Freddy Hyun Smith : on High Marsh Press

 

 

 

 

Wax. Centre out, top in, bottom out, centre in. Tie, cut. This is the method of book binding I’ve been using on Kate Kennedy’s Ledges, the 2023 Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest winner. My job isn’t to be a reviewer or critic but Ledges is a good chapbook. 

I’ve been binding these books because I am interning as the Publishing Assistant at High Marsh Press, which means a lot of things. As I mentioned, I’ve been binding books. I’ve also been answering/sending emails, writing thank-you notes, mailing out orders, speaking to local book shops, and managing social media. I’ve been avoiding licking envelopes (water seems to work fine). One time I tabled at a zine fair. I didn’t think to bring a tablecloth which garnered me some gentle ribbing from my fellow zine sellers, but people seemed to enjoy seeing my live book binding demonstration. Even if it was on a naked table.  

The degree of freedom I’ve had in the internship has been awkward to navigate at times. I worry about posting irrelevant things to the instagram account, and about not posting enough. I sometimes find myself bracing to be scolded before meetings with my supervisors, and perhaps I should be (I’m not the best at writing emails). 

Geordie Miller and Keagan Hawthorne are my supervisors. Both are new fathers, which means a lot of things. Morning meetings have guest appearances—smaller people who can only speak in poetry (“more puffin / new, new book. duck / quack. what’s that / what’s that. quack.”). Toys and granola bars populate surfaces below knee-height. Phone calls can be made without a phone line, and the other end of the line always seems to hang up whenever I come on the line. Meetings are liable to be called short or pushed back. Time is a precious thing when you are a parent, it seems. I guess my professional development is sometimes secondary to the development of a young child. Go figure. I was instructed by Geordie and Keagan to disparage them in this write-up, and this is probably as close as I can get to that. 

“notes from a small publisher”. I think that was the prompt I was answering. I have trouble staying on track sometimes. Book binding is good for that. The thread holds things together. One of the beautiful aspects of Kate Kennedy’s chapbook is its fascination with objects — though High Marsh Press defines its presence mostly online, I would describe my internship in a similar way. The letterpress in Keagan’s home is an enchanting and mythical creature. 14 pt type feels much smaller when you are handling it in person than on a computer screen. Seeing a poem backwards and composed of hundreds of carefully arranged tiny metal pieces has given me a new appreciation of the words and letters I use. Leading refers to actual pieces of lead, not the verb you might use to describe a rider walking their horse. I remember the rundown Keagan gave me the first time I “dissed” type (distributed type that had been arranged into a poem back into the proper case). The phrase “out of sorts” comes from printing. The drawers you distribute in are called “cases” like lowercase and uppercase (don’t call them drawers, some people get persnickety about it). The indent on the bottom of the type is called the “nick”. Be careful not to get d’s and b’s, q’s and p’s, u’s and n’s, I’s and l’s mixed up. . .

One of the things I have been guided to do is write short handwritten “thank you” notes to go in the envelopes alongside sold copies of Ledges. I don’t have extraordinary penmanship, but I get out my nicest pen and try to have a nice moment with it. I do think the chapbook is a beautiful object. I’ve always been drawn to books (truth be told this opportunity has been a dream come true), and a locally made, hand-crafted one just feels special. It has convinced me of the value of creating with care. 

I should have finished writing this ages ago, and I fear I may start waxing poetic. Or sentimental. I think I’ll wrap it up there. Tie, cut.

 

 

 

 

Freddy Hyun Smith is a Kind Heart Award winning poet, performer, and student at Mount Allison University, where he is an Editor-in-Chief at 7 Mondays. He also co-edits Skeleton Beetle and wears waterproof shoes, just in case. His accolades include the 2024 Poets of Tantramar Contest (awarded the MTA category), and the George School Children’s Center Kind Heart Award (2003). 

Thom Eichelberger-Young : Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets, eds. Omar Berrada, Sarah Riggs

Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets, eds. Omar Berrada, Sarah Riggs
Litmus Press, 2024

 

 

 

