Notes from a Small Publisher – Briony Collins, Atomic Bohemian

 

 

 

 

Atomic Bohemian is a publishing house and daughter of its parent project Cape Magazine. I started Cape with a friend in our second year of university to rebel against the (many) rejections we were facing from other publishers at the time. We wondered if we could remedy our rejection blues not by trying to take up more space, but by offering our space to others: healing through giving. Cape was designed to take in other misfits of the publishing landscape and offer them a space around our campfire, giving them some brief warmth in what can be a cold industry. This makes us sound quite cool but, truthfully, we were a couple of disgruntled twenty-somethings with a bone to pick with The Man (who had no idea who we were, nor did he care). Eventually, we escalated our mission from an online ‘zine into the world of books, and thus, Atomic Bohemian was born.

Though we began what we lovingly nicknamed “AtBo” together, I was soon flying solo, and I have been running it for the past nine months.  I have published six books from writers around the world at the time of writing this, with three more on the way. In a short time, the AtBo family has grown into a small but mighty band of writers and readers, and our books have reached poetry open mics in Australia, book shops in Singapore, and have been up and down all parts of the UK, USA, and Europe. Clearly I was mistaken in my angsty Cape-days, and I am not the misfit I thought I was, as I have had no trouble finding a merry troupe of fellow artists with whom I've created fabulous (if I do say so myself) books.

I think about Toni Morrison's famous line a lot: 'if there is a book that you want to read, but it doesn't exist yet, then you must write it'. The same can be said for publishing. If you crave a space where you feel at home but haven't quite found it yet, then you can (and should!) create it. This is why I try my best to lead AtBo using three core values that matter to me: Authenticity, Accessibility, and Kindness. These are nothing new, of course, but everything I choose to do with AtBo comes back to them. Through Authenticity, I am asking for writing that reveals something about its writer. There is no need for grand proclamations, sweeping revelations, or rushed generalisations with me. Anyone can write about the world, but no one can write about you as well as YOU can. This does not work without Accessibility, which is an ongoing objective of mine. I am still learning how to widen my arms to embrace as many people as I can, but learn I will! If AtBo – and I – am not accessible, I cannot ask people to be authentic. This leads to me the final value, because Authenticity and Accessibility are impossible without Kindness. I am a strong believer in paying it forward. It is the reason why Cape and AtBo exist at all; two people wanted to see what would happen if they made room for others instead of themselves.

Ultimately, AtBo is run by a human on too much caffeine with too little time. I am currently working two jobs and doing a PhD full-time. Everything about AtBo is done for the love of publishing and appreciation of writers, and nothing else. I have made more mistakes than money, but AtBo has opened my world. It could not be done without the occasional editing help of Will Wren, nor my first line-up of writers. I choose to end with thanks to them: Tracee Findlater, Fliss Cary, Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad, Cath Barton, Daryl Li, JP Seabright, David Hay, Paul Truan, Paul atten Ash, and Sam Dapanas.

 

 

 

Briony Collins is an award-winning writer and publisher. She has three books with Broken Sleep – Blame it on Me, All That Glisters, and The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees – and Whisper Network (Bangor University) and cactus land (Atomic Bohemian). In 2025, her debut novel and two poetry books are forthcoming.

Kevin Spenst : Whatever Heals You

 

 

“The paradox inherent in travel, the response system, the gall, the privilege, the gifts, the assaults and accounting.” — Tawhida Tanya Evanson

Midnight Arrival

I’m writing this in Seattle, Washington, in the home of strangers, a young couple I’ve never met. They are in New York, staying in the home of other strangers. Last night, Cheryl and I arrived in Seattle just after midnight. We went to a hotel where we showed a number to the front desk and they gave us a backpack. In it was a fob, clicker and keys in the side pocket. This was the arrangement. We drove the final five blocks and used the clicker to open the parking garage gate and then we used the fob to get into the building (though at first we weren’t sure which entrance to use in the large underground parking) and then we used the same fob to get into the apartment where we are staying for a week. I feel like I’m part of some espionage operation though I don’t think Cheryl and I could pass for Nitin and Shivani and I have no idea what my instructions are. I mean I know I have to write and I’ve brought three books of poetry from Canada with lines that I’ve written out to pass along to strangers. At the end of the week, we have a two-day music festival to go to and so before then, I’m going to try to make myself feel less of a tourist by sharing lines of poetry from Patrick Grace, DS Stymeist and Jess Housty.

