The Bodily Press is an independent publishing house for poetry, and a record label for improvised music. Founded in 2017 by poet/pianist/composer Eliot Cardinaux, The Bodily Press has recently begun publishing a wide array of poets. New work released this year includes a trio of books by Cardinaux himself (Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room), as well as chapbooks by American poets Norman Finkelstein (Four Episodes) and Mark Scroggins (forage acanthus).
Slated for release in the late fall of 2024, Denver Butson’s The Etcetera Variations: Poems with and for Musicians is the first full-length poetry collection to be published by the press besides Cardinaux's own recent books. The 130-page book features poems Butson has penned and performed in collaboration with musicians such as Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban, Marco Capelli, Marc Ribot, and many others, making it a logical release by an imprint that already serves the improvised music as well as various poetry communities.
The publication and release of Butson's book marks a turning point in the life of The Bodily Press, as Cardinaux begins to invite work by a number of new artists and writers into its catalog, including:
- Angel Alphabet by Tasha Robbins, the "poet's painter" of the beat generation, which consists of 22 paintings visually depicting the characters of the Hebrew alphabet in angelic script (coming in 2025);
- The first full-length poetry collection by Paul Catafago, a New Orleans-based, Brooklyn-born poet of the Palestinian diaspora, whose poems directly relate the struggle for Palestinian liberation to the historical struggle of Black American musicians (coming in 2025);
- A debut chapbook by Shana Bulhan, a gender/queer, disabled, neurodivergent, biracial poet of the South Asian diaspora, whose visual cover art has already been featured by the Bodily Press this year, and whose forthcoming work investigates themes of queer madness, exile, and precarity;
- An Drochshaol, a chapbook by Joseph Donahue, an Irish-American gnostic poet and professor at Duke University, part of his “Terra Lucida” series;
- A chapbook by Deja Carr (AKA Mal Devisa), a Western Massachusetts-based African-American poet and musical artist;
- A chapbook by Suzanne Mercury, a Boston-based occult poet and beekeeper.
The press aims, through an aesthetic thread of “lyric madness,” to bring together poets from otherwise disparate communities, thus hoping to help diversify and cross-pollinate the landscape of American poetry.
Learn More: https://bodilypress.bandcamp.com/