grama magazine, in collaboration with Auto Destructing Books, is thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of Plantable Chapbooks! Bound in handmade paper embedded with wildflower seeds, Plantable Chapbooks are designed to be returned to the earth.
Introducing Plantable Chapbooks!
grama magazine is thrilled to announce, in collaboration with Travis Sharp’s Auto Destructing Books, the first release of our series of Plantable Chapbooks, Matthew Cooperman’s SHOSH NE NS. Plantable Chapbooks are designed to be returned to the earth. Plantable Chapbooks is a project intended to interrogate the received form of the codex or art object while simultaneously making a concrete gesture towards a form of earthly reparation.
We see this series as positioning the book (or, in this case, chapbook) as an art object or installation piece, and further as a site of performance: just as a reader is required to activate a text’s potential, so too must a reader decide to destroy the text in order to make possible its final stage–returning to the soil, and returning the page to its previous life as plant matter. We posit Plantable Chapbooks as a sort of compost poetics in which poetry becomes recyclable, a potential compost for fertilizing the future.
Each book’s cover is made from plantable seed paper (handmade by Porridge Papers in Lincoln, NE), letterpressed here at SUNY Buffalo, and hand-bound by the editors.
“SHOSH NE NS is an erasure project based off of Ed Dorn’s (1929-99) pioneering ethnography The Shoshoneans: the People of the Basin-Plateau (with photographs by Leroy Lucas), originally published by William Morrow in 1966. A year after the watershed Berkeley Poetry Festival–and Malcom X is assassinated–a long-haired Dorn and afro’d African-American Lucas, wander the highways and backroads of Nevada, randomly encountering the remaining Shoshoni people of the Great Basin. Never overtly political, never overtly anthropological, the book is a series of encounters, a quest narrative, and a road book with no explicit destination.”
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/ Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), as well as Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Editions, 2016), the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/ Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis, 2013), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath, 2011) and other books. A Poetry Editor for Colorado Review, and Professor at Colorado State University, he lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children. www.matthewcooperman.org.
Please contact Meagan at m.gramamag@gmail.com for information on how to obtain a copy of SHOSH NE NS. Books are made to order, so please allow a few weeks.
You can watch our planted chapbook grow via gramamag’s instagram @gramamag!
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