Taylor Zhang : on Choo Choo Press

 

 

Choo Choo Press first began as a collaboration between me and the painter and designer, Emily Bluedorn. Emily and I had been circling the project for years, having started a (secret) poetry blog in college with our mutual friend, Katya Lopatko, where we posted all of our most heartbroken, melodramatic poems under Italian pen names. The blog, which was called Les Filles Perdues, ran for two years until our graduation. Soon after, Emily and I separately started experimenting with book arts: I made several artist’s books (a pill bottle, a symptom diary, a physically edited novel), while Emily experimented with various printing methods. Around this time, we started chatting about a potential zine collaboration that we could print at Parsons, where Emily had free student access to the Risograph machine.

This first project, Chantilly, which traces the origins of our friendship, took over four hours to print. We burned through several masters and stayed an hour after the print lab closed. In the end, we left with only one miniature copy, which we passed back and forth whenever we saw one another. A few weeks after our first attempt, we tried again, and this time, we were able to wrestle fifty copies from the machine. To support our first drop, Emily coded a simple website, using varying shades of bright pink, a tribute to the fluorescent ink we used in Chantilly. While she coded, I packed orders on the living room floor, stuffing each zine into a cellophane envelope that I then sealed with a train-themed sticker. Those first few weeks flew by, and when I think back to our start, I think about us working on the floor of Emily’s apartment until late into the night, full of hope.

Looking back, all of these choices—about paper, ink color, packaging—would ground us for years to come. We didn’t realize it at the time, but when we decided to make this first zine, we were making a larger argument about the function of our press, and more broadly, about the nature of books. We wanted an outlet that could show that diaries, journal projects, and other personal ephemera could be read closely, intimately, as seriously as mainstream literature. We also understood that their form was an integral part of the reading experience, that an embodied, physical reading experience was worth preserving. All of our projects that have followed, including our poetry chapbooks, feature a handmade element in line with this first impulse to honor the book as an object. In the intervening years, the press has grown, though the vision—of imaginative collaboration, of thematic and physical possibility—remains.

As we open for submission for another year of projects, we’ve been reflecting on the past five years. Since our start, we’ve worked with extraordinary artists, learned from other independent publishers, and made some great friends. Of course, we’ve also had lows: the stray accident with a paper cutter, the countless hours of production, the endless logistics of distribution. But with any artistic venture, doubt and exhaustion can exist in the same breath as intimacy, community, and creation, and we’re grateful for all that the journey has brought. And we’ll end by saying that every launch holds the magic of our first: a surreal feeling that an idea once in our heads is now a tangible, precious thing.

Choo Choo Press is now open for submissions. We are seeking original manuscripts of poetry and nonfiction, as well as thoughtful pitches for artists' books for 2027 publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taylor Zhang is an educator, writer, and the co-founder of Choo Choo Press, a non-profit publishing project. Her own work can be found in The Massachusetts Review, The Cortland Review, and The Vassar Review, among other outlets. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, she now lives and works in Berlin.

Emily Bluedorn is a visual designer and painter based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, for which she wrote her thesis Never Real Historians. Currently, she works as a designer for Princeton University Press, co-publishes at Choo Choo Press, and maintains an independent art-making practice.

Renato Gandia : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Perhaps a poem begins when the past stops agreeing with what we remember about it.

Most of my poems begin there: with a memory, an encounter, something I witnessed, something I didn’t fully understand when it happened, or something I have not completely accepted or made peace with. I return to it years later and discover that what I remember and what I now understand are not necessarily the same thing.

I have learned not to ask too quickly what it means.

Perhaps this is because I spent years working in journalism and communications, where language is expected to tell you what it means. Clarity matters. You answer the questions a reader is likely to have and try not to leave too much room for misunderstanding.

Poetry asks something different of me. A poem often begins precisely where my ability to explain something ends.

I grew up with other kinds of language, too. Before journalism, there was the language of the Catholic Church. I spent thirteen years in priestly formation, where words were repeated until they became ritual: prayers, responses, scripture, the language of consecration. Long before I understood repetition as a poetic device, I understood its power as prayer.

And before all of these, there was Tagalog.

I write primarily in English now, but I don’t think I write only from English. Somewhere underneath a poem are the languages that formed me. Sometimes a Tagalog word enters because English cannot do what I need it to do. Sometimes English itself feels slightly strange in my mouth, and I have come to think that strangeness can be useful.

I saw these impulses come together while writing Eating Rice, On Our Feet, my first poetry collection. Many of its poems grew from experiences I had carried for years without fully reckoning with them.