What would we learn from the cats / the one on the back of the chair—eyes toward the structures on the other side of the window / all day observation—suburban fauna: squirrel, rabbit, birds, and free selves—transmit back (awareness) chattering / is a radio frequency, draws in [other] / The free selves are blamed for ecological devastation especially towards avian communities, but also towards smaller land mammals (rabbits, squirrels). Would this cat, always inside, express that they harbor fantasies towards ecological devastation? Another cat does not chatter, shares the chair, but looks inside / licks its self / Which one is the “free self” because here—ideation—even debate surrounds companion animal which has, after all, been domesticated / Domestication is a sure sign of human dominion / So, we wager to keep them off the streets, while wondering the alternative—there are millions of cats in animal shelters annually, and many of them are euthanized. We offset euthanasia, locate it within another occupation, not perceiving it as a solution. The suggestion is not a mass-culling, but to question how many “we really need” or “how many there need to be.” We play gods as the issue complicates—seeking a way out of the burden of our profligate spreading of companion species (especially abandoned dogs and cats), along the same lines as advocating for wider spread, say, plant-based diets—the background involves, somehow, mass-culling of a population that does exist, while the argument is in tandem proffered conceptually or theoretically, to avoid “touching upon” the dreadful subject underlying. At the same time, the contemporary solution is not mere euthanasia, but also the castration and spaying of male and female stray or wild dogs and cats. Trap Neuter Release encourages an abandonment of the animal after the alteration (read human intervention) of the animals sex organs, removing critical hormones contributing to the lived life of the animal, and, likely depriving them of immersion as fully within their instinctual perceptions. Moving away from mass-culling, towards the “optimal” strategy, is a static transition, completing only a circuit. The reality of the procedure of domestication—which is neither contemporary nor historical, but ongoing or braided with human behavior towards a society—is paradoxical. The only way out is also affirmational of our ideological and cultural valuation in the Anthropocene of human dominion. To maintain or solve our problem, we must deem it “a problem” (which we have done already through controversy and debate and profligation of animal welfare groups for many centuries with minimal impact) requiring human intervention to resolve. We are entrenched in it—being the problem, not the object—born not only from our actions but our clarifications and definitions of them (defenses and rejections) through language (distancing).

—

I now spend my nights listening to the cries of cats gathered outside the gate. Theirs is a lost call; lamented by no one, drowned out by the last of the cars. ^[1] / Cats appear with semi-frequency in about 40% of the authors’ works in the recent Litmus Press publication Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets. The editors explicitly state This is not an anthology. It is a collection of murmured experiments, a room brimming with echoes. ^[2] / Cats are not the only animal, but they appeared often throughout the first half. / It is hard not to see connections and differences within this book—connection here feeling more the purpose or result of an encounter. When writers are grouped into anthologies, the goal is rarely to create great confusion, discord, or disagreement (though we know that many anthologies do offend the sensibilities of various readers, revealing issues with either the anthology or the reader) / Cats were one such connection, scaffolded through the early encounter with the cat in the first poem proper in the book. / Turn the page / Glance across the spread / You always make the mistake to think a glance is an action—an exertion / Aya Habih’s work here moves from the cat in “CITY ONE” to fish in “CITY TWO: BEACH” / Free Zone. Fishing Port. Photography is Forbidden. Disposal of Waste is Forbidden. And so is Fishing./ Small silver fish are observed being washed onto the shore on their last journey, which ended on a beach rock carved with graves the same size as the fish. It is as if their graves were molded synchronously with the cementation of the rock. ^[3] In this strange city, entered into, location of observation, the speaker relocates themselves from the ‘place of comfort’ situated within “CITY ONE” (hinged by “AIRPORT”), abstracting (possibly via censorship? Look at Rachida Madani’s “Author’s Note” where she describes how abstraction is required in order to avoid state censorship in her poetry—censorship rules! ^[4]) a political sensation into an ecological metaphor. The fish could and can readily be the doomed bodies of the proletarian subjects, underneath the State force of war, invasion, colonization, and capital accrual. On this beach, then, where so much is forbidden, while so much is also a potential, the movement together of the forces of nature (sedimentation, erosion) where they meet the residents of nature (the fish), the realities of our own lives are seen in focus—we are filled with so many desires that we are incapable of fulfilling. This morning, I read a blog post by Farah Rose Smith, which echoes many sentiments that are shared—not only now, but across traumatic situations (especially those taking place outside of our quotidian centers/sites of experience, where we, removed from positions of power and control, can only watch/observe/witness): How can anyone go about their days as usual… work, school, what else?... amid the images of dead children, limp, bloody, blue and green, eyes bloodshot to the point of flesh bursting around the irises?^[5] continuing a few sentences later How can I have so much and the women of Palestine so little? This is a question many around me are unwilling to address—not with Gaza, not with transgender bodies, not with police brutality (especially towards black and indigenous bodies). It is for this reason the image operates differently, because it is mediated, received, and understood differently by different viewers. The image, further, is not universal. The image we see is not the coffins and memes and cartoons that the Christian Trump Voter sees on their Facebook feed. These are all known things. They have little to do with cats, though they reflect the experiences of some readers encountering what many would quickly or offhandedly call an anthology. The aversion to the term is a challenge to readers of Another Room to Live In, especially within constant contemporary contexts we have been born under (myself, considering the decades of direct US involvement in Gulf Wars started just a few years before my birth, and has continued since then throughout my entire life) which seek to other and eradicate the Arab world, and its diaspora. Much of the resistance, to, comes through the ways in which the authors in this volume are distanced from “traditional Arab verse culture” (connections and disconnections of such being addressed readily by both authors and translators), and by the intense connection of the authors at hand—it is appropriate to avoid the term anthology when the title includes contemporary Arab poets for, while the latter is a correct and accurate term, most all of this work was produced through the TAMAAS translation seminar, and the book is more a documentation of that site than the wider Arabic diaspora, in the sense of where it was sourced from and how it was produced (no writer not included in the TAMAAS seminar is in this volume).

