Founded in 2017 in Amherst, MA by poet/pianist/composer Eliot Cardinaux, The Bodily Press is an independent publishing house for poetry, and a record label for creative, improvised music. Initially created as a way for Cardinaux to publish and record his own poetry and music in collaboration with other musicians and to learn the art of book design, publishing, album design, and music production, The Bodily Press has recently begun publishing a wider array of poets. New titles released this year include 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) Mark Scroggins (forage acanthus), Joseph Donahue (An Drochshaol), Sarah Menefee (Winter Rose, forthcoming), and National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey (By Bent Light, forthcoming).

The Bodily Press is also excited to announce its first full-length poetry collection by a poet other than Cardinaux. Slated for release in early 2025, Denver Butson’s The Etcetera Variations: Poems For And With Musicians, a 130-page book features poems Butson has penned and has been performing over the last three decades in collaboration with musicians such as Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban, Marco Cappelli, Marc Ribot, and many others, making it a logical release by an imprint that already serves various music as well as poetry communities. With a double introduction by ECM recording artists, Maneri and Ban, and praised by notable poets, Terence Degnan, Lorraine Doran, and Mark Nowak,The Etcetera Variations is teeming with more poems by Butson that novelist Colum McCann says “knock our comfortable balance all to hell, and then they help stitch our imaginations back together again.”

The publication and release of Butson's book mark a turning point in the life of The Bodily Press, wherein Cardinaux begins to invite work by new and established artists and writers into its catalog, including: 

● National Book Award winner Nathaniel Mackey, progenitor of Black American Music with his chapbook, By Bent Light, featuring poems from mu and from Song of the Andoumbolou in advance of the release of the first two books of his forthcoming Double Quartet, a four-volume work-in-progress;

● Sarah Menefee, poet of the San Francisco streets with her chapbook, Winter Rose (forthcoming in 2025);

● Tasha Robbins, the "painter-among-poets" of the beat generation, with Angel Alphabet, 22 paintings visually depicting the characters of the Hebrew alphabet in angelic script (forthcoming in 2025); 

● Paul Catafago, a New Orleans-based, Brooklyn-born poet of the Palestinian-Lebanese diaspora, with Palestinian Freedom Suite, his debut full-length poetry collection, featuring poems directly relating the struggle for Palestinian liberation to the historical struggle of Black  musicians in America (forthcoming in 2025);

● Shana Bulhan, a gender/queer, disabled, neurodivergent, biracial poet of the South Asian diaspora, whose cover art has already been featured by the Bodily Press this year, and whose forthcoming work, their debut chapbook, investigates themes of queer madness, exile, and precarity;

● Bodily press editor, poet Eliot Cardinaux with a new full-length collection, The Ocean from Here to Here

And new chapbooks from:

● Deja Carr (AKA Mal Devisa), a Western Massachusetts-based African-American poet and musical artist;

● and 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, and hopes to broaden and diversify the conversation of contemporary poetry and to cross-pollinate the poetic landscape of American poetry, rather than focus on a single group or identity. 

With the aid of Fractured Atlas’ crowdfunding platform, alongside other potential sources of funding, such as a 2025 Amherst Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals (pending), The Bodily Press aims to raise funds that will help with book production costs, and will allow The Bodily Press to provide Bowker ISBN numbers for every full-length collection published through the press. The Bodily Press, funded, for now, solely on Cardinaux’s out-of-pocket shoestring budget, is also in dire need of updated technology to facilitate smoother book design as production ramps up in 2025.

In the wake of the closure of Small Press Distribution earlier this year, small publishers are in a more precarious position than ever. Poetry and poets need small presses to survive. The Bodily Press is doing its small part to fulfill that need, but we need your support.

My aim for The Bodily Press is to bring together audiences of improvised music, with readers of contemporary poetry, and to bridge the gap between various, oftentimes disparate, poetic and musical communities within the U.S. and abroad. Having lived in Denmark for a period and toured widely overseas for more than a decade, I have built connections in Europe as well as the U.S. Recently, I have also extended my network of musical collaborators — in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands — into the field of poetry, poetics, and translation as well. 

