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Picturing by Jory Mickelson, a book of poems

Do you see? Every time I attempt to close
there is a new gate we must pass
through. In every story, there comes
the point I can see no further given the line
will never finish

“I believe the desire to create pictures, David Hockney states, “lies deep within us.” This sentiment is paired with the experience that most of us derive a deep pleasure in looking, beholding, and seeing. And in being seen, truly known. If nothing else, we are deeply visual creatures. Vision is a primary sense and a principal way of making sense of the world.

How we picture is akin to how we perceive and interpret, determining the nature of our experiences and, therefore, the very quality of our lives. Hockney affirms that the history of making images is less about representation and more about how we see.

In this collection of poems, Mickelson re-imagines what words a history of images contains and draws out the desire to be taken in whole and laid bare.

Jory Mickelson is the author of two other books of poetry--All This Divide and Wilderness/Kingdom, winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. They live and write in the Pacific Northwest.

$40 (CAD / ~$28.25 USD)

Paperback, printed and bound by Coach House Press on 70 lb Zephyr Laid paper.

ISBN 978-1-7381784-2-1

To be released & shipped: January 22, 2025

Praise for Picturing:

“If / pleasure is an ending, then surely we are / joined,” Jory Mickelson writes, in Picturing, where the viewer melds with the art, the gaze moves between and beyond, exposing a sorry inside desire’s hinge. From Marilyn Monroe to Icarus, Paudl Cadmus to “the angel’s ruffling wings,” these poems shift the lines between longing and conquest, childhood and history, an open wound and a painter’s caress. Reveling in beauty and damage, this is a book that sings and singes.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art and The Freezer Door

Jory Mickelson’s third book, Picturing, combines a reverance for the past with a nuanced portrait of the present--a place where the poet confesses, “I have tried my best / to survive” and “I am / willing to make / a deal with God / that even if / I die / let my face still make money.” Mickelson lays bare the implicit narratives that shape our understanding of passion, love, and success, unearthing depths that lie beneath the surface of our collective consciousness. This collection adds a painful counterpoint to cultural reflections on identity and memory.

Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize

To be seen is to be known--though something of identity always escapes, Jory Mickelson’s Picturing argues. More completely, one is seen in what one makes: a family, a manifesto, a story “we tell / ourselves when we need / to sleep” and the story “we tell when / we need to stay / awake.” Imagination helps us remake ourselves more completely and intimately, as Mickelson writes about an 1890s photograph of women dressed in traditionally men’s garb: “The dream / of a world held close / then hidden away.” But the imagination needs publishing, even if clandestinely, Mickelson tells us. “Give me one more / hour and I’ll show you,” Mickelson writes, “how the trick was I was / never bound at all.” Picturing undoes the picture, unbinds the ties, and helps us imagine a freer us.

James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy

What makes Jory Mickelson’s new book of poetry, Picturing, so engaging and, at the same time, so extraordinarily moving is how sensitively they weave the many different ways that artists--poets, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, actors amongst many others--look at this world we share and yet see it so differently. I loved how Mickelson asks us in one poem to consider how unique the vision of writer Audre Lorde is and then provides us access to the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in another or challenges us to consider the way that the work of The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator J. C. Leyendecker connects us with the paintings of Paul Cadmus and Thomas Eakins and the photographs of drag balls in the mid-seventies by Michael Childers. There is such a delicious range of queer gaze to be found in Picturing! Here Andy Warhol is, in a way, poetically reunited with his lover Keith Haring while in “The Artist’s Model” Mickelson unpacks with great care the relationship between John Singer Sargent and Thomas McKeller, the Black model who for more than a decade played a key role in both the painter’s work and his love life. My favourite work in the collection was the wonderful sequence “The Falls” which references a series of paintings that Warhol created around a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from Niagara, the film that launched her career--a poem that for this reader captures both the construction of an artistic vision and the range of responses that a work of art can elicit.

