Our Story

APOSTROPHE BOOKS began as a discussion, not surprisingly, about the current conditions and circumstances of poetry publishing in America and internationally. Although there seems to be a proliferation of small presses—many of them interesting, complex, and compelling—we found a striking gap in work devoted to the hybridization and intersection of poetic discourse with theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and pataphysics.

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The potential to expand the definition of poetry—at this moment in time—to include these other modes of thought and representation seems crucial, urgent. Over the past 20 to 30 years, philosophical and poetic discourse has revealed an obsession with textual surfaces, consciousness in language, and the seeming instability (even dissolution) of the imagination. Innovation, the mantra of Modernism, has become suspect.

Ironically, the subsequent responses to this crisis of imagination and representation, to human subjectivity itself, have often been extraordinarily innovative and imaginative. To bind or restrict these responses with pre-established forms and genres seems awkward, if not absurd.

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Therefore, we launched APOSTROPHE BOOKS to promote work that undermines generic categories and questions, explores, investigates, and/or challenges the very act of creative and imaginative language with creative and imaginative language.

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The founders, publishers, and editors of APOSTROPHE BOOKS are Mark Tursi and Richard Greenfield. Our book designer is Sunjidmaa Ganbold. Each book is a collaborative effort from cover to cover, start to finish. We also receive assistance from graduate student interns from New Mexico State University. Most recently, Jill Mceldowney assisted with the interior of Carlos Lara’s The Green Record.