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It was yesterday when I read the majority of the poetry that included cats and kittens. It was this morning that I watched the cats on the chair chatter towards the birds outside / I know what they would do / I do not want such gifts / Therein lies another advancement of the conundrum with which we started—and perhaps I am wrong to extrapolate it out into a wider society of the United States, though I do because of the near corner store nature of humane societies and animal shelters in this country / I imitate the cats of this house. ^[6] seems an appropriate thought process to encounter when coming off the moral qualms of paying taxes. While we are low income and thus don’t send in a check or credit card payment to the IRS, we do still pay a small fee to them when checking out after submitting the electronic filing (two state returns, as you worked in the state adjacent to your own, and a federal return). You think about how you are grateful an estate document did not arrive before the filing deadline—to be put off for next year—and that you were finally able to access a W-2 so that you were neither audited nor required to submit a late filing. It is this thought process that is interrupted by the cessation of rain, which has been persistent of late (leaking through the ceiling on the first floor, damaging the chairs, sending us up at night to dump out the bowls of water catching below in pots and pans—the next day cleaning them and replacing them with whatever spare containers we have; still, there will be damage). When I pay taxes, I support the violence my State perpetuates on other bodies. When I vote—if I vote—I endorse the violence my State perpetuates on other bodies. My cats want to kill, instinctually, the other. Am I different, not wanting to kill, but not doing enough to stop the killing where I can (futile actions not so futile—Aaron Bushnell self-immolation forgotten already by the newscycle to be commemorated by new publication by FT through GENDERFAIL—what matters is who remembers) from the cat? In the journal entry from this morning, Farah had indicated that she held onto the belief for so long, the desire, that the world is born good. My husband is reading a book wondering over how good people can hold such ideologically apposite beliefs—I wonder that good/bad dichotomy is not only impossibly paradoxical, but derived from definitions outside our actual behaviors and desires, but underneath the lives impressed upon us by our various State bodies—such that I return to the question Juliana Spahr asked about why people were suicide bombers, what do they believe? In that I need stimulation, I am imitating the cat in a procedural similarity akin to domestication—where the State, through the corporate arm of (social) media has altered the thought processes and behaviors (as the cat with the window as barrier) that formulate my and others perceptions. Farah’s questions over the meaning or value of a diploma, occupation, a purpose here in this site versus the deprivation there (in Gaza) is another marker of the situation at hand—the recognition (by some of us) of actions of potential energy, which do have impacts, even if they are disregarded (loudly) by powerful others. The cats persist in their hunting desire for their prey—the birds. Beyond the hunting mechanism at play, the persistence of desire is the instinct which has not been abandoned in the animal body and psyche. It is this that I imitate.

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I took too long to interpret them/so the dreams stopped coming.//One that lingers is of the two/stray kittens, forgotten without food. ^[7] Sara Elkamel writes between Cairo and Egypt, but here, she talks, as Nabih does, of cats in Cairo—with many of us recalling the historical significance the cat held within Egyptian culture across time, perhaps nostalgically, perhaps fetishistically. Millions of stray cats and dogs live on the streets of Cairo, leaving some compassionate lovers of companion species wary of visiting the society. The “humane society” and “shelter” clung to by some as a resource of salvation for the downtrodden companion species (it is not—more so an animal orphanage masquerading as an ethical organization) is not as readily popular or common in other countries, save those who have adopted similar “concerns” towards companion-animals that are held by animal rights advocates in the West. These forgotten strays appear in Nabih’s poem, as well—drowned out by cars. The ecopoetical praxis is a perspective, an eye to what is ignored and forgotten. The cat in these poems is subjected to the whims of our urban societies, another emblem of the ways humans have enforced a sense of dominion over non-humans. Within the city, the animal, not specifically the cat (though some, like rats, have adapted) is generally deprived of the resource network (ecological) it requires in order to survive. It is forced to live on scraps, to hunt for rodents and other small animals which similarly thrive on human scraps. Some animals thrive on human kindness—which is often registered by people who share such eyes as these two poets. Elkamel writes in another poem, “August,” that she kissed the abscess on the kitten’s lips. ^[8] Those of us who do not witness, those of us who vote, who echo the State views, who endorse them and go about our daily lives ignorant of others suffering, appear synthesized in another work, curiously absenting specific animal species, by Safaa Fathy: Animals sit on fours/waiting for the verdict ^[9] Taking place within a city, and dislocating (shrugging off) the sensation of a lyric “I” as speaking subject, the poem in question abstracts the political and sociological situations amidst flux and revolution in an unspecific—though Arab—city. The animal could be human or non-human, regardless. The situation revealed exacerbates our awarenesses of how we live a “domesticated” life. Consider, too, the trappings of a domestic life within the West—what is called, how it is advertised and propagandized. It is something to aspire to—a stable space defined by others (often those in power or with access to it)—while decrying or despising what one does have. The domestic life is a trap—an enslavement—oriented at capital and exploitation of the subject (us—the polis) as a commodity or source of revenue. Such is the domestic of domestication.

