Sarah Gzemski : Noemi Press : New Beginnings

 

 

 

Noemi Press has gone through major transition this year as our founder, Carmen Giménez, accepted the job as publisher of Graywolf Press and appointed Suzi F. Garcia and Anthony Cody as new co-publishers. Suzi and Anthony, in turn, asked me to become the press’s executive director. At this crossroads, it feels like an enormous accomplishment to have made that transition together and to continue to publish the work that excites us. 

Suzi, Anthony, and I have worked together for years in our previous positions (them as poetry editors, me as managing editor), so we weren’t starting from scratch, but the weight of Noemi Press’s history and wanting to uphold its legacy has been at the forefront of our minds. After all, 2022 is the 20-year anniversary of the press’s founding, with Carmen (and co-founder Evan Lavender Smith) making chapbooks at their kitchen table in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Since then, Noemi Press has published over 100 titles, often taking on experimental work that challenges the status quo. As a brand new leadership team, we gathered in August to talk about the press’s past, present, and future—one that feels bright and full of possibility.

I’ve promised to write about Noemi Press for months now, and kept getting delayed and delayed, which may be the most illustrative example of what small press life is like these days. In the midst of this heart work, we’ve adjusted to new day jobs, family changes/challenges, and the struggles of the day-to-day we all face in what feels like a strange and tenuous time. At Noemi, we’ve been feeling overwhelming gratitude for our authors, editors, designers, and community throughout the changes of this year.

We’ve been working behind the scenes on a new website design that will be more accessible and user-friendly, and held a successful IndieGoGo campaign to fund it. We’ve been writing grants and finding ways to make the press sustainable work for us as we lean into our own artistic practices. All of this takes time and imagining, and it’s all in service of the work we love and want you to read.

This year, we published five titles. PLACE by Alexei Perry Cox is a discussion of language and poetic usefulness, specifically how collective discourse survives the unimaginable through personal recourse. Gorgoneion, Casey Rocheteau’s latest book, was the winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry, weaving biting wit and tender moments into its critique of American society. In prose, we published marcus scott williams’s damn near might still be is what it is: part autofiction, part memoir and travelogue, part road novel, part journal entry, confronting what it means to be American, to be Black, to be a tourist and penniless and to fall in love. 

A big part of Noemi Press’s story this year was the publication of AKRÍLICA, Juan Felipe Herrera’s 1989 book newly translated by a bevy of talented folks and edited by Anthony Cody, Carmen Giménez, and Farid Matuk. This book has long lent its name to our Akrilica Series, which publishes innovative Latinx lyric poetry, and so to publish it anew under the series’ banner has been a privilege and honor. Also as part of the Akrilica Series, we were thrilled to publish City Without Altar, Jasminne Mendez’s poetry collection and play-in-verse amplifying the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border.

With forthcoming work in 2023 from Nawal Nader-French, Angela Peñaredondo, Sandra Simonds, Catherine Chen, and Raquel Gutiérrez, we know what the immediate future holds and can’t wait to share it with you. As for twenty years from now, your guess is as good as mine, but I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be as spectacular and vibrant as ever.

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Gzemski is a poet. She is the executive director of Noemi Press and the financial coordinator at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is an editor and book designer living and working in Tucson, AZ, the ancestral and current home of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui people. Her current manuscript about growing up an evangelical pastor's daughter grapples with fundamentalism's effects on her girlhood/womanhood and confronts its nationalist rhetoric and roots. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Bone Bouquet, Four Chambers, and Cartridge Lit, among others.  

 

Heather Sweeney : Gentlewoman, by Megan Kaminski

Gentlewoman, Megan Kaminski
Noemi Press, 2020

 

 

 

In an exploited and precarious world, how can move through, reclaim, and honor what is left of nature? Of ourselves? Megan Kaminski’s new poetry collection, Gentlewomen, evokes the experiences of gathering, of caring and of re-envisioning/re-visiting the world we have (un)made.  The words that constellate and collide on these pages are resonate and timely:

          “We are all alone together” (43).

THE WALK
I was thinking about the sisters on my walk today, the great allegorical trinity: Natura, Providentia, and Fortuna.  I was winding my way through a hilly neighborhood of concrete and mountains, palm trees and hazy sunlight.  The streets became narrative strands. I was thinking about what sisterhood means and about what our relationships contain and maintain for each of us. I was also thinking about our mother earth who continues to hold and nourish those who regard her with indifference and even those who seek to destroy her for their own gain. I was thinking about stability and sustainability, about how everything contains and emits its own energy.  About how everything is personal.  About how we, much like the sisters, are now separately enduring:

This shouldn’t be so difficult--your side
          of the ocean no colder than mine and
          coasts are often rocky and lined with stinking
          fish and seaweed.  I read your letter again
                                                                        (37)

THE TAROT
Later, I was compelled to draw a tarot card for Megan, for her gorgeous book and for the gentlewomen everywhere. The Emperor appeared which implies, as I understand it, confrontation with authority, rigidity and the patriarchy.  Not surprisingly, this card reflects the struggle of the sisters, and of the collective, as they/we grapple with loss, isolation, and anger. Kaminski reminds us that the earth is “Too easily depleted and used” (23). The sisters are gentle with the earth, but are not afraid to express rage and resistance to the systems that continue to destroy us all.  Natura proclaims: “When I rise up strong at times furious,/I thunder might and with havoc,/sweep over glasslands over sheets...I fuck factories spewing moke, tumble cities, light oil wells on frozen tundra…”(15).  The sisters are (re)designing something together as in ritual, as in creativity, to feel alive.  There is also a sense of simultaneity occurring: “...”I and my sisters,/ever present always listening” (68).

 

THE DREAM
In the dream I was looking for the sisters “Amongst/irrigation tubes and GPS planters” (29).  Amongst ruin and rupture, I sifted through space and looked for the lost girls, the motherless and the ghosts.  Amidst catastrophe I scoured for a circle of sisters in the interdimensional gathering.  I looked for traces of them “over miles of ocean” and in a “tree budding pink sending shadow/across lawn”(45). I searched for them on the “highway unfurling towards northern plains/unspooled unbroken bereft of pulse” (51). I foraged in “The porous body of we and I and they and so” (42)

In Gentlewomen, Kaminski suggests a collective landscape and how we, the earth and all her inhabitants, are an extension of each other.  This book is a catalyst for community, engulfing the reader with intensity, grace, rage and humor all at once. The sisters want to tell you about survival and about healing.  They want to illuminate our possibilities.

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Sweeney lives in San Diego where she walks her dog, looks at mountains and tries to breathe deeply.  You can find her at https://www.heathercsweeney.com