Nat. Poetry Month Feature: Dancing Girl Press

‘m so pleased to feature Dancing Girl Press in our National Poetry Month series.  They’re one of my favorite chapbook/poetry-based presses because they’re innovative, inexpensive, have a fantastic blog, sponsor writing and literature focused events, and feature a lot of new authors in their chapbooks.  I was able to ask Kristy Bowen, who founded and runs the press, a few questions about what they do.

1.  When was your press founded/what is the history of your press, and what is your mission statement?

“I officially launched DGP in the spring of 2004, though I was tossing the idea around in my head about a year  prior to that.  I’d been running the online journal Wicked Alice for a couple years at that point, whose focus was women poets, and thought a chapbook press might be a nice accompaniment to the website.  I was, at the time, enrolled in a small press publishing class at Columbia College where I work, and was  working on  a simple stapled print version of the magazine.  At that point I had a chapbook in production from another small locally based feminist press that wouldn’t be out for another year, so I decided to do a trial run by publishing my own chap, Bloody Mary, to see how things worked out.  By that fall we had also released the print annual and our first official title, Adrianne Marcus’ The Resurrection of Trotsky.  We’ve been going full steam ahead since then, increasing the number of books we publish each year and spreading the word.  Mission-wise, our goal is to showcase interesting work by women authors—work that is fresh and exciting, and innovative –in lovely designed handmade volumes (though we will be publishing our first full-length and commercially produced book this year, a photo/poetry collaboration by Robyn Art & Robin Barcus. ) I’m still pretty much a one-person operation, though I occasionally get some help with production from a few people, but typically do the layout, design, and printing myself.”

2.  Would you be able to share with us any poems that you have published that could give our readers a taste for what you produce?

Sleight of Hand

I’ve fallen for the silt and turkey vultures,
the Thai food and sleeper waves,
Molotov cocktails and polystyrene,
soap flakes and the CIA. The cop yesterday
at a press conference holding up
each moment: tear gas and battering ram
and four black and whites in front of 7-Eleven.
I want his hands that didn’t shake.

Even though it’s just
a choreographed illusion
like a sword passing through a
beautiful woman in a basket.
The trick is her black feathered straps,
her legs roped and spread-eagle.
I’m confessing my love for performance.
I’m collecting mother of pearl and
pictures of the sky—each curtsy and canary
a lover’s hand I’m holding to a thigh.

How can I not submit to this world?
I lift my torn oyster veil every time.
I take in the body dumps and bookmakers,
the calling cards and ephedrine highs.
I kneel down. I make this
vagrant world mine.

-By Kim Young, taken from her chapbook Divided Highway

“There are actually samples from each on each book’s page of our websites of the type of work we publish at www.dancinggirlpress.com, but in general, we tend to gravitate toward work that is doing interesting things with language, image, and narrative.  If you looked at them,  I imagine certain stylistic preferences would probably emerge, but I tend to select manuscripts that I love for some reason, ones that engage me as a reader.  I like work that plays with syntax, narrative, work that surprises me somehow.  Production-wise, it was important, especially in those early days when no one knew who we were and we were operating at a loss, to keep it simple, laser printed, hand assembled,  stapled (or occasionally bound) chapbooks in print runs of around 100.  We’ve since gotten a little more daring with our formatting in some  cases.  I did a collaborative project with artist/poet Lauren Levato that incorporated visual art and ephemera.  We’ve had a couple boxed projects, including Michaela Gabriel’s The Secret Meanings of Greek Letters, and billet-doux, an anthology composed of letters and postcards designed by the poets themselves.”

3.  Is there any other info about your press, freebies, or points of interest you’d be interested in sharing with our readers about what you do?

“We are always open in the summer months for submissions and especially love to publish local, Chicago-area  women poets in particular…”

Fantastic.  We, at Publish Chicago, are also all about Chicago authors and Chicago publishing.  Rock on, Dancing Girl, rock on.