Events that have taken place and are planned for the coming year, include: 

● A triple-release reading at Amherst Books in Amherst, MA, on October 12th, 2024, featuring Bodily Press authors Norman Finkelstein, Mark Scroggins, and Eliot Cardinaux; 

● A successful, well-attended reading by Eliot Cardinaux at the XIT THE BEAR reading series at The Press Room in Somerville, MA on November 10th, 2024;

● A table at the Northampton Print and Book Fair, November 22-23rd, 2024 in Northampton, MA, where titles and merch from The Bodily Press were made available for purchase, along with information about our endeavor; 

● A projected series of readings and concerts at the Copenhagen Winter Jazz Festival, featuring Danish poets and musicians, Bodily Press founding editor, poet and pianist Eliot Cardinaux, and very special guests;

● A projected reading at Amherst Books featuring no less than five Bodily Press authors and artists, including Deja Carr, Suzanne Mercury, Shana Bulhan, Tasha Robbins, and Eliot Cardinaux, in April of 2025, in celebration of National Poetry Month;

● And the Brooklyn launch of Denver Butson’s The Etcetera Variations, a night of improvised poetry and the chamber jazz of Mat Maneri and Eliot Cardinaux, the cinematic surf work of Marco Cappelli and Italian Surf Academy, and many other possibilities involving some of the biggest names in improvisational music.

Further down the road, The Bodily Press hopes to resume, in earnest, its work as a record label, serving improvising musicians and composers between the U.S. and Europe. I have produced and released a dozen albums through The Bodily Press, in collaboration with international improvising artists such as Kresten Osgood (DK), Thomas Morgan (USA), Asger Thomsen (DK), Jonas Engel (DE), Etienne Nillesen (NL), Will McEvoy (USA), Max Goldman (USA), Simon Forchhammer (DK), Gary Fieldman (USA), Caleb Schmale (USA), and Jeppe Høi Justesen (DK). By publishing more books by new authors and artists through The Bodily Press, this network of musicians will also gain access to the work of poets and visual artists they might not otherwise encounter, and vice versa. This will engage communities not only across the boundaries of genre, style, and medium, but also across national borders, all of which often keep artists apart, and, worse, in competition with one another, rather than in creative modes of collaboration. With the support of Fractured Atlas, an organization open to working across both national and psychic boundaries and borders, and with your own very kind support, I believe this project has a great chance at success. 

As you will see, there are various donation tiers on our crowdfunding page, ranging from $2-1,000, based on what you are able, willing, or would like to give. We offer a variety of rewards for set donation amounts, from Bodily Press stickers and typewriter bookmarks handmade by Denver Butson, to poetry chapbooks, full-length collections, and a variety of bundles, as well as digital downloads from our musical discography. Thanks to the fiscal sponsorship of Fractured Atlas, The Bodily Press is a 501(c)(3) organization. Therefore, any amount that you are generous enough to donate over the list price of a particular reward item, is tax deductible. On behalf of The Bodily Press as its founding editor, and on behalf of our authors, I want to thank you sincerely in advance for your generosity. Your support, whatever the amount, is crucial. Thank you.

-Eliot Cardinaux

Born in Dayton, OH in 1984 and raised between there and Geneva, Switzerland, Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator adventurously working at the edges of the lyric and improvised music. He is the author of the poetry collection On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), and the trio of Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room (Bodily Press, 2024). His latest collection, entitled The Ocean from Here to Here, is forthcoming from The Bodily Press in 2025, following his recent chapbook Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer (Bodily Press, 2024). Eliot has produced and appeared on over a dozen albums of original music, including American Thicket (Loyal Label, 2016), featuring Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan, and Flin van Hemmen; and Odysseus Alone (Insula Jazz 2018) with Kresten Osgood and Thomas Morgan. He has released a number of albums through The Bodily Press, including Sweet Beyond Witness (solo, 2018); What the Wildflower Witnessed (with Our Hearts as Thieves, 2021); Out of Our Systems (with Will McEvoy and Max Goldman, 2022); and Pavane (with Gary Fieldman, 2022). He most recently appears in a duo with American percussionist Gary Fieldman, on the album Imminence (self-released, 2024). He holds a bachelor’s degree in contemporary improvisation from The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and an MFA in creative writing, with a focus on poetry, from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Eliot’s poems and translations have appeared in Jacket2, Meridian, California Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Solstice, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Arts Fuse, and elsewhere. He travels and performs throughout the United States and Europe. He has taught literature and writing at UMass Amherst, and taught music as a postgraduate mentor at the Copenhagen Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Denmark. He works as a bookseller at Amherst Books, while managing his editorial responsibilities for The Bodily Press.