Ursus Americanus was formed in 2016 out of a reading series I ran briefly in Nashville, TN called “Life is Boring.” I had recently returned to my hometown after living in Portland, OR for six years where I had been experimenting with vagrancy. I was inspired by the small-press poetry community of Portland: Octopus Books, Poor Claudia, the Independent Publishing and Resource Center, and curated readings like If Not For Kidnap. While living back in Nashville, I noticed a lack of such resources and figured that a consistent reading series was a good entryway back into a community. I enlisted the help of my friend Daniel Pujol (who I’m certain will be remembered as a punk, literary hero of the Southern avant-garde) and he gave me the contact information of Nick Rossi. I invited Nick to read at the first installment of “Life is Boring” and he quickly became a reliable fixture of the event––always showing up, always on time, always with beer to share, always ready to chat and give feedback. I loved him very deeply very quickly. As we became closer friends, I learned that Nick already ran a journal called Sobotka with his friend Kathy. I picked his brain about printing and formatting and told him about my interest in publishing chapbooks. He was down.
While there have been a few exceptions in the past decade, our mission has been to publish prefect-bound chapbooks of poetry with non-negotiable dimensions (those of you who own the first printing of CT McGaha’s “Gutterboy Rides Again” are sitting on a gold mine), but with a tremendous amount of creative freedom given to the authors for the covers. I have moved to referring to them as “shorter poetics” because I’m really not interested in the ontological debate of texts that blur the distinctions between chapbook and full-length. A spine is merely a matter of structural integrity. Our first chapbook, Mighty Stranger by Daniel Pujol, was released in the Fall of 2016. We published three more chapbooks while still located in Nashville before we both parted ways for grad school (Nick back to his hometown of Chicago and me to New York).
We have somehow managed to keep the wheels from falling off all of this time, which is mostly thanks to Nick’s ease, commitment, and work ethic. We just recently welcomed our twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapbooks into the world, Not My Circus by Henry Goldkamp and Kikirikiki by Natalie Stamotopoulos. We have three more chapbooks in our publishing cycle set for 2025 and 2026 from olga mikolaivna, Adrian Sobol, and Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo. As we are encroaching a decade publishing together, we are also working to rethink / reshape what we want the mission of our project to be going forward. We knew next to nothing when we started and now still know next to nothing but have ten years of change, trauma, adaptation, exposure, experimentation, marriage, divorce, deaths, illnesses, etc. There are many things we wouldn’t do or put up with again. Moments that nearly broke us. We have each had a minimum of two jobs each since beginning this venture. We have financed every aspect of this project ourselves. We have given hundreds of hours of unpaid labor-time. It would simply not be tenable if we didn’t love and respect each other to the degree that we do. The only sustainable way forward is to amplify that this is a project of mutual love and care that is determined to keep the possibilities of poetry alive in a world that so explicitly wants to destroy it, or at least destroy the modalities that make its production possible.
If we have the means to do so, so do you. Start a press. Seriously. Stop expecting hand-outs, recognition, social currency, ladders and labor from everyone else for your undiscovered genius and print fucking books. Look to Spiral Editions. Look to Keith LLC. Look to Beautiful Days. Look to New Mundo. Look to 1080 Press. Look to Blue Bag. Look to The Year. Look to above/ground. There is absolutely no future if we all idolize and rely on publication and endowment from completely obsolete and oblivious institutions (a missive for another time). We all owe each other.
May Palestine be free in our lifetime.
Nick Rossi is a co-founder / editor /
designer at Sobotka Lit Mag / Ursus Americanus Press / No Rest Press. His work
has (semi-)recently appeared in Gab Magazine, Works & Days, SALT Weekly,
and elsewhere. He works and lives in Chicago, IL.
Eric Tyler Benick is a writer, publisher, and educator based in Brooklyn. His poetry collections include the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026). He is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Apartment, Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He teaches postcolonial and anticarceral literatures at Wagner College.
