Litmus Press

Publisher of innovative, cross-genre, and interdisciplinary work by poets, writers, translators, and artists. Follow us!

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11/12/2025

💫 Donate or become a member at the link in our bio 💫

Despite threats on all fronts, we’re keeping vital 20th‑century poetic experiments alive, because we’re aware of the urgent need for the radical and imaginative models left to us by our progressive and feminist forbears.

To sustain this work, we need your help.

Your membership or donation today goes directly toward:

-Payments to authors, translators, and artists
-Fair wages for our small, dedicated staff
-Printing costs for new and backlist titles
-Free reading and teaching resources that make bold, forward-thinking contemporary writing accessible to all

Every gift helps! 🌖 ✨

11/04/2025

We’re excited to be en route to the American Literary Translators Association conference in Tucson this week AND to be launching our new blog, THE ETHER SEA, with an interview by Clarise Reichley with Virginie Poitrasson and Michelle Noteboom on The Unlikeness of Things!

“I wanted to write an intimate and physical adventure leading to the troubling encounter of the ‘other of oneself,’ because there is something immensely unstable within us, and one of the main challenges of writing is no doubt to invent—in each book—a poetics of this instability of bodies,” says Poitrasson.

On translating, Michelle Noteboom writes: “Virginie’s book itself is underpinned by defamiliarization, as the body is constantly thrust into situations that demand—and produce—a different sort of perception, or altered perception... In my ‘day job’ as a translator in the audiovisual business, producing voiceover or subtitles, it is all about ‘massaging the French out’ of the English until no traces of it are left. Here, the English remains stained by the French (hopefully in a good way), and that may be what gives it a sense of ‘defamiliarization.’”

Read on at the link in our bio!

https://litmuspress.org/the-ether-sea-blog/

11/01/2025

Litmus Press & Wave Archive invite you to a reading on Thursday, November 6th with performances by Magdalena Zurawski, Raquel Gutiérrez, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, poupeh missaghi, and James Loop. Doors 8pm. Free / by donation at Wave Archive, 197 Toole Ave. Tucson. 🌊

We’re excited to be at the American Literary Translators Association ALTA conference book fair this year! Check us out at the fair and at our offsite reading!

See you in Tucson!

10/23/2025

As part of the Publishing-In-Transit Series, where publishers discuss their work, our very own Monti—usually hard at work editing books here at Litmus—will talk about their publishing circuits and projects beyond Litmus, alongside the magnificent Cole Swensen and writers/publishers Erin Honeycutt and Katharina Ludwig.

Tune in online through this coming Wednesday at 1 PM EST!

10/02/2025

What people are saying about Mira Mattar’s Yes, I Am A Destroyer:

“An astonishing, contrary, visionary rush – insightful, poignant and ecstatic.”
—China Miéville

“[A] dazzling hybrid of experimental prose, autofiction, and poetry that resists the stricturing confines of embodiment, selfhood and identity at every turn.”
—Odhran O’Donoghue

“What if the self were necessary to its own undoing? As in: the only one capable of dismantling the first-person’s tightly wound ideological conglomerate—on which literature so heavily depends—is the self itself...This is an extraordinary book. Everyone who is someone should read it—to become no one.”
—Mirene Arsanios

“...[M]y words fail. This is the kind of book that pulls me in at ungodly hours, holds me transfixed in its questionings: ‘what can I recall without memory?’ asks Mattar’s speaker of family objects, or ‘why may they have their eyes when we may not have our own?’ .... A work of ineffable brilliance from one of my favorite Palestinian poets alive.
—George Abraham, author of Birthright

“[Yes, I Am A Destroyer] leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection.... This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.”
—Lisa Robertson

Yes, I Am A Destroyer is available via the link in bio.

First published in 2020 by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in the UK and Europe, we are honored to make *Yes, I Am A Destroyer* available to a North American audience.

As always, you can support Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide in Gaza. You can materially support Palestinian life in Gaza by donating to a green resistance movement working towards reviving Gaza’s farmland by building food sovereignty. Protest, boycott, donate NOW.

09/25/2025

"DEAD YOUTH 1: How’s the dawn?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Bilious. An ugly thing. So new, yet it glooms like cholangiocarcinoma. & glops its cellophane.

DEAD YOUTH 1: And how’s the moon?

DEAD YOUTH 2: Green Cheese.

DEAD YOUTH 1: Yuk yuk"

Online edition and workshop today at the link in bio

[Photo taken during the production of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, written by Joyelle McSweeney, performed and produced by Runaways Lab Theater, Chicago, 2017.
Pictured are Dylan Fahoome, Candace Hundell, Gannon Reedy, Ronen Kohn, Will Green]

09/23/2025

Only 2 days until we gather online for the launch of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks!

With writing prompts, readings + conversation from Joyelle McSweeney & Tonya M. Foster.

🔗 RSVP at the link in bio

09/18/2025

Biswamit Dwibedy and Pam Dick at last week's celebration of ERODE in Berlin. Some more glimpse from the reading, which also featured fellow Litmus friends Oana Avasilichioaei and Cole Swensen. Thank you to Hopscotch Reading Room for hosting such a wonderful evening and for all who joined us across the ocean.

ERODE is now available for Purchase through Asterism. If you are a bookstore in Europe interested in stocking Erode let us know -– we have some copies over here.

09/16/2025

You’re invited!
Join us next week for a free generative workshop and discussion which also doubles as the virtual launch of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, a digital critical edition, with Joyelle McSweeney & Tonya M. Foster.

This launch is part of our Open Poetics Series: making out-of-print titles available as eBooks, with expanded resources and multimedia tools. The new digital-critical edition of Dead Youth was curated in close collaboration with McSweeney and is entirely free to access.

The Online Launch will include writing prompts, discussions and reading facilitated by McSweeney and poet Tonya M. Foster. Sign up through the link in our bio

📅 September 25, 3:30pm ET
🌐 Online, free & open
🔗 RSVP via link in bio

09/11/2025

We’re excited to be tabelling at the iconic NY Art Book Fair this weekend debuting as POETRY CORP., a collective of five NYC-based publishers—Belladonna* Collaborative, Futurepoem, Litmus Press, Winter Editions, and World Poetry—working together as a mutual aid publishing cooperative.

We’ll have limited editions of Spectral Evidence: The Witch Box, the paperback, and a few other special treats.

📍 Booth
📅 September 11–14
🏛️ MoMA PS1, Long Island City
🎟️ Free admission on Sunday!

For admission details + full schedule, check the NYABF website.

09/09/2025

Book launch + Berlin reading!

ERODE by Biswamit Dwidbedy launches with Litmus Press on September 15.�This stunning new lyric brings together his first out-of-print book Ozalid and expands it into Erode.

Berlin friends — we've got a special reading coming up! Come through this Friday at Hopscotch Reading Room (Nansenstraße 2). Biswamit will be reading from Erode alongside none other than Cole Swensen, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Moyna Pam Dick(aka Lou/Gregoire/Mina Pam Dick et al.).

Europe: more stops from Biswamit coming soon. Stay tuned!

09/08/2025

We are excited to announce that Mira Mattar’s *Yes, I Am A Destroyer* comes out on September 15th! You can pre-order a copy now at Asterism Books

First published in 2020 by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in the UK and Europe, we are honored to make *Yes, I Am A Destroyer* available to new audiences in North America and beyond. With new cover art by

Mira Mattar writes fiction, poetry and essays. She is the author of Yes, I Am A Destroyer (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020; Litmus Press, 2025), Affiliation (Sad Press, 2021), The Bow (2021), and the chapbook, And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring (Veer2, 2023