In essence Press Brake is a nostalgia project. It started last autumn when I made a chapbook with James Haug. I’ve always admired his poems, and his neighborliness is second to none. We made My Team Hates Friday in the fall of 2024. That September I would walk over to his porch and we'd hang out and go over the poems and proofs. I formatted the cover with my friend Evan (shout out my friend Evan) when we went to the Netherlands for a week. James (I refer to him as Jim) encouraged me to keep making chapbooks, and I thought about how much fun I had making My Team with him, and how much the chapbook culture from around Amherst and Northampton shaped my poetic mindframe from college forward. I'd always admired the poems of many, many poets who call, or had once called, western Massachusetts home. I thought: What if I could try to emulate that? Try to make chapbooks I think are seriously rad, serious, highbrow and lowbrow, grassroots, odes to local copiers, and vehicles for supporting writers I admire in adjacent towns, in my town. Maybe someone young might find some of them years/decades from now and think they're cool, or see the life and tradition of DIY publishing in the western part of the Commonwealth, kinda like I did. I've been lucky and grateful to be able to work with and publish a variety of writers whose writings I believe in and love greatly. Brian Baldi, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Jon Ruseski. Jim Haug! So many poets, so many poets I cannot name them all. What better thought, I thought, one night late at night after speaking with Jim, than to be able to bring some of that work into the world in a way that feels true, organic, and natural to who I am, and to the literary tastes and cultures I grew up around. I hope to continue publishing chapbooks in a way that honors and upholds the poetries that continually inspire me, that inspired me so much when I was younger, so much so that I decided to become a poet.
Ian Fishman has written (or co-written) five chapbooks, recently Football Rockstar (illicit zines / blush) and CALM DOWN! (factory hollow press).
He previously edited Umpteen Triangles, a ltd. ed. chaplet operation, and currently edits Press Brake, a geographically-specific poetry refrigerator focused on the poetics of western Massachusetts. He is an editor-at-large for Copenhagen and Knife Room. Recent poems and writings can be found in blush, Coma, BOMB, Little Mirror, Saga City, and Passing Stranger Zine. He earned a BA and an MFA from NYU, and splits time between Brooklyn, NY and Northampton, MA.