Jeffrey Canton, reviewer for The Globe and Mail

Prétend by Arielle Burgdorf, a novella

Prétend follows a young translator from Montreal whose name and identity are in constant flux. Our protagonist begins the story as Jean, a woman trapped in an abusive marriage to a dangerous man named Konstantin. Isolated and alienated in London, Jean soon becomes John, and her relationship with Konstantin starts to unravel when he asks her to translate his poems from Russian. After she begins to uncover some of Konstantin’s deceits, she agrees to meet a reclusive artist in Canada named M., and leaves Konstantin, becoming Jeanne upon her return to Montréal.

Working with M. on a new translation is magical and restorative for Jeanne, as she learns for the first time in her life what it might be like to have a translator-author relationship free of dated ideas on fidelity, domination, and the invisibility of the translator. Jeanne also starts to realize she has feelings for M. and wants more than just a business relationship together. But M. has a secret too, and just when it comes to light, Konstantin lands in Montréal and creates chaos. Jeanne uncovers Konstantin’s biggest secret and becomes determined to expose him, forcing him to leave her alone once and for all—but will he give in so easily? And will she find a way to work things out with M., or leave Montréal behind for a new city and a new identity?

Arielle Burgdorf is a writer originally from Washington, D.C. They received their MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh where they taught in the Words Without Walls program at Allegheny County Jail. Their writing and translations have appeared in Lambda Literary, Broken Pencil Magazine, Exilé Sans Frontières, Maximum Rocknroll, and elsewhere. They are currently pursuing a PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz focused on queer and feminist experimental writers from Québec.

$40 (CAD / ~$28.25 USD)

Paperback, printed and bound by Coach House Press on 60 lb Rolland Natural paper.

ISBN 978-1-7381784-1-4

Praise for Prétend:

“[Burgdorf] has written a clever, sexy, moving & playful novel about literary translation, control, language, & selfhood.”

Jen Calleja, translator, publisher at Praspar Press and author of Vehicle, Dust Sucker, and I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For

“As its protagonist cycles through names, cultures and countries in a journey of self and soul, Burgdorf’s passion for language itself is a beautiful lodestar, a letimotif woven into the fabric of the story. Like a knife to a whetstone, Prétend gives off sparks.”

Alex Manley, author of The New Masculinity and translator of Made-Up

A/An by Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a chapbook

Using 17th-century court records of the Salem Witch Trials as a sounding board, A/An mines the archives to uncover the power and violence residing within the language of the legal system. As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant. Rather than regarding the witch hunts as historical curiosity or speculating to fill the gaps, A/An considers the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance. In these poems, English becomes foreign to itself, having distorted through time and slipped through the sieve of law, through the inevitable erasures of matter and the ideological erasures of the archive: the gaps marked “[illegible due to fold in paper],” and the silences that remain unmarked. In a poetics of the “[…]”, A/An engages with textual gaps as lacunae. In A/An, poetry and archive wrestle, shattering these legal documents that act as gravestones and spilling the voices caught therein.

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a Chilean poet, novelist, translator, and text-based artist, is the author of the novel La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They teach creative writing at Clark University.

$35 (CAD / ~ $25 USD)

Paperback, printed and bound by Coach House Press on 70 lb Sephyr Laid paper, typeset in Sabon, 12 pt.

ISBN 978-1-7381784-0-7

Praise for A/An:

“Archival and speculative, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez’s A/An is a revisioning of the Salem Witch Trials into a portfolio of court ephemera, converging them thematically despite and through its divergent forms. It’s precisely what we haven’t escaped of the Trials that blooms here: the spectacle of adjudication, the self-righteousness of the law and legibility, coloniality’s self-exception. Sovereignty is haunted: an invisable hande pushes us forthe. Gutmann-Gonzalez deftly summons the past and present’s continuity through this possible lyric alternative. A/An is a distillation, a reduction, a tincture of the ever-renewable past. Handle cautiously--this is yr book.”

Jos Charles, author of feeld, a Year & other poems, and Safe Space

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