If they are not to freeze us to death; i.e. How the Small Press Destroyed My Life

Author: Bradley King

Publisher: Spiral Editions (2026)

King’s chapbook-length essay braids generations of small press poetic thought and practice to forge and understand new theories of power, collectivism, aesthetic resistance, and relevance of the “small press” world in this rapidly decaying time of fascist capture and continued atomization of the self. This essay brings together both poets of the present day small press in addition to those who helped build that world as we know it; Zan de Parry, Tilghman Goldsborough, Kyle Schlesinger, Ivanna Baranova, Kat Robinson, Anne Waldman, Noa Nguyen, Jonathan Green, Devin Johnson, Cedar Sigo, to name a few. Using Luciano Conchiero’s theory of “tangential resistance,” King parses out the current iteration of poets, publishers, friends, the world, “our shared acts of co-enjoyment […] sustaining mutual co-creation, not just artistic creation,” calling for “radical closeness” and “the ways of the shared interior.”