Model Press

Model Press was originally MODL Press, a print micropress that I started as a way to self-publish but got more and more invested in publishing other people who were around town, who I chatted with at readings, who I was friends with. Publishing books and pamphlets by folks became a way to not only circulate their work, but also to spend a little time caring about the things they were excited about. In the last couple of years, I’ve become frustrated by certain dynamics in poetryworld: a scarcity of attention tensely paired with a surplus of poets; an intensified drive to professionalization; an ahistorical slamming against the present. But mostly I missed the way that the DIY speed of small press cut through the inertial murk of endless polish and proper channels. Where was the quickening joy of sharing work with naïve abandon? The chapbook allows for a kind of extended scrappiness that forms the missing middle of contemporary poetic circulation. The chapbook should be the domain of the incomplete, the in process, and, most importantly, the fast.