As a journalist in Edmonton and Calgary, I reported on temporary foreign workers living in crowded houses, sometimes thirteen people sharing four bedrooms. I understood the conditions as a reporter: overcrowding, health and safety, the precarious circumstances of migrant workers. But I also came from the Philippines, where several generations and extended family sharing a home can be perfectly acceptable. Years later, when my own brother came to Canada and experienced similar living conditions, what I had once encountered as someone else’s story became painfully close to my own.

That contradiction stayed with me.

This is often where a poem begins for me: not because I have resolved a contradiction, but because I haven’t. Poetry gives me somewhere to put two things that appear unable to occupy the same space and ask them to remain there together.

This may be why ordinary things recur throughout Eating Rice, On Our Feet: rice, pots, spoons, hands, mouths, meals. They are attached to experiences, and those experiences change when examined. Rice can become hunger, migration or the wish to belong. Cooking can be labour and love at once. Feeding someone can be tenderness, obligation, survival, even resistance.

I am less interested in deciding beforehand what these images mean than in discovering what happens when I stay with them. If I already know exactly what the rice means, I probably have an essay, not yet a poem.

The poem has to surprise me.

For a long time, I thought revision meant making a poem clearer. I still value clarity, but I am learning that revision can also mean allowing a poem to remain unresolved. Sometimes the stronger choice is not another explanation but an image. Not another sentence but a break. Not another word but white space.

Perhaps this is also what makes a good poem for me. I want it to risk something. I want to encounter something I recognize and then discover that I have never quite seen it that way.

Maybe a good poem does not reconcile us with the past. Maybe it does something more difficult: it asks us to return to what we thought we knew and remain there long enough for certainty to give way.

The experiences that begin my poems are often ones I have carried for years. I used to think I returned to them because I wanted to understand them.

Now I think I return because they are still capable of changing me.

And perhaps that is where the next poem begins.

 

 

 

 

 

Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores migration, memory, faith belonging, and queer identity. He is the winner of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry presented by Writers’ Trust of Canada, and his work has appeared in literary publications and anthologies in Canada and abroad. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice, On Our Feet (Frontenac House, 2027) and memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books, 2027). He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and acquisitions editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds. He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again.

David Herd : Die Wintereisse

 

i

When it snows in the woods
And I am there
To witness
The ice
As I am privileged to watch it
Seal the pond
Soft
Against the grass
Outlining leafless branches
Voice
If I might still say voicing
Winter song 

Die Winterreisse
In a tone that was both gentle
And intended
To carry
The sound of snowflakes
As they fall against the world
Soft
Into the night
I witness a thrush calling
Repeating and repeating
This not
Light. 

 

ii.

It is seven and the stars
All of the stars are shining 

No cloud to speak of
As the world wakes. 

No clouds only patterns
Instruments of light 

Before we speak or
As day breaks. 

Before all the singing
It is the song of the stars 

Each of them open
To a human voice 

I would have said watching
Even while the snow melts 

Not yet quite gone
Present tense.

 

iii.

We feel now
The future in the instant
There are two of us and we are
Walking this winter lane
Like we haven’t seen
In who knows how long we remember
The land laid out
Only words remain. 

We don’t pray but
Across the valley
We hear the call to prayer
The need at least as it is spoken
To observe the hours
Vigil to mark the day
And as the light comes matins
Yellow against the gorse
As snow stays 

As we watch each step
Zwischen den Jahren
Where the quietness is a promise
On the world’s terms
Who walk
Listening we think
To the year’s silence
This most complex of emotions
Darkness
Turns.

  

iv.

And while you draw
I put words to things
Like I might offer
Or as if I would only name them
These things would stay
Like rhyme
Might hold you in place
Or as if a sound
Was a charm
Held over towards a future
Before the ice
Breaks 

Like that painting by Camille Pissarro
The Banks of the Marne in Winter
Not picturesque
People walking beside a line of trees
The scale held down
Uninterrupted by any majestic elements
Like a draughtsman
In the landscape
Delineating human intervals 

A couple of people
Making their way
Pictured in the act of composition
And the painting doesn’t tell us
But there might be snow 

Just not yet
Only buildings as a principle of arrangement
Likened to one another
As echoes
Hold.

 

 

 

 

David Herd [photo credit: Sarah Hickson] is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His most recent collection, Walk Song (2022), was a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review and his forthcoming collection, As If It Was Possible This Morning, will be published by Shearsman later this year. He has given readings in Europe, North America, India and Australia, and has held fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University and the Writing Center, Gloucester, Massachusetts. His critical history, Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-war World: Making Space for the Human was shortlisted for the 2024 MSA Book Prize. He is Professor of Literature and Human Rights at the University of St Andrews and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales.