Slope Editions

If there is a current running through most Slope Editions books, it's the current of delight.

Our authors are curious and wide ranging. They are people with whom you'd chat easily for, as evidenced by their work, they think of everything ranging from TV shows to aviaries to pop music to Jacques Lacan.

They are interesting writers, and our staff are interesting and devoted people; our readers are probably interesting, too.

And there's a kind of pallor I associate with big-city, big-staff, big-visibility, big-budget presses. Slope Editions is the blood flowing, is diversity. We're spread out over three states and began online, for crying out loud.

The typical university or brownstone press seems mostly to put out "safe" and truly forgettable books, plainly put. As a teacher, I've thought much less about poetry in recent years than, say, things like urban planning or McDonaldization or environmental studies because so much that I do see bores me.

I've got seventy-five student essays to read, two children and a third on the way, and a 1,000-mile-a-week commute between Buffalo and New Hampshire to make, and a publishing house wants me to read yet another jerk-off book with unintelligible blurbs on the back?

It wants me to find time for more poems about privileged academic life—quiet mornings in a track suit in a marble kitchen—or "gritty," below-the-radar borough life?

Sorry, I've got better things to do. And hopefully, Slope Editions represents, to at least some readers of American and international poetry, one of those better things to do.