Chicago Review 66:03/04 & 67:01 (Winter, Spring, Summer 2023)

Editor: Adam Fales

Publisher: Chicago Review (2023)

In November 2022, Chicago Review put out a call for essays, interviews, and other writing on “small press poetry in the United States—its past, present, and probable future, as well as the writers, editors, communities, and institutions that make it run.” The stipulation to focus the issue on the U.S. was intended to offer parameters to a prompt where possible responses were otherwise boundless; however, we also wanted to invite contributors to think about the importance of small presses for today’s poetry writ large, from somewhat communal and potentially transnational perspectives. We hoped to compile a collective (though not uncontradictory) idea of what one might mean by “small press poetry in the United States.”

Here, however, you will find no comprehensive account of what small press poetry is, was, or will be—and certainly no complete picture of the writers, publishers, and networks that make it run. Instead, we have assembled a Flood of histories, impenetrable and personal Jargons, and Lost Roads that connect only in remote places.