Day 1: Lune Cafe || Deviant

I have the best memory

of what it means

to be gay

at the end

of summer.

We’ve arrived by city bus to Pioneer Square and I couldn’t feel like more of a tourist. There are groups of tourists galore on most every street corner being led by loud guides. We’re hungry so we’ve ducked into Lune Cafe, where we order from a touchscreen which has pictures of all our options. At the end, there’s an option for tipping, but I’m not sure who this would be for. There is no contact with anyone working here. I sit and write beneath a wall of astroturf suggesting something green. In neon are the words: glowww (with three w’s.) The word is on other walls in the phrase ‘let’s glow!’

     Words matter but it’s also the person (or voice) behind the words that’s even a bigger part of what matters. In Patrick Grace’s first book of poetry Deviant, a loose narrative is set up from the first page, where

It began in a field where two boys

played in a circle of melting snow.

In this opening poem “Why Not,” an almost pastoral setting is created in an alliteration of “finches and foxes” “while the rest of the world / pressed buttons and touched screens.” Moving forward in couplets, the poem presents two boys throwing a baseball that they’ve found. One of them hurtles it at the other’s ribs for no particular reason. This escalates to the ball being thrown back within packed snow at the other’s face. The pastoral descends into a singular emotion: “boys learn the edges // of what they hold in their hands // when angered.” The pastoral opening (“creeping phlox flourished”) has been replaced by something cold and hard.

    This mix of longing for something lovely and someone beloved with violence seems to be the central tension of the book. The way through is in finding the right words. “Dasterdly” is the second poem in the collection, one which begins with the speaker learning the word from his mother in describing a “devilish boy in red shorts” and the speaker’s uncertain stirrings of desire. By the end of the first section, this mix is blended in the last stanza of a poem about

learning to taste

 

another boys’ spit and dreaming

it could be warm, secreted

special, just for my mouth.

This poem “Nightcall” is one of my favourites in the collection. The geography is the most precise (“wandering up the hill from Kits Beach”) and the language play is at its loveliest (“banana-scented sunscreen sheen.”) There’s even a word made up for the occasion of the poem: Blundersight, which seems to be a portmanteau of blunder and blindsighted. It’s as if the tension between beauty and the ugliness of violence forces a new language into being.

     The titular deviance of Grace’s collection mixes throughout the rest of the book in poems written in mostly couplets, tercets, quatrains or just single long stanzas. In a more varied stanzaic form, “A Violence” circles around an inquiry into an incident of domestic violence, with the speaker asking: “did they believe you / did the man in blue believe / another man / committed the violence.” This section (there are five in total, like fingers in a fist?) goes on to explore this toxic relationship. Fear, nightmares and the distancing language and cold, biassed word choices from those who are supposed to serve and protect dominate this section. 

    What heals someone after a lifetime of minor and major traumatic encounters? This books suggests language that reenvisions a life. The last section has four poems, the first one beginning:

At first the world was body.

I didn’t question the gold

hardening its rivers inside me.

The last poem recalls the image of a gap, a hole, a tunnel that has run throughout the book as a place of solace and the poem ends on greenness and brightness:

In the parking lot the older kids killed it

with their stories, their names, their viridity.

 

Miles away, a boy dove into a river of gold,

his body flexuous, extend under the sun.

Perhaps, I’m being overly optimistic in my reading. There is some ambiguity throughout the book, which may reflect the speaker’s coming to terms with who he is (ambiguity as a stand in for ambivalence?) What I love about the collection as a whole is the reworking of images and lines. One of the poems near the very end seems to be written from lines found throughout the collection. The obsession that drives any writer in trying to understand something is on full luminous (and ‘burning’) display.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.