i've discovered there's a thrill in publishing raw talent, ragged edges, rule breakers.
AngelHousePress publishes poetry chapbooks on occasion in a limited edition of 50 copies, no reprints. if you would like to send a chapbook, please send a query letter first with a brief synopsis of the work, and a short bio to amanda@angelhousepress.com. Note that the manuscript can be no greater than 22 pages, excluding cover. Currently reading manuscripts for autumn 2018. at this point, i am only interested in considering work by those who identify as women, are genderqueer or are in a marginalized group. Please specify on your cover letter. Also please note that if you've already sent me a manuscript or query in a given year, please do not send another manuscript or query that same year.
Manuscript Submission Guidelines
If you have already sent me a query e-mail, and I have agreed to consider your manuscript, please follow the guidelines below when you send me the work.
AngelHousePress chapbooks are published using InDesign.
1. Submit no more than 22 pages;
2. Use Palatino Linotype 12 or 10 point font; this is our house style and if you use this font, there will be no issues with alignment. The point is maximum legibility in print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino
3. If possible, prepare and submit your document as an MS Word .doc or .docx file.
4. If you can’t send an MS Word file, please send an RTF file.
5. Do not include illustrations within the manuscript.
6. If you own copyright to illustrations you’d like to include in the chapbook, send them as separate jpgs with an indication within the MS as to where you’d like to include them.
7. Include author photos as separate jpgs.
8. Do not include watermarked backgrounds within your MS or any other graphics.
9. For poetry, place each poem on a separate page.
10. Do not format the document as columns or tables within your MS.
11. Include an author bio and acknowledgements at the end of the manuscript.
12. Do not send a collection of poems that has already been published as a collection.
Conditions of Publication
1. We publish a limited edition of 50 copies.
2. We do not do reprints.
3. Author receives ten complementary copies of the chapbook.
4. North American authors have option of purchasing additional copies at half price. We can't accommodate half price for international authors due to high cost of shipping.
5. We sell copies of the chapbook on AngelHousePress.com and at the Ottawa Small Press Fair.
Story of Lilith is an excerpt from an experimental novel called Eros, which retells Romeo and Juliet through a variety of avant-garde constraints. Part Two of Eros tells the story from the “Juliet” character’s perspective—who is named “Lena” here—and is presented as a lipogram that negates the vowels “A” and “E.”
The work is a playful account of the day-to-day life of a young woman. Don’t be surprised to find Virgil and Milton showing up alongside bikinis and Oxycodon, while Sisyphus sings with Björk. In Story of Lilith, you will find amusement for mouth and mind.
The echoing question of the mark that language leaves on us all and makes of us all is celebrated here in Dick's lyrical recall of the invention of drawing, while her English/French parallel enacts the question of presentation vs representation in yet another way. The parts all come together in a marvelous tumult, endlessly breaking down and endlessly rebuilding. —Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On.
The ideal creator: Jennifer K Dick articulates the inventor/invented myth of Dibutade in delicate charcoal words that revel in the limits of language. -Lisa Pasold, author of Any Bright Horse.
Engager une réflexion sur le langage avec une intrication audacieuse - et rare - de l'anglais et du français, au travers de la légende mythologique de Dibutade, voilà le projet poétique d'Afterlife. Dans une écriture kaléidoscopique, Jennifer K.Dick s'attache avec virtuosité à interroger ce qui fait trace et ce qui nous trace, nous forme, nous silhouettes humaines. Un livre tout en "point d'ombrelumière". Virginie Poitrasson, auteure d'Il faut toujours garder en tête une formule magique.
Howie Good’s “Robots vs. Kung Fu” is a collection of dark and delightful prose poems that subvert the real. Good is a close observer of the infinitesimal and the infinite. Within these pages you will encounter the surreal bumping up against the ordinary: honey-haired frauleins in Nazi bling vs the clock; trees on fire vs anti-crazy pills; globes crushed by tractors; beasts with seven heads vs sad little funerals in the rain, nagging black flies vs shopping, an angel with brilliant black wings vs school cafeterias. There’s no denying there’s some dark matter here: “What’s been called my heart serves also as a wine glass, a highway, a urinal, a grave.” It would be ham-handed to offer up a general statement about the humour, sadness and absurdity in everyday life, at this point. Better you should read “Robots vs Kung Fu.”
In 17 Reasons, skeleton mariachis and ghosts wander through the life of a young punk who attempts to navigate the urban circus in all its leopard print and electrified red neon.
House of Many Words is a thoughtful, absurd, playful and imaginative work in the spirit of Ionesco and Beckett.House of Many Words is a thoughtful, absurd, playful and imaginative work in the spirit of Ionesco and Beckett.
"this is an odd work, and one that intrigues; after years of poems playing off surrealism, brevity, landscape and the narrative “I,” his foray into script is entirely curious. " rob mclennan, "Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair." Friday, July 29, 2016.
