the manuscript when it was first submitted and being completely blown away by the complexity and efficiency of how Mercer created the chapbook.
Finally, the series wraps up in June, 2018, with Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s What is Not Beautiful. Talukder’s work is really incredible. Her lines are clear, but complex and packed full of nuance. What is Not Beautiful examines a new marriage and mental health and Talukder approaches her subjects with such precision and depth. Talukder is a master of these tight, short lines that pack volumes of imagery and emotion in just a handful of words. And the music of her poems knocks me out of my chair every time I return to her manuscript.
I could talk for hours and hours about these chapbooks and I, for real, cannot wait to share them with the Glass readers. But for now, here, I think I’ll end by saying that of all the many benefits of running Glass, easily the best is the privilege of being able to sit with and read these manuscripts, to fall in love with them and then to help others find and fall in love with them too.
DD: What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced, starting a new press?
AF: To be honest, I’ve been incredibly lucky. On the one hand, I’ve had a few friends who run presses who have always been there with advice when I’ve been confused (especially Margaret Bashaar from Hyacinth Girl Press, who has been willing to share her experiences and advice with me so many times). I’ve also had a number of readers who have followed the press from the beginning and have helped spread the word on the press’s behalf in so many ways. The support and encouragement from the community and from readers has been amazing and I don’t know how I’ll ever repay all of the kindness that has been shown to me.
The main challenge has been time. I work a lot of hours at my day job and that means I don’t always get orders out right away. But I try to be as quick as possible. I also have friends and family, so balancing time between work, the press, and a social life (plus my own writing) is something I still struggle with.
Then there are the technical aspects of running the press: figuring out what the best method of shipping is (the folks at my local post office are probably sick of listening to me tell them that they’re overcharging me), learning how to find artists who will provide cover art and figuring out what a fair price is for their work, making sure I’m getting the best materials for the chapbooks at the best price.
It’s important to me that I can keep the cost of purchasing the chapbooks low without charging reading fees which means making sure that the cost to make them stays low. I’ve made choices early on that maybe weren’t the best choices (receiving submissions through Submittable, buying ISBN numbers, etc…), so I’m constantly evaluating and reevaluating those choices. And learning how best to market the chapbooks so I can get as many copies in the hands of readers as possible. It’s a constant learning process running the press. And I kind of love that about it. There’s always something new to look into and figure out. But, once you think you know what you’re doing, you find out that you really need to learn more, which can also be a little frustrating.
Still, all in all, somehow the press continues to thrive and grow and I remain amazed by the trust writers and readers continue to place in me. I’ll keep trying to live up to that trust.
DD: Tell us about Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
AF: Everything related to Glass began as Glass: A Journal of Poetry in 2008, as I discussed above. It seemed like an obvious choice to bring the journal back when I opened Glass as a chapbook press. I like to think of the journal as being complimentary to the press, but it also has a lot of flexibility. When I first reopened it, it was a weekly journal that spotlighted a single poem each week. Starting this year, I’ve shifted to a monthly format. Each issue includes 10 poems (sometimes, a few more) and throughout the month we also publish interviews, reviews (edited by our Reviews Editor, Stephanie Kaylor), and current events poems in our Poets Resist series (edited by Catherine Ellis Chambers). I like that the journal allows me to share the work of so many poets, especially since budget and time constraints mean I’m only able to publish five manuscripts through the chapbook series.
DD: You have an unusual day job for a poet and book publisher; you work as an exterminator. How did you come to work in the extermination business? How has being an exterminator influenced your work as a poet and publisher?
AF: Ha! Yeah, I don’t know many other exterminator poets, to be honest. It’s an interesting industry to work in. I got this job, basically, because I was born into it. It’s a family business, started by my grandparents. My uncles took over for them and now my cousins run it. It’s a little weird driving around with my name on the side of my truck (Frame’s Pest Control – “Don’t get stung by inexperience. Give us a buzz.”) but, it pays the bills. Honestly, it’s a pretty good job for me. I’m outside rather than behind a desk and I see different places and people each day. It’s also a job where I’m constantly learning new things, which, as a writer, is pretty great.
My work has definitely been influenced by my job. On the one hand, pest control gives ample opportunities for new subjects and images for my poems. But, also, this is very precise work. There’s a decent amount of science required to be able to do pest control effectively. And that scientific precision is definitely finding its way into my work. Even at the linguistic level. I’m fascinated by the language of pest control. Pyrethroids is a fantastic word, musically, and there’s something rhythmically interesting about the phrase “Juvenile Insect Hormone Regulator.” And “Instar” — honestly, is there a better word? So, all of that is finding its way into my work. I’m still figuring out how I want to use that material, how to merge the diction of pest control with the music of poetry. I’m reading a lot of Sharon Olds and looking at how she utilizes anatomical diction in her work. It’s a process, like everything else, but it’s a pretty interesting process, I think.
