Kindling by Claudia Torres

Click the image to read the full text of the poem, or purchase it here. 

The Poet: 
Claudia Torres is at home in the woods of Western New York where she walks daily in the park with her dogs. In a former life, she was the creator and host of the public access television show Truckstop Intellectuals, which showcased local artists and writers. This is her second Architrave poem. 

The Poem: 
“Yet upon screwing said song and dance/ I find myself asking “now what?”” Indeed. It’s fine to escape, even fun, but sooner or later it falls flat as a strategy for living. This speaker’s preferred method is chemical but it could just as easily have been food, shopping, sex, travel, fight club... Torres’ speaker knows that these are, at best, temporary relief from the deep dissatisfactions inherent to being alive, which is why the end of this poem rings true. Unhappy at yet another family function, the speaker acknowledges that everything that drove her to drugs still exists, as does the desire to escape again. We can only hope to keep it in check while “Life gives what it can.”

The Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 18pt Century Roman 
Body: 12pt Futura Roman & Italic 
A straight shooting poem needs a sturdy typeface that nonetheless has a bit of style. Futura is somehow mostly straight but slightly rounded, evenly weighted but overall a light presence on the page. How else to convey the poem’s struggle? Century provides just enough curl to give the title and poet’s name the attention they deserve.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

I Am This by Meagan Gamble

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet: 
Meagan Gamble is a very recent graduate of Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. She writes poetry, fiction, emails, grocery lists and blog entries. She’s a native Iowan, although she currently lives in Illinois, and she loves the Midwest even though she’s been trying to leave since she was ten. You can find her and more of her poetry, fiction, et cetera at meagangamble.blogspot.com 

The Poem: 
Gamble’s speaker knows saints and superheroes exist not just in the mundane world but because of it. The idea that a person’s wounds can make them great isn’t new; what’s fresh here is the speaker’s appropriation of her Heros’ wounds instead of their fame. It’s easy to get angry when you’ve been kidnapped to the underworld or “roped... under an overpass,” it might make you want to escape, “fly [your] plane at night when no one can see” or “hide beneath the flowers.” But a girl can’t stay hidden forever and the nasty, violent world persists. The poet gives us a compelling alternative: own it all, stake a fierce claim and announce it to the world with your best barbaric yawp.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Optimus Princeps 
Body: 12pt Writing Stuff 
A manifesto, by definition, is deeply personal and seethes with energy. This one reads like something scrawled in haste, in the heat of its moment across whatever surface was available. Writing Stuff is a handwriting typeface that is nonetheless delicate, like the speaker, who, chronically misunderstood, has been pushed to the edge. Likewise, the small caps of Optimus Princeps, its slightly larger caps and pronounced serifs read like a shout: Here I Am! All Of Me! Look!

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

Laurels In September by Kejt Walsh

Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet: 
Kejt Walsh emerged, dew-eyed, from Iowa’s capitol city and has been splitting time between East and West Coast haunts ever since. Kejt likes drinking chai with non-dairy milk, petting large dogs, and walking in the rain. Kejt’s poetry has been featured in GOUIEand Bluestem, and an essay entitled “Why I Write” appeared in Broad! a gentlelady’s magazine. Kejt is currently completing a philosophy degree in Eugene, OR, and looks forward to a life characterized by the constant presence of books. 

The Poem: 
Have you ever wanted to escape so badly that you wished you could transform yourself, become unrecognizable? It’s a story that reaches back to Apollo and Daphne, but Kejt Walsh gives it an uneasy, modern twist. Her speaker identifies with all the would-be Daphnes who “each turn tree,” calling one “sweet sister.” Her descriptions of these “tree-girls” betray her own longing to transform, to “reach/ for other leaves, birds’ nests.” But she can’t quite forget that trees get cut down for all kinds of arbitrary reasons. It’s this knowledge that undercuts the last line; in such a world, no one is “saved” and the speaker knows her “feeble assurances” to the contrary aren’t enough. Safety is, at best, temporary, no matter how much the speaker longs for it, no matter how hard she tries to reassure herself of the contrary.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 24 & 18pt Euphorogenic 
Body: 14pt Echelon 
Trees as women, women as trees - it was probably an old association even in antiquity, so it’s no coincidence that we call tree branches “limbs.” The typeface therefore needed to have a similar reaching quality without becoming illegible. Echelon’s diagonals arc off the vertical stems (see the capital N) and in letters like the lower case w, create a swaying effect. Euphorigenic is similarly organic, the way the capitals and the lower case t descend, how its heavy serifs root it to the baseline, the tendrils of the capital S and lower case j.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

The Moth by Michael Hettich

Read the full text of the poem by clicking on the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
Michael Hettich has published a dozen chapbooks and books over the years, most recently The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers Press, 2011) and Like HappinessThe Measured Breathing, won the 2011 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook contest. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He lives in Miami and teaches at Miami Dade College. His website is michaelhettich.com. 

The Poem:
This poem offers a kind of Mad Hatter’s trip down memory lane, which is to say, there is no room for nostalgia and the pace is way faster than a stroll. In place of a white rabbit we follow a moth and then a young man back into the recesses of our own heads, where our memories are at once familiar and changed. But the poet doesn’t let us linger there – he turns the young man around, sends him right back out into the present, “buoyant/ with a new sense of life.” The insistent “ifs” continue, piling up into an irresistible urgency to keep the man/moth moving until he either injures himself or collapses in exhaustion. It’s the kind of feeling you might get “toward the end of an evening run,” the end of the work week, the end of your
working life…

The Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt Gill Sands Italic
Alternate title O: 30pt Gill Sands Roman
Body: 12pt Gill Sands Roman
Alternate body O: 12pt Gill Sands Italic
Long poems require a typeface that lets the reader’s eye slide along the page, unobstructed. But this is also a fanciful poem, so there needed to be a bit of whimsy as well. Gill Sands is all of that: highly legible yet the lower case g is the epitome of squiggle. The right half of the lower case k doesn’t quite meet its vertical stroke and
the lower case f and l refuse to combine into a ligature (as they do in, for example, Futura). When you tell a friend a fanciful story, their eyes might widen, their mouths might open into a silent O – and so this poem has substituted Os in key words, as if it cannot quite believe its own story.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis 
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

The Old Now by Michael Bazzett

Read the full text of the poem by clicking on the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
Michael Bazzett's poems have appeared in West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review, DIAGRAM, and Guernica, among others, and his work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was the winner of the 2008 Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and new poems are forthcoming in Carolina Quarterly, Pleiades, Smartish Pace and The Literary Review. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. 

The Poem:
Imagine all the moments of your past (both those you’d love to relive and those you’d rather forget) intent on happening again. They haven’t really “passed thoughtlessly away” at all. They’re just “in a back room… hold[ing] vigil/ elbows propped on the windowsill” looking for a way into the present moment. They might take the form of a memory or a dream, or maybe just a vague feeling that the same things happen over and over. Bazzett’s speaker is haunted by it all, but gently so: the poem’s closing image of rabbits munching clover is all springtime possibility, and isn’t that why we hold our memories so close? It’s hard to know which has the stronger pull, the possibility of renewed happiness or the chance to set a wrong to right.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 24 & 18pt Optima roman
Body: 12pt Helvetica roman & italic
For a poem that addresses the transition between moments, the typefaces needed to be similar enough to suggest a continuum but at the same time distinctly different. Helvetica is a classic modern sans serif – ubiquitous in public signage, helping people get from here to there – but somehow timeless. Optima is ever so slightly serifed, more distinctive but less famous, a first cousin.
Using digital design to create printers plates allowed me to reverse the type of the title for a true mirror effect – something that's impossible with lead type. It seemed appropriate for a poem that loops back on itself "sensing [its own] seeds of return."

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

Woodmere by gaye gambell-peterson

Read the full text of the poem by clicking on the image, or purchase it here.

The Poet:
gaye gambell-peterson believes in layers. She seems compelled to pile words on a page, or stick bits of stuff onto a canvas. Her two books feature her poetry and her collages: pale leaf floating (Cherry Pie Press) and MYnd mAp (Agog Press). Her poems have been published here and there, and awarded locally. Her collages have been juried into national shows and have been used as covers for many book publications. Travel inspires her—whether it’s to other continents, to one coast or the other, or simply spending a weekend at a Missouri B&B where the screened porch overlooks the pond. Member of Loosely Identified (a collective of women poets) and the St. Louis Poetry Center. www.gayegambellpeterson.com 

The Poem:
Our world is faster and louder than ever. The result is a fragmented, cacophonous experience that can feel meaningless. But gambell-peterson insists it's possible to make sense of things, if only we're willing to "sit silent" long enough to "let the wild grow accustomed." There is, of course, the need for the creatures in this poem to become comfortable with their human visitors, but there is also the need for the humans to quiet themselves. It's only after this essential first step that the speaker can begin to impose an order on her observations of the landscape, in this case the musical structure of a symphony. From random sounds, meaning is created; whether we sit by a wooded pond or on a bench downtown, it's what we do.

The Design: 
Title & Name: 30pt & 24pt Goudy Old Style
Body: 12pt Balham
The contrast of thin and thick strokes in Balham mimics the "there and gone again" elusiveness of the creatures and forces that create this poem's sounds. It also gives the page a lightness that matches the poem's tone. Goudy Old Style is weightier, but not so much as to capsize the balance of the page.

Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis

Happy Birthday To Me, by Christopher Citro

Read the full text of the poem by clicking on the image or purchase it here.


The Poet:
Christopher Citro's poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry East, Arts & Letters Prime, Fourteen Hills, The Cincinnati Review, the minnesota review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He has taught creative writing at Indiana University and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry has twice been featured on Verse Daily, and his awards include the 2006 Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Darrell Burton Fellowship in Creative Writing. He lives in Syracuse, New York, but you can visit him online at www.christophercitro.com



The Poem:
Willy is a very odd guy, but humorously so. It’s hard not to chuckle at his “conversation pit (filled with alligators and musty water)” or the cobra sitting in his chair, because they’re so over the top. Who keeps such creatures around the house? A guy like Willy, for whom a look-alike zombie turns out to be the perfect gift – and therein lies the heart of this poem: it's friendship. Bianca understands and accepts Willy as he is. She sees him more clearly than he (at least at first) sees himself and she responds accordingly. That’s a true friend.


The Design:
Title & Name: 30 & 20pt Garamond Bold
Medieval Title: 30pt Cardinal
Body: 13pt Garamond Roman
Medieval Body: 13pt Cardinal
Willy’s eccentricity called for a typeface that you just don’t see every day. Dieter Stefmann’s Cardinal strikes an excellent balance between the exotic and the legible. But what to pair with it? The companion typeface had to be unobtrusive, yet also harmonious. Garamond’s ascenders, descenders and ligatures offer just a hint of the more pronounced flourishes in Cardinal.


Editorial & Design by Architrave Press, St. Louis
Letterpress printed on the Heidelberg at All Along Press, St. Louis