EthelZine and Micropress
one of the many presses donating to the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign
Ethelzine and Micropress is a fantastically prolific press, especially when you consider that Sara is doing all the handstitching. The chapbooks and zines are colourful with buttons, sequins, material, art, handmade paper.
You can choose the EthelZine and Micropress bundle here. And you can check out Ethel’s other titles here.
“In this scene, Ethel is a healed piece of meat. Placing her face on the alter and biting into a vitamin, she remembers how, once, she got caught throwing potatoes at a very public baptism.
In another scene, she is some kind of primary species moving through the garden.
At a haunted dump, she is a pit of wounds and your ugly voice is as manic as a room full of unemployed actors.
When she returns from the garden, dirty and smelling of camphor, she is drinking the strange milk of some animal.
Not ashamed, she stayed up most nights singing dumb songs about fish and sweating through the bedsheets.
When she dreams about sex, it’s always a disaster.
“If the physical world is a sexy filmstrip, then we are all going to be veryvery sad,” she says. “But if it is a mutual harness, then we’ll all be going out whole to the slaughter, with our hair trimmed and out claws sharpened.”
The above is what you read when you click on “about,” which gives you an idea of the flavour of the press.
and also,
“Started in 2018, Ethel is a twice-yearly limited-edition, hand-made journal of writing and art and a micro-press specializing in handmade and hand-bound chapbooks and mini-books.”
I had a great conversation with Sara Lefsyk, the editor of EthelZine on the Small Machine Talks. Listen here.
For the campaign, Ethelzine is offering the following works:
Joshua Burton’s Fracture Anthology
from Fracture Anthology
Heard
I.
when writing in my mother’s voice: two pulls earthing us
away from one another.
the horses attached to a single body, each limb
pulled away— seeing through to her
through
a muggy decanter. I can never truly capture her voice, yet,
in writing her here
my hope
is to let lyric light through her
like a myth through family. I cannot touch her voice—
the jar of salt in my hands.
II.
a man sings his story in voice of a woman, his mother.
am I silencing her voice, closing in
on myself, skeletal as I am from the start? I believe the light
that guides these words comes from care.
but there’s a difference between picking up broken glass
and knowing what to do with it.
Tom Daley’s Far Cry
from Far Cry
Second Tuesday
The moon lays its sheen
on the neighbors’ slate roof
on the second Tuesday
after your death.
All the stone shingles pool
in a circle of light
and the air lost it’s tremor
of moth. All your gone whispers
are grinning me down. All
your licked grimaces ferrying
me off to some speedway
of snicker and frown.
Riding the long route
of your emptying palms,
you’re still waving me down
from the night. Steering
me close to the highway,
you row between
mountains dubbed Equinox
and Green. Over us both
the white and clamoring moon,
dividing its spell from its curse.
Over us both, the hot breath of goodbye
scalding our scalps and our wrists.
Kwame Sound Daniels’ The Body Manuscript
from The Body Manuscript
Jenny Hval’s “Why This?”
I heard a song that reminded me of
hunger. I listened and waited until
my stomach grew empty and my mouth, dry.
The music was wordless and meandered.
The vocals verged on wailing. I felt, in
that voice, a ringing clarity that led
me back to loss. What is it about the
glory of starvation? Bestowing an
emptiness and fog, hollowing the
bones, making the hungry bird-fragile, prone
to death. One last flight before a spiral.
One last time to grieve before all feeling falls away.
There is a song that sounds like hunger.
I find myself singing along.
Jenny Irish’s would-be future-humans
from would-be future-humans
The USS Narwhal
The metal womb knows nothing of submarines, but that is how she thinks of herself: a submarine, except that she is not submerged and moves through time and not water, so the name is wrong—sub is wrong, marine is wrong. But, in body and in experience, that is how she sees herself: a submarine, a fat metal dart as sleek as a steel seal, parting an unimaginable vastness, and housed inside her, a hundred tiny and terrified heartbeats fluttering, frenetic, and longing to surface.
Anuja Ghimire’s fable-weavers
from fable-weavers
monsoon
in the year that I believe in anything
a boy whispers in school
lightning strikes parents if children lie
I climb into your bed in our flat
my cold back on the wall stained with rain
water releases smell of cement
you don’t fold me like the tucked in rupees
in the elastic edge of your petticoat
your breath moves in small clouds
night is long and lonely without dreams
death fills the room like mold
I latch on the crevice of your stomach
when the edge of your sari falls with the sky
//
Click on the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign page.