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For dogs, it is easier. At least, linguistically and perceptually (in some spaces). There are over 10 million stray dogs reported in Cairo, with as many as 60 million estimated. The human population of the city is around 9.5 million—leaving the possibility that there are nearly 6 dogs to every citizen in this city. In my experience, in the United States of America, having had a cat near my side since I was born—I have always understood that dogs are granted the ready idea of a personality, a desire to communicate and give and participate, while cats are deprived a personality, labeled as more aloof and sensitive. Certainly, some cats have been granted their own personalities, and there is the musical Cats. But, dogs hold the imagination differently. Dogs do appear in Another Room to Live In, but rarely as strays (though an interesting poem involves a letter to a disappeared individual using a childhood memory of watching a dog attempt to clean a wound first by licking, then by gnawing or eating the infected area). Such suggests the wider differentiation between cats and dogs in perception. From there, too, is to say that neither species has a globalized accepted discreet population of personality—instead, we ascribe group identity to these species, labeling them universally: they are allowed one identity, one personality, one behavior, or else they are an outlier—a curiosity. It interested me that most of the poems in the volume which dealt with cats were written by women, while one of the most prominent references to dogs occurred in a poem by a man (translated by Pierre Joris) which navigates the historical legacy of Ulysses: Homer will say that nobody recognized him, except the old dog. But dogs don’t live long enough to recognize their masters. ^[10] There is buried in the sentence the recognition of the domesticated life of the animal, but—I wondered—cats live similar lives to dogs, and do not they also not live long enough to recognize “their masters” within the diasporic situation, contemplating the analogue of the wandering Odysseus with the frequent issue of “living in diaspora” and “displacement” that is entailed in this work as a sequence of ideas and perceptions by various contemporary Arab poets? The word “cat” does not appear in The Odyssey.

 

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^[1] “CITY ONE” by Aya Nabih in Another Room to Live In. Litmus, 2023. 46.

^[2] “Editor’s Note” by Omar Berrada and Sarah Riggs in Another Room to Live in. 34.

^[3] “CITY TWO: BEACH” by Aya Nabih in Another Room to Live In. 47.

^[4] “Author’s Note” by Rachida Madani in Another Room to Live In. 76.

^[5] An important question, considering how many times similar images of infants and children with medically urgent conditions are readily shared and reproduced in order to garner sympathy, funds, and action by viewers—while the images of brutality, rending the body/somatic subject, in warzones do not impact similarly. There are, further, the imaging campaigns that take place on college campuses by right to life organizations which present similarly “graphic” (a specious term that suggests a wrongness or need to censor/hide/block/caveat an idea/image/object) medical images to their own ends—often operated by Evangelical Christians who readily support the brutality (cause of the images Farah Rose Smith is addressing) of Israel and the United States, actively denying the images of brutality from these warzones. The issue is abundantly not the image itself, but the question Smith follows up with.

^[6] “Dreams of the Detainee” by Sara Elkamel in Another Room to Live In. 54.

^[7] “The Eye Theatre Closes Its Doors, and Opens Them Again” by Sara Elkamel. Another Room to Live In. 56.

^[8] “August” by Sara Elkamel in Another Room to Live In. 55.

^[9] “April” by Safaa Fathy in Another Room to Live In. 144.

^[10] “Café Marine” by Habib Tengour in Another Room to Live In. 171.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thom Eichelberger-Young is an artist and mental health caregiver living in Buffalo, New York. Their books include ANITKYTHERA (Antiphony Press) and the forthcoming OINTMENT WEATHER: THINKING POETICS IN DESPERATE TIMES (CLOAK, 2025). They also edit Blue Bag Press.