An update to our landmark catalogue, Pressing Issues: Voices for Justice in the Book Arts, which was issued in the summer of 2021.
Download PDF of Pressing Issues 2022 Supplement
Pasadena: Archetype Press, 2002. Printed in a variety of styles, using a variety of methods, this compilation of “isms” and ideologies provides highly visual humor and insight into topics ranging from ageism to materialism to conspiracy theories to psychoanalysis. A student production supervised by Gloria Kondrup and Heidrun Mumper-Drumm at..... More
Martin Lesinski, 2017. A book woven into being through the trials of military service, Beyond the Reach of Reason presents itself as a living thing. Lesinski’s poetry draws upon his experience as a combat veteran, a disabled veteran, and a disabled person living in American society. There is a heartbeat..... More
Seattle: Aubergine Atelier, 2019. Each copy in the edition contains unique paintings by Jodee Fenton. These, distributed throughout as full leaves, cutouts, and paste-downs, encourage a new perspective on Yeats’ seminal poem. Originally composed as a reaction to the pain of the early 20th century—the aftermath of the First World..... More
Connecticut River Valley, MA: SAW Press, 2018. Ashes to Ashes was originally a performance piece held in 2016, in which Whitaker organized the first-ever funeral service to commemorate and mourn the thousands of African Americans who have been lynched and denied their last rites. Whitaker then worked with printer Michael..... More
Newburgh, NY: Thornwillow Press, 2012. Reproduced photographs and manuscripts of and by Lincoln as frontispiece and interspersed throughout. These provide impressive referential punctuation to the documents here assembled by Harold Holzer, who has addressed both the range of Lincoln’s life and his astonishing legacy of belief in the United States’..... More
(Sacramento, CA): Deconstructed Artichoke Press, 2012. As much a love letter to baseball as an admonition of its cultural shortcomings, Thompson’s prose poem follows a softball player’s discovery of herself and of the gender bias in the game she adores. The text is loaded with as many questions as answers..... More
Amsterdam: Aschenbach Galerie, 1989. Penck’s signature raw, “primitive” style, which takes cues from graffiti and hearkens to the concurrent pop art movement championed across the Atlantic by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both embodies and communicates the anxious selfhood of one living in Germany during the Cold War. Penck repeats..... More
(N.p. 1988). Offset lithographic poster. Conal, a self-described guerrilla poster artist, here captures conflation under the Reagan Administration of hyper-militarization, Nicaraguan Contras, and the War on Drugs. Against a camouflage background, a suited skeleton gazes out, perhaps as if a dehumanized victim, perhaps as if a soulless political perpetrator. The..... More
Octon, France: Verdigris, 2005. Rothchild’s illustrations—two mezzotints, one of which has been broken up into eight fragments—communicate the pensive darkness of the writer’s desk, laying it, as Bishop does poetically, before the reader in pieces and as a whole. Bishop’s poem was originally published in Geography III in 1976. Her..... More
San Francisco: Sore Dove Press, 2021. A selection of art prints, postcard-sized, by Hirschman, all signed on verso by him. Hirschman was a Beat poet, passionate about the anti-war and Black liberation movements, and the prints represent a sampling of a larger project by him; from 1976 to 1988, he..... More
Edwardsville, IL: Hutchins, Ed, 1991. Four wedge-shaped volumes, with each section describing an obstacle to unification and peace: Hunger, Poverty, Intolerance, and Ignorance. Each volume consists of a series of elaborate folds, with brightly colored illustrations. In a clever structural statement, when the four books are placed together forming a...... More
(Iowa City): Naughty Dog Press, 2002. Five folding wallets, each of which uses a Jacob’s ladder format that allows it to open either from the left or right side. On the internal panels of each wallet Emily Martin has printed opposing statements—”I am a patriot/You are a traitor,” “You have..... More
Seattle: Windowpane Press, 2004. A cube of 42 notched cards, twenty-six of which bear a democratically-minded alphabet. The letters are printed in red and overprinted in black ink with words expressing central tenets of democratic government, with all its positives and negatives. The remaining cards are devoted to calls for..... More
Sydney: Ant Press, 2012. An exploration of Australia’s system of democracy and of the principle of voting rights, Oppen’s book plumbs the ambivalence many modern voters feel toward democracy to analyze the ironies of current governments. The bulk of the book is devoted to a series of linocuts foregrounding the..... More
NY: Vanguard Press, 1928. Ward’s mezzotints, scattered throughout the poem as both borders and full-page illustrations, wield his characteristically soft lines, keen gestures, and ominous shading to emotionally portray the undue hardship endured by Wilde and his fellow prisoners at Reading. Wilde drew particular inspiration from his own experience, having..... More
1986. Twenty-seven assorted art pieces, including xerographs, lithographs, mixed-media collages, and prints, accompany nine text pieces to present an alternative catalogue of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The book supplemented the exhibition, “Art for AIDS: A Creative Response to Crisis,” which took place from October 10 to November..... More
Chicago: Starshaped Press, 2019. Single sheet; folded, the recto provides a synopsis of Farrell’s fraught summer of 2018, when her daughter underwent nearly eight weeks of chest radiation treatments to stem the growth of tumors around her lungs. The side effects were devastating, and the following winter was awash with..... More
Gambier, OH: Unit IV Arts, 2021. Sheffield’s visual and poetic meditation on “lostness” stems, particularly, from an article on Lost Person Behavior, which is the science of applying profiles to know how and where to search for someone, and, generally, from the pervasive and at times either abstract or tangible..... More
Portland, OR: Relay Replay Press, 2011. Wang’s book unfolds through layers of memory in a most literal way, containing within its small self a multitude of images and textures to mimic the scrapbook recollections of a human mind. This particular mind is that of Arnie Metz, one of five seniors..... More
Sitka, Alaska: Orca Press, 1983. Dauenhauer, though himself not indigenous, was married to Tlingit poet, scholar, and advocate Nora Marks Dauenhauer, and he subsequently joined his wife’s efforts to translate and preserve Tlingit oral literature and advocate for the preservation of Tlingit culture through awareness and linguistic study. His poetry..... More
NY: Holt, Rienhart, and Winston, 1970. Kent’s alphabet lauds the democratic vivacity of circuses, taking its cue from the e. e. cummings quotation that titles the book. Other quotations, these from a variety of figures, including Camus, Thoreau, and Emerson, supplement the sweeping Day-Glo illustrations that both decorate and enhance..... More
NY: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1935. Thirty lithographs by Ward illustrate Hicks’ biography of Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World and the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Reed witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution, and through his articles in The Masses, transmitted his impressions to an..... More
Winnetka, IL: Vixen Press, 2002. Caryl Seidenberg’s drawings, reproduced here by polymer plates, depict the simple domestic beauty of sewing materials and, by harsh contrast, semi-abstract visions of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Pinsky’s celebrated poem likewise addresses the injustice of such industrialized and dehumanizing work, beginning..... More
(Providence, RI): RISD, 2015. Ten photopolymer plates depict, in a hazy brown palette, gruesome photos of unidentified female bodies found on the outskirts of the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The images’ abstractness evokes the frightening yet fascinating intermingling of life and death; the lines are definitive, but the..... More
