Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Sarah Jean Grimm and Eric Amling : on After Hours Editions

 

 

 

After Hours began in 2016 as a limited edition press, publishing eight chapbooks in a strikingly marbleized series that included work from Elaine Kahn, L.A. Warman, Sam Riviere, Aurelia Guo, and Galina Rymbu, among others. The short form ephemera acts like a Trojan horse; it’s a digestible format and an intimate introduction to a poet’s work. Nearly all of the chapbooks have since sold out, many to readers from around the world.

In 2020, we were able to expand our capacities to publish full-length collections. Our mission was to strike a balance between poignant literary craft and reckless art. We found that in our first four books: Emily Brandt’s Falsehood, a searing study of gender and power in suburbia; JoAnna Novak’s Abeyance, North America, an erotic travelogue mapping desire across landscape; Lawrence Giffin’s Untitled, 2004, a meditative, epistolary, and ekphrastic long poem about birth, death, art, culture, and the works of the late Agnes Martin; and Galina Rymbu’s Life in Space, a co-production with Ugly Duckling Presse that brings our former chapbook author’s full-length debut to English, and which vibrates with some of the most powerful political writing happening anywhere today.

Under the After Hours umbrella, we also started a reading series called Bank Holiday, so named for the surreal setting of an abandoned bank in Catskill, NY. We held two events before the pandemic, but it’s something we look forward to revitalizing in the future. By the time we can pack an indoor setting again, maybe we’ll have a long list of After Hours authors to host.

Our ambition for the press is to publish 2-4 books a year, and for those books to be both surprising and seductive. The design of our books is an important element of that equation; instead of glossy stock photography, we want the covers to be windows into the work, and to be worthy of the work. We’re also committed to publishing at least one translation each year, adding our drop to the bucket of the American literary landscape, where only 3% of books published are translations.

Most poetry presses are labors of love like ours. We’re doing what we can outside the bounds of our day-to-day lives. That’s the ethos of After Hours, in a nutshell: we are the midnight oil, when you move from one desk to another. A pleasure pursuit with better lighting.

 

 

 

Eric Amling is the author of From the Author's Private Collection (Birds, LLC 2015) and co-editor of After Hours Editions.

Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017), a founding editor of Powder Keg Magazine, and co-editor of After Hours Editions. She lives in New York and works as a publicist at Catapult, Soft Skull, & Counterpoint Press.