E. Rowan Mena

Accountability, Harassment, and White Male Fragility

June 20, 2016 by E. Rowan

I just created a label in my editor’s gmail for DrunkenBoat: Harassment. I know from experience in other leadership positions that this is a label I will have to use all too often, even in the supposedly progressive field of literary arts. This is a label I need to have because I need to keep records of the men (it’s always men) who can’t handle rejection (par for the course in literary publishing), or can’t handle correction, or can’t handle […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: drunken boat, feminism, fragile masculinity, male privledge, male tears, toxic masculinity

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Cat Lorem Ipsum

June 13, 2016 by E. Rowan

See owner, run in terror lick yarn hanging out of own butt jump off balcony, onto stranger’s heador meowing non stop for food so swat turds around the house. Spit up on light gray carpet instead of adjacent linoleum climb a tree, wait for a fireman jump to fireman then scratch his face, and rub face on owner ignore the squirrels, you’ll never catch them anyway chase ball of stringswat turds around the house. Stares at human while pushing stuff […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: book design, cats

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Dark Things Have Their Origin In Myself

February 25, 2016 by E. Rowan

[or notes on reading about the gothic] A few months I decided it was high time I stopped denying my ultra-goth aesthetic leanings and instead turn fully into exploring them. This was mostly thanks to the phenomenal collection of essays Dark Museum by Maria Negroni, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero and published by Action Books. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I realized that there is perhaps a way of approaching the gothic as a latinx that would allow me to circumvent the […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: darkness, gothic, poetry

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The Making of the Covers

March 20, 2015 by E. Rowan

7 runs, 9 hours, 4 days, 3 different presses, 3 different covers. Maybe only another letterpress printer will understand the insanity that felt like, getting three of the four handmade letterpress covers for the Anomalous Press 2015 season done in the past week. (The fourth is being printed by the phenomenal Lee Marchalonis, and I don’t even know what it looks like yet, but she’s one of my favorite printers ever!). I started out last week with the cover for The All-New by […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: anatomy of a museum, Anomalous Press, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, fiction, ian hatcher, iceland, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, nonfiction, penis museum, phallological museum, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, the all-new, third person singular

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My Week In Books

March 13, 2015 by E. Rowan

Featherbone. from Featherbone: Searshut your throat & open soundless: again—it pierces your back— spins—you lurch and plummet— light is: to blame you: unother. The light is already bleaching your veins metasomatized —blooming in the cracks the fissures. This is my book, Featherbone. It’s a cyborg feminist retelling of Icarus, driven by compound neologisms. The cover art is by Wangechi Mutu, titled “Love’s a Witch, Orfeo’s Underworld Coronation for Euridice,” 2006. Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist and sculptor who resides in […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: Anomalous Press, arrowsmith press, askold melnyczuk, cole swenson, collier nogues, drown/sever/sing, drunken boat, erica mena, featherbone, frank andre jamme, ian hatcher, jorie graham, la presse, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, melissa green, poetry, the all-new, the ground i stand on is not my ground, to the secret

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What do Rosmarie Waldrop, a penis museum, columbian legends, and code poetry have in common?

March 4, 2015 by E. Rowan

The new season of Anomalous Press titles is nearly upon us, and I spent the whole day getting these amazing things off to the printer. (I’m so spacey that I just wrote titles, then it looked wrong so I tried titels, but no, its, definitely titles…) [update: you can now pre-order the whole 2015 season!] And seriously, I say this every year, but these books are so so good! As always, we’re doing super-limited runs of 100, with digital (but beautifully designed) […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: a kendra greene, all-new, anatomy of a museum, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, chapbook, columbian literature, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, experimental, experimental nonfiction, experimental poetry, ian hatcher, iceland, keith waldrop, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, lyric essay, phallological society, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, third person singular

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Small Press Publishing Goals: Making Future People's Heads Explode

February 27, 2015 by E. Rowan

“My mission is to create beautiful, strange little books that a grad student studying the small press movement of the early 21st century will find in a special collections somewhere and they will make her head explode. Can you give us a preview of what’s current and/or forthcoming from your catalog, as well as what you’re hoping to publish in the future? Well, last season we only put out three titles, and they were all poetry. Outer Pradesh by Nathaniel […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: Anomalous Press, experimental poetry, keith waldrop, nathaniel mackey, outer pradesh, poetry, publishing, rosmarie waldrop, small press

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Judging A Book By Its Cover (And Interior!)

February 11, 2015 by E. Rowan

Form fixed, or flowing? That’s the question I think about a lot in terms of new book forms. Is a particular text flowing, like water, able to shape itself without losing anything to many different containers (page sizes, margins, font faces, leading, etc.) depending on the preference of the reader. Or is a text, like many poems, fixed. The line has to end where it ends or the meaning and artistry of the text are compromised. There’s clearly room in […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: book design, design, poetry, poetry design, poetry publishing

Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

February 9, 2015 by E. Rowan

In many ways this book is exactly what I expected. It is a collection of beautiful, light, lyric poems, in a very traditional translation that is beautiful, light, lyric and focused on image and meaning and very occasionally sound. If this appeals to you, you will love this book. For me, though, there wasn’t much beyond a few occasional moments that really grabbed me about it. Lan Lan is clearly a finely attenuated poet, one who puts great care into the […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews • Tags: canyon in the body, chines poetry, contemporary poetry, fiona sze-lorrain, lan lan, literary translation, poetry, translation, zephyr press

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The Future of the Book

January 30, 2015 by E. Rowan

I had a really interesting conversation a few days ago with someone I met on an airplane. I don’t normally speak to strangers in public, as an introvert it actually sort of terrifies me. But something compelled me (technically, my window seat and three teas) to start a conversation with him, and I’m so glad I did. Because it turned out he was extremely interested in the future of reading and the future of the book. It got me thinking […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: elit, future book, future of the book, hybrid books

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