Green Lantern’s Synchronous Releases Teach Us How to Love
The White House
by Joel Craig
Green Lantern Press, 2012
80 pages / Dust jacket edition $20; Regular edition $15
&
Palm Trees
by Nick Twemlow
Green Lantern Press, 2012
82 pages / Dust jacket edition $20; Regular edition $15
Two synchronous 2012 releases, Joel Craig’s The White House and Nick Twemlow’s Palm Trees, invoke the communal support Chicago’s Green Lantern Press evokes in its intimate independent practice: small groups collaborate in the sort of devotion that can only survive beyond the constraints of money, friends sutured together in the simple creation of works of beauty.
Craig and Twemlow are longtime Chicago friends. Craig co-founded and curates the Danny’s Reading Series, and is the poetry editor for MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Twemlow now lives in Iowa City, where he writes and makes films. He also co-edits Canarium Books.
Because of Craig and Twemlow’s friendship, Green Lantern’s founder, Caroline Picard (who launched the Press and Gallery years ago, with pal Nick Sarno) released their respective books of poetry simultaneously, so the friends could tour together.
No Green Lantern release is regular; every book steeps in curiosity, newness, the unexpected. Every release is bound with delicacy, according to the “slow media” approach, making each book a curatorial site. It feels limiting to call them books. They contain ephemeral inserts, silk screen covers; artist plates.
The books might be siblings. They do bear some physical resemblance:
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February 11th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
February 11th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
We Are Already There: Gretchen E. Henderson’s On Marvellous Things Heard
On Marvellous Things Heard
By Gretchen E. Henderson
Green Lantern Press, 2011
91 pages / $12 Buy from Green Lantern
The pupil…having fallen sick, was dumb for ten days; but on the eleventh, having slowly come to her senses after her delirium, she declared that during that time she had lived most agreeably.[1]
Chicago-based Green Lantern is a non-profit press helmed by Caroline Picard and other artists, focused on bridging contemporary experience with historical form. The Press brings forth “emerging and forgotten texts” within a cultural climate where the humanities must often defend themselves. You may recall their notable release of last summer, Erica Adams’ utterly innovative The Mutation of Fortune. Blake Butler wrote in March, 2010: “Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.”
3 Comments
November 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Five Things About The Mutation of Fortune by Erica Adams
1. The Mutation of Fortune by Erica Adams, is available, now from Green Lantern Press and this is a book you definitely want to get your hands on because it is imaginative, original and darkly provocative.
2. Three fortunes were written for the book which was given to psychics for readings. The second fortune, written by Alchemilla V. Midnight, is below. You can also read the book’s first fortune (written by Thordis Bjornsdottir) and third fortune (written by Rowland Saifi aka Dr. Victor A. Schwert).
Dear Book,
This is not your first life as a book and it is not your last. Many lifetimes ago, you were not material, but existed in the hearts and memories of rough bearded and tough footed folk. You were breathed to life by firelight and whispered by older sisters at midnight, under cool linen. Book, you have made tender chests beat so quickly, fluttering as if there were butterflies, actually more like thick moths, attracted to the glow of your stories that lived in these hearts. Now here you are, a book, and it is no surprise to you, but perhaps surprising that so many will read you and be changed in their own ways, thereby changing you. Don’t be afraid of this change, Book. Allow yourself be devoured, remembering another life as biscuits or bison. You will become something else then and you already are, your being dissolving into the person holding you in her hands. As you rest here in these hands, dissolve into the next thing. Be like vapor.
13 Comments
June 10th, 2011 / 5:24 pm
June 10th, 2011 / 5:24 pm
Green Lantern Press
Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.
In particular, I’ve been trying to write a review of THE NORTH GEORGIA GAZETTE AND WINTER CHRONICLE by William Edward Parry and the crews of the Hecla and Griper for about six months now, (“An annotated transcription of the 1821 newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette. The newspaper, written and published aboard an English ship trapped in the Arctic, was an attempt by the captain to lessen the boredom of a long, isolated winter.”) and every time I pick up the book to dig further, I get so consumed in a single page that reading the book as a whole could conceivably go on forever. More on this hopefully sometime soon, but in the meantime: revel in some of this.