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Making “I Still Have Everything You Gave Me” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Making “I Still Have Everything You Gave Me” by Naomi Shihab Nye

The grit of this poem appeals to me. I like its staunch acceptance of what’s difficult and its self-determination re: what’s worth keeping. Over the months of working with it, I’ve found myself thinking about longer arcs of legacy. Generational ones.

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26" guillotine paper cutter for sale or trade

26" guillotine paper cutter for sale or trade

I'm deep in shop-move planning and looking to trade out my 26” guillotine for a 23” one.

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Making a mural from a line by Lucille Clifton

Making a mural from a line by Lucille Clifton

The line “i continue to continue” kept ringing for me: staunch, solid, no reason needed for being. When casting about for something I could do for my community in those dire days of being afraid of each other’s breath, I got this crazy idea to paint a mural of that single line.

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Poems Not Bombs: “We Lived Happily during the War” by Ilya Kaminsky

Poems Not Bombs: “We Lived Happily during the War” by Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya’s poem helps me hold contradiction. It gives voice to the fear, the guilt, the confusion that I still hold the same as my teenage self. And it gives me a hint of how to continue, in the middle of the bombing and falling and war-mongering and money-grabbing: “I took a chair outside and watched the sun.”
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How Poetry Broadsides Are Made at Expedition Press

How Poetry Broadsides Are Made at Expedition Press

I read fast, and then I read slow, and I often set it aside for months and see what sticks with me. What surfaces when I pick it up again later. I know I’ve hit on a poem or part of a poem I want to print when it makes me feel something big and I can’t get it out of my head.

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What is a poetry broadside?

What is a poetry broadside?

Simply put, a poetry broadside is a poster of a poem. It doesn’t have to be letterpress and it doesn’t have to be poetry, but letterpress poetry broadsides are the most common ones made today. They are usually framed and hung as artwork.
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The most complex of simplest words: "Loveable" by Raymond Antrobus

The most complex of simplest words: "Loveable" by Raymond Antrobus

Have you been there before? Listening to someone say they love you and nodding along while negating it squarely inside your head?
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Making "What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade" by Brad Aaron Modlin

Making "What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade" by Brad Aaron Modlin

What a poem. It makes me feel at once hopeful and sad, sweet and desolate, longing and content with not knowing. Many lines tug at me and make me cry—in a way that feels like the small child inside of me crying—because she's being seen.

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You are not you for long: Terrance Hayes poetry notecard

You are not you for long: Terrance Hayes poetry notecard

What good's a collaboration if I only share what I feel sure of? I took a deep breath and sent off both excerpts and got a resounding response from the entire SAL staff: You are not you for long. And goodness we aren't, are we?

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From seed to summit: No'u Revilla poetry notecard

From seed to summit: No'u Revilla poetry notecard

I love the mystery and the strength it holds. The lack of translation makes a weaving happen that reminds me of how much I don't know, and can't know.

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Making “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón

Making “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón

This poem gets me every time, especially this time of year, especially this line: “Patient, plodding, a green skin / growing over whatever winter did to us,” — I feel a welling up of all the grief I carry, and as I automatically try to choke it back the poem opens me up further with that “strange idea of continuous living.” 
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Aid to Gaza via poetry prints

Aid to Gaza via poetry prints

For the month of December, Expedition Press will donate 50% of sales from prints by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Mosab Abu Toha to Emergency Aid: Gaza Under Attack, a joint campaign of the Palestinian Feminist Collective x Middle East Children's Alliance.
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On Noticing Love & Studying It: Ross Gay poetry notecard

On Noticing Love & Studying It: Ross Gay poetry notecard

This line is an act of noticing itself. It's not a demand, nor a command. It feels like an invitation and one that I can say yes to no matter how bad or hardhearted I feel. I can notice. And I can study what I notice. Choosing to notice love leads me back to the actual feeling of love.
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Dreams young & old: Pablo Neruda poetry broadside

Dreams young & old: Pablo Neruda poetry broadside

I feel this poem speaks from a young and an old place at the same time and I love how it holds the two together. Unapologetically. It reminds me how we are always ourselves, holding our pain and joy, our knowing and unknowing.

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Simple & unrelenting: “We Love What We Have” by Mosab Abu Toha

Simple & unrelenting: “We Love What We Have” by Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab's poetry goes beyond recognition. It catapults us into actual feelings which is why it's uncomfortable and important to read. And it does this while holding fierce love.
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Colt's Armory press SOLD

Colt's Armory press SOLD

14x22 Colt's Armory press in great working condition for sale. Asking $9,000 obo.
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23" Challenge Guillotine SOLD

23" Challenge Guillotine SOLD

SOLD! 23" Challenge guillotine paper cutter for sale. Asking $900. Sharp, clean, square: this small guillotine cuts big stacks of paper with ease. It's used often in a working print shop and the only reason for selling is that we're getting a bigger one!

