A Thing or Two About Rebuilding (2021)
Made in late 2020 for the Pantheon Writer’s Circle (Poem Pals, at the time).
Six copies in recycled cardboard copies were produced. Collage, ink illustration, and painting were used to decorate the bindings. Each copy was specially made and personalized for a member of the circle.
Note: I meant to make one artist's copy for myself, but I never got around to it. So the colophon says seven copies were produced, but there were actually only six. My bad.
Thefts and Forgeries (2021)
A digital zine made for the Pantheon Writer’s Circle compiling poems by the group. I made the zine after a writing exercise in which members of the circle wrote poems inspired by lost, stolen, and forged artworks, and then created “forgeries” of other members’ poems by copying their styles. Members of the group wrote poems about artworks including Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633), Pei Shen Qian’s forgeries of Clyfford Still, and Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). Six digital copies distributed to the members of the circle.
The zine can be viewed here. The quote at the beginning of the zine ("I add my own love...") is from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and the quote on the final page is from the essay "The Forger Contemplates Rossetti" by Bruce Whiteman. Those quotes, as well as the poems, are uncredited in the text of the zine, in accordace with the theme.
Dispatches from a Windowless Room: Selected Poems, 2018-2022 (2022)
One large-format artist’s copy. I mostly made this to pass around to friends (as an alternative to sending PDFs of my recent poems by email) and to experiment with a larger page size.
The book can be viewed here.
How to Do Your T Shot: A Handbook for Hard Times (2023)
Made in the spring and summer of 2023 and published in August 2023 in an edition of fifty copies: ten deluxe copies (incl. one artist’s copy), fifteen regular copies (incl. one artist’s copy), and twenty-five zine copies (incl. one artist’s copy). Per Papaya Press policy, people who contributed to the production of the book were each gifted a copy, so five of the regular copies were actually hors commerce. Mel Gilcrest, KC Swanson, and Max Mallon edited; Joon Seo Lee, a medical professional, fact-checked; and Adrian Masotta was generally helpful and inspiring.
One draft artist’s proof experimenting with design options was also produced. In this proof, the front cover was collaged with a testosterone information label and the back cover featured a mounted testosterone bottle box. This looked a bit goofy. So, in the final version of the deluxe and regular copies, the design is reversed, with the box appearing on the front cover and the label appearing on the back.
An important facet of this project was the production of a digital version of the zine that could be downloaded, printed, and shared freely. Unfortunately, poor planning and the switch from using Tumblr to Neocities led to the URL printed in the colophon of this book being incorrect. The PDF is now available through the Neocities site here.
The book can be viewed at the following links: the deluxe edition, the regular edition, and the zine edition.
Pain Is (2024)
Idea development began in 2021, poems completed fall/winter 2023, binding and creation winter 2023/2024. Mel Gilcrest, Max Mallon, and KC Swanson assisted in editing the poems.
Produced in an edition of forty copies:
Eight deluxe cartonera copies (incl. one artist’s copy), each uniquely collaged. Each cover collage was inspired by a poem in the collection: “Pain Is,” “The Wound Man” (two variants, one with a yellow color scheme and one with a red color scheme), “The Museum of Light,” “Heat,” “Shared,” and “Decomposition” (two variants). Then, the covers were scanned to provide the designs for the other copies. On accident, only seven of collages were scanned (all but one of the “Decomposition” variants). The artist’s copy is the “Pain Is” variant, which features an illustration from a seventeenth century medical text. Note: One of the “Decomposition” variants features a “brazen bull” illustration on the front cover, which is the original frontispiece from a damaged copy of Phalaridis Agrigentinorum tyranni. Epistolae. (Oxford: Johannes Crooke, 1695).
Eight regular cartonera copies (incl. one artist’s copy), each cover scanned and printed from the original collage designs. Due to only seven of the deluxe copies being scanned, one of the covers (the artist’s copy) is a duplicate (“Pain Is”).
Twenty-four zine copies with covers scanned and printed from original collages. Due to only seven of the deluxe copies being scanned, there were three copies each of four design variants (“Pain Is,” “Museum,” “Heat,” and the yellow “Wound Man” design) and four copies each of three design variants. Three zine copies were reserved as gifts for the editors.
Each copy contained a digitally printed “wound man” frontispiece (from Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldbuch der Wundarznei, 1530 edition). In the deluxe and regular copies, the frontispiece was digitally printed on half-mulberry, half-bamboo fiber paper and features a letterpress caption printed in black ink in Century Bold on a Chandler & Price Proof Press. The letterpress printing was done at Nova Community Arts in Atwater Village, Los Angeles.
Note: I could not, for the life of me, find a z in the case of Century Bold, so I had to intentionally misspell the caption as “wundarsnei.” Oops.
The book can be viewed here.
The Trans Swimmer: A Guide and Personal History (2024)
This was the first Papaya Press book bound in multiple gatherings and the first bound in a style other than Japanese stab binding. Instead, the gatherings are sewn together at the spine in three places. I didn't follow an exact method, but the style was inspired by the Archetype Press books Center Sill and Prometheus Typographica. Unlike my other books, I didn't use cardboard from old shipping boxes as the binding material. I was lucky to find some old flexible board at Remainders (the art supply thrift store) and used that for the covers in place of cardboard. I only had enough board for fourteen copies, so I decided to just cap the edition there.
Six lettered deluxe copies (incl. one artist's copy) and eight numbered regular copies (incl. one artist's copy) were produced. Each copy is illustrated with six collages assembled in part from old issues of Splash magazine (2008-2009) that I found in my mom's garage. I produced these collages traditionally, then scanned and digitally edited them before printing them on glossy photo paper using my Canon Pixma G620 printer. Each deluxe copy contains an original collage leaf as one of the six illustrations.
The cover was illustrated digitally by Gabriel Morales (carboncanines.carrd.co). He did an excellent job.
A copy was reserved for Gabriel Morales. A regular copy was reserved for Masato Nakayama (who offered advice in the writing process).
The book can be viewed in the deluxe edition here and the regular edition here.
Reliquary (2024)
A single-sheet (sort of) zine illustrated with small collages and decorated with Posca marker. I added two covers made from paper-covered recycled cardboard to give the zine a bit more solidity. Since single-sheet zines have all these hidden faces, I wanted to capitalize on that format to create a zine with recessed and concealed illustrations. I've been reading a book on the relics of Jesus lately, so reliquaries seemed like an interesting topic, and I created this zine to explore the spiritual value of relics, their veracity as historical objects, and the aesthetics of their display.
A little Easter egg, so to speak, is that I used images of Jesus for the face of St. Catherine. This symbolizes how the veneration of relics is not considered idol worship (by Catholics, at least) because relics are seen as an access point to God by way of his most ardent followers. Also, using the eyes of Jesus to represent those of St. Catherine seemed appropriate given her supposedly divine visions.
I was inspired by the following relics: the severed head of St. Catherine of Siena, the Holy Nail at Trier Cathedral, and the tongue and jaw of St. Anthony of Padua.
Three copies were produced. The book can be viewed here.
Home (2024)
Another (sort of) single-sheet zine with a movable flap and construction paper accents in red and black. The zine was printed in black with red text on my Canon G620 printer. This was something of a nightmare to produce as, for various reasons, I had to redesign and recreate the maze twice. The process was also very complicated: I drew the maze by hand onto graph paper, copied it into digital graph paper specially sized for a single-sheet zine (graciously designed by Max Mallon), layered those lines onto a collaged background, and then digitally added the text of a poem. I had collaged the background traditionally, scanned the collage, and then digitally converted it to grayscale. After printing the zines, I applied the accents and hand-traced the lines in black Posca marker. Shockingly labor-intensive for what was intended to be a small project following the major undertaking of The Trans Swimmer.
In any case, this zine explores the concept of home, its implications (safety, connection, family, warmth) and the consequences that arise when the home is disturbed (fear, isolation, loneliness, cold). The collage incorporates images of run-down buildings, machinery and construction sites, frigid natural spaces, and distorted digital and manuscript text in both English and Spanish; I avoided images of people. To explore space and disorientation, I intentionally rotated the text so that the reader would be forced to spin the zine around to follow the path of the poem through the maze. The poem was partially inspired by one sentence in the Richard Siken poem "Birds Hover the Trampled Field": "The territory is more / complex than I supposed." I love the enjambment, and I hope I captured a similarly cryptic, ominous tone in the poem that comprises the text of Home.
Twelve copies were produced. The zine can be viewed here.