"a dream, a game, a refusal, an attempt, a stand-off. " Cary Fagan, "Curtain Time" December 17, 2016
jettison/collapse by Francesco Levato is a mash-up of poetry, linguistics and critical/cultural theory. Imagine Ferdinand de Saussure colliding with Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson in a fender bender with Benedetto Croce. The result is as delightful as peanut butter and chocolate, and ice cream in July. Levato’s mash-up results in heady imagery and quirky combinations. In this work, Levato offers readers an investigation into the noise of language, language as song and prayer, the body as minimal unit of meaning, the unreliable, traitorous I. The fallen angels adore Levato’s sense of play and innovative engagements with the living and the dead.
"Given this is the first of Levato’s work I’ve seen, the introduction is interesting, and the collection is constructed as a sequence of short poems that blend the lyric and collaged fragment. The effect is lively, precise and even slightly disorienting, as the mind sets the pieces together of his deliberately-worded jumble of words, phrases and ideas, set just as much as a “translation” of a variety of sources into a single text." rob mclennan on Francesco Levato's chapbook "jettison/collapse"http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/…/ongoing-notes-ottawa-s… .
"Contrasting affect with intellect, Levato activates “the orbic flex of his mouth, pouring and filling” in order “to defend against the tide of conceptualism.” It is this enacted debate that gives this collection its vigour. When language explores its lingual potential
“to give, as in fellatio,” it activates the openness of personhood in opposition to pure enunciation.
"The poetic language that results is more immersed and dynamic than Levato’s theoretical musings might suggest. “I take part, I see and hear the whole,” he writes, “the cries, the curses, the fall of grenades, the whizz of limbs, heads, stone and iron.” Alongside his
ideas—which consider topics like etymology, Walt Whitman and Julia Kristeva—there is a sonic and tactile pleasure in saying that becomes the book’s underdog hero, if only because Levato identifies this spirit as a species of subterranean hunger, its “velvet mason
a sweet assault.” Nikki Sheppy, Arc Poetry Magazine 83. For more of the review, please purchase the issue here.
AngelHousePress is pleased to present “phases of the harpsichord moon” by Gary Barwin, a rerelease of his first chapbook, and his first individual publication, published by Gary’s micropress, serif of nottingham in 1985 when he was 21. We fallen angels are pleased to be part of this heavenly harpsichordacious delight where Laura Secord fugues with Bach and Jimi Hendrix’s lix are transcribed into imaginative world play. In his introduction, Gregory Betts talks about how Gary’s writing offers readers an alternative to the dreariness of the world. I would also add that “phases of the harpsichord moon” celebrates the beauty of the earth’s minor chords.
"This is an easygoing, unselfconscious and complex sequence of threads that engage a wordplay in and around each other." rob mclennan.
"A pretty neat object, beautifully made and the story of preface and postscript interesting as well. " Pearl Pirie
In Worm’s Saving Day, a worm is infatuated with a Spanish señorita. Language continues long after we have turned to ash. Evocative of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, this long poem continues the debate over essence vs existence. Steadman has a penchant for the picaresque. Our hero is a lowly worm, his rival is the Ash Man. Worm is a tunneller and a dreamer.
Chapbook launch: Friday, June 12, 2015, 7pm, The Factory Reading Series, Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong Street, UPSTAIRS
the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair Pre Fair Reading featuring Marilyn Irwin (Ottawa), Dean Steadman (Ottawa), Alicia Cumming (Kemptville) and
Stuart Ross (Coburg)In “Where No One Can See You,” Anita Dolman describes carnage in the half-light, fallen ballerinas, bleak urban & prairie environments, muffled echoes, confined spaces, battered fedoras, wall-flat moments & the possibility of an open door.
[cover photo: Elizabeth Dolman]
Anita will launch the chapbook at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair Pre-Fair Reading on November 7, 2014, 7:30pm, the Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong, Upstairs. The chapbook will be for sale at the Fair on Saturday, November 8, 2014.
Steven Artelle's long poem "Four Hundred Rabbits" is simultaneously imaginative & philosophical. There are red rabbits, shy rabbits, rabbits into soft core porn, rabbits with foot fetishes, filthy creatures who become deities of dust, robot rabbits, masked rabbits. Above all "Four Hundred Rabbits" has a poignant lyricism with descriptions which bring to mind Albrecht Dűrer's Apocalypse & William Blake's illuminated books. This work is full of energy, heat, humour & creativity. If John Updike, Dante Alighieri & Lewis Carroll were to have a love child, his name would be Steven Artelle.
"one rabbit cried/our divinity was nothing without the cities/the cities with their night fires and their cavernous days/and praise and praise and praise was the pulse of our dancing"
a scrappy commonplace book containing incantatory delights with a dark edge, piceous pit shadows, turquoise ballerinas, unlaced violins, bad dreams & lost maps. printed on distressed & glossy paper.
Apt. 9 Press publisher & poet Cameron Anstee has written a thoughtful and engaging review of Christine McNair's chapbook, "Notes from A Cartywheel" being launched on Thursday, December 1 at the Factory Reading Series, which takes place at the Carleton Tavern, 7pm UPSTAIRS. Christine will be sharing the stage with local publishers & writers Bardia Sinaee & Matthew Firth.
The review is here:
http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2011/11/christine-mcnair-notes-from-cartywheel.html
Event info is here: http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/11/span-o-presents-factory-reading-series.html
"Notes from a Cartywheel" will be for sale at the reading, or for those who are not in Ottawa or unable to attend, on the site via Paypal.