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45" Vaggelli Board Shear SOLD

45" Vaggelli Board Shear SOLD

Sold! Beautiful Italian board shear that cuts like a dream. Asking price $3,000. In Kingston, WA.
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Releasing “Apenimonodan” small print by Margaret Noodin

Releasing “Apenimonodan” small print by Margaret Noodin

During the final steps of finishing this print — sorting and counting comp copies, archives, inventory — I found myself setting another and yet another aside, into a gift pile that accrues regularly on one corner of my work table.
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Making “Thank You” by Ross Gay

Making “Thank You” by Ross Gay

While printing this piece, in the literal act of making, I had the strangest feeling that this broadside already existed. Like I found it rather than made it. I've experienced this before but I still cannot explain it.

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Finding strange comfort: Victoria Chang poetry notecard

Finding strange comfort: Victoria Chang poetry notecard

I find a strange comfort in these lines even though I really don't know what they mean. This is what I love about poetry—it eases my need to know and cuts great swathes through my thinking.

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Graveside poetry & pie: Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Graveside poetry & pie: Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Never did I imagine myself more than a decade later, standing in front of Raymond Carver's grave on his birthday, reading this poem to his loved ones at their annual pie and poetry gathering in his honor.
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Letterpress United: No to War

Letterpress United: No to War

“What we want to emphasize with this action is the presence of a real community that can try to respond, with a voice at the same time unique and plural, in a united way to the problems that society presents us, demonstrating our existence and our point of view in a clear and understandable way. We want to make our voice heard clearly on the collective theme of freedom of expression and the rejection of war.”
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Making “Choreography of Ruin” by Ellen Bass

Making “Choreography of Ruin” by Ellen Bass

All the while the feeling of it soothed me. The quiet potatoes and the wind rubbing the trees leant a calm recognition of the present ruin we’re in. I needed those words.
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Poetry Unbound & On Being

Poetry Unbound & On Being

“immerse yourself in a single poem ... anchor your week … to the everyday poetry of your life …” I felt a thrill roll through me, a mirror held up at once.
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Making “tó” by Sherwin Bitsui

Making “tó” by Sherwin Bitsui

I don't know if this is relevant but the four sacred colors in Navajo are blue, yellow, jet, and white.”
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Embracing Grief

Embracing Grief

What I’m most grateful for about the losses I’ve experienced in my life is their effect of making me suddenly, unexpectedly, excruciatingly present. The summer my older brother died I was painting a friend’s 2-story 4-bedroom house a soft pale yellow.

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June Jordan by Sabina Smith

June Jordan by Sabina Smith

When I first read June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights,” it was the first day of spring break. I was sitting at a coffee shop next to Expedition Press with my friend. We saw Myrna and she invited us over. On her wall in the shop there was a copy of the poem tacked up. I still can’t fully describe how powerful it felt, so full of emotion and honestly, I’d never read anything more mesmerizing. 

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On Edge

On Edge

Recently I was interviewed by a 13 yr old who asked me what the hardest part of my job is. “Time!” I said immediately. “Good lord, time management. Knowing what to prioritize when.” A week prior a journalist asked me about my relationship to time as if I knew some secret about detaching from the fast-paced pressures of the digital

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Building an Art Show

Building an Art Show

A year ago, at a windy roadside stop in South Dakota with a couple flickering bars of reception, I checked my email. There was a message from the manager of a gallery in downtown Seattle. She was wondering whether I wanted to join next year?

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Making Sweet Darkness

Making Sweet Darkness

I first read the poem “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte on a Friday, at the end of one of the worst weeks of my life. Husband demanding separation, step daughter screaming, mother gone missing.

 

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Ode to Morning Pages

Ode to Morning Pages

It’s a simple practice. Write three pages, first thing every morning, longhand. Can't imagine not writing them.

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On Propaganda & Personalizing

On Propaganda & Personalizing

I watched the election results come in with increasing sickness. I went to bed early and woke up numb. The rollercoaster ride since recalls the early days after my brother died: anger, shock, despair, and overall a grand penetrating sense of pure disbelief.

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Broken Broadsides

Broken Broadsides

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my voice as an artist and my role as a publisher: how they inform and whether they inhibit each other. I feel a strong insistence that I should divide these actions and define them. Then I forget.

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Design Process with Metal Type

Design Process with Metal Type

People often gawk when I give a typesetting demo, sliding each metal letter one by one into the composing stick, tilted at an angle to keep them in line, upside down and backwards.

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Letterpress Workers 2016

Letterpress Workers 2016

I’m just back from two weeks in Italy, the first in Milan, the second at Tipoteca Italiana and then Venice. I am sitting here back in New York feeling a little sad, missing all the lovely new friends I made and knowing I won’t see them for quite some time. Oh time. But what a time!

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