Han: Hello from Durham, NC, where the maples have turned a brilliant red and the oaks gold, and we are still enjoying a long, Southern fall, and I have yet to take down all our Halloween decorations.
Here’s our short press description: “Inspired by the idea that you cannot step in the same river twice, at River River Books, two poetry editors join together to publish (at least) two exceptional poetry titles a year.”
Amorak: Greetings, too, from Michigan, where two feet of snow have already come and melted away, and there’s more in the forecast for this week.
What are we doing? What are we excited about? Well, we’re figuring out what we’re doing — learning as we go. There are so many details in running a press, even a tiny one like ours. There’s always a new technology, a new detail, a new expense. As for excited, we are excited about the poetry community, about adding to the conversation. It’s a glorious time for poetry — so many poets, so many venues publishing them, making poems more accessible than ever. We are thrilled to be even a small part of that.
Han: I love our press name—that poetic doubling of river that evokes both place and local geography as well as a metaphor for co-editorship. Something that made me laugh was the thought that we should have named our press LEMONADE BOOKS—we have each encountered our share of lemon-like experiences in the publishing world. So while I’m going to frame the following shared motivations as positives, I also want to acknowledge that hearty complaint can inspire us to create something new and depart, potentially, from the status quo:
We want to get poetry titles into the hands of readers. Examples: We commit to showing up at major writing conferences and tabling books, distributing through Small Press Distribution, selling through our website riverriverbooks.org, placing review copies with intentionality.
We want our authors to feel and BE supported by their press, from editing to blurb to readings.
We want to make beautiful books, inside and out. Design is exceptionally important to both of us.
Amorak: It’s so hard, writing poems and sending them into the world in hopes that someone reads them, connects with them, finds beauty in them. Our driving motivation is to make sure that the poets we publish have that experience — to make sure they know their work is finding readers.
Han: We are so excited about our Summer 2023 and Spring 2024 titles. The sheer range and skill of these poets, whose books we selected through our first summer open reading period (tip optional), LIFTS us! Formally these titles are brilliant, but we also think they are each ethically brilliant, considering climate crises, gun violence, southern inequity and discrimination, religion, immigration, American work and class, all while making great art. Poets are some of the most incredible cultural historians we have, and each of these poets does this work with grace and attention and love.
The titles are:
An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp (06/23)
Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland (06/23)
Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman (01/24)
A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira (01/24)
Amorak: These four books are so, so good. Brilliant. Like, I can’t believe how good they are. It’s an honor to be part of shepherding them into the world. I had unrealistically high hopes for the quality of work we’d be publishing, and these four books just totally exceed even those lofty dreams. We were really moved by how many poets sent us their manuscripts during our open reading period in June and July. I mean, more than 250 manuscripts for a two-editor press that had never published a thing. It felt like such an act of trust on their part, and a responsibility to treat the collections with respect and care. It also speaks to the need for the work we’re doing — the number of poets out there putting their hearts into language and hoping someone reads it.
Han: We shared our model contract online at our website (riverriverbooks.org) before opening to submissions this past summer, and I think that set the tone for our submission period, and offered a material example of how we want to work as a press. We both value transparency and communication at the very top, and working with Amorak reminds me of that quote about how friends stand side by side, looking in the same direction. Mutual endeavor is a joy, is soul-food. It is wonderful to make something with another person—to invest in a project you both believe in, to share work with someone who just BRINGS it in terms of energy and talent and experience. It feels like an essential part of living a good life: to collaborate with sympathetic humans.
Amorak: Yes, ditto that for working with Han. Collaboration and community are at the heart of this work for both of us. It’s a gift, to share this vision and this work with someone.
Han: Lastly, I’ll add that we didn’t intend to choose four books by women poets, or to select three debut collections—we didn’t define parameters for our selections as such. We did know we did not want to publish all white authors, and that our catalog should reflect the great range of voices in our writing communities. From the visual art of Agnès Martin (Lauren Camp), to fados of the Ironbound (Carla Sofia Ferreira), to the intimate ecologies of the Jewish American South (Rachel Edelman), and a book-length lyric of law and gendered violence (Jennifer A Sutherland), we are excited for River River Books readers to have the tops of their heads taken off, to quote Emily Dickinson, as we have by these poets and their collections.
Han VanderHart is a genderqueer, Southern writer living in Durham, North Carolina, under the loblolly pines. Han and is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry podcast and edits Moist Poetry Journal as well as reviews at EcoTheo Review. Their aim is to live, edit and write with transparency, care, and warmth. They love rescue pitbulls.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His previous books are Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks. He is recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems appear in the Best American Poetry anthology, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, the Norton Critical Edition of The Odyssey, and many print and online journals.