As for the press, my job brings a lot of advantages, mainly because I’m not bound by anyone else. I’m not university supported, either through the press or through my day job, so I don’t have to worry about how various other people are going to react to what I do with the press. This independence lets me look at my submissions and choose the ones that best fit my vision of the literary world that I want to see, without any input (for better or for worse) from anyone else. I really cherish that independence.
DD: What was the subject of the first poem you ever wrote?
AF: Oh, wow, yeah – so, my aunt and uncle had this wall in their laundry room in the unfinished portion of their basement and, basically, they encouraged everyone to write little messages on the wall. I think it was supposed to be inspirational sayings and things like that, but mostly it was just random things we’d heard in songs or on movies. But I thought the idea of this cluttered wall was really really deep. And I had just started really reading poetry and I thought that wall would be a great poem. So, I can’t remember any of the lines other than the opening line: “This wall is cluttered.” I don’t remember much else about it other than that it was a really bad poem, even for a seventeen year old.
DD: What was the first poem you reread multiple times?
AF: It was probably Stephen Crane’s “Many red devils ran from my heart.”
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
Crane was the first poet I fell in love with, especially this poem. I don’t know – something about this Ars Poetica really spoke to me. The darkness, the angst, the speaker’s discomfort and feeling of strangeness, it all pretty much gelled with my young, grunge outlook on the world and art. I’ve grown a lot since then, both in how I see the world and how I see art, but that poem still brings me back to being seventeen and full of nihilistic naiveté.
DD: If you had to have one line of poetry tattooed on you, what would it be?
AF: Without question, I’d pick these lines from Rane Arroyo’s “The Burrito King of Toledo, Ohio”: “I’m addicted to dawn/to light, to vision.” (as a backup, I’d choose “You’ll see how we give/birth among the ruins” from Wisława Szymborska’s “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”)
DD: If you had to have one song lyric tattooed on you, what would it be?
AF: “Thunder wishes it could be the snow” from “Purple People” by Tori Amos, with part of the refrain from The Dave Matthews Band’s “Pig” as a backup: “While you’re dancing on the ground,/why think of when you’re gone?”
DD: The newest chapbook you’ve published is Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost. Could you end the interview by telling us a bit about this collection and giving us a poem from it?
AF: How to Cook a Ghost is one of those collections that is really hard to fully explain. It’s a chapbook that really needs to be experienced. Logan February has done a really amazing thing with this series of poems. He’s dug deep into ideas of love and longing and loss and handled them all with a truly unique voice and style. I remember the first time I read How to Cook a Ghost, when it was first submitted, and trying to think of another sequence of poems that I could compare it to and I seriously couldn’t. That’s part of February’s genius. There really is no one like him.
The chapbook is a series of poems that explore those themes I just mentioned, but February approaches his subjects through the experience of eating. So, each poem, in a way, is a recipe. Follow the instructions and you might end up with a wonderful glass of lemonade. Or you might end up with the closure you need to understand a past love. It is truly astounding how carefully, and seemingly effortlessly, he holds these poems together. And his imagery is simply breathtaking. And the accumulation of these poems – this is a manuscript where the parts are incredible on their own but the whole manuscript still manages to be greater than the individual parts. Here’s a sample poem:
Food Poisoning
Do not eat that
you are only lying to yourself.
All of that sugar
– chocolate [honey & milk]
– ice cream [prismatic gore]
– poison [blue blackness]
and your heart has not been
broken yet.
Why do you fill yourself
with the very things that
will not stay inside of you:
candied gravel & other indigestibles?
You have made yourself sick,
praying for a miracle,
kneeling
over the toilet seat – cry:
I heave to make myself holy.
When an odd thing
shows you its oddities,
why are you surprised?
This herb will cleanse you –
juice it, drink, repeat:
he is a boneless body with two faces
until you understand
some foods do not taste very good,
but then, they will not start to rot
in your stomach.
Anthony Frame is an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, where he lives with his wife. He is the author of A Generation of Insomniacs (Main Street Rag, 2015) and of four chapbooks, including To Gain the Day (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015) and Where Wind Meets Wing (forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press). He is the editor/publisher of Glass Poetry Press, which publishes the Glass Chapbook Series and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Third Coast, Harpur Palate, Boxcar Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal and Verse Daily, among others. He has twice been awarded Individual Excellence Grants from the Ohio Arts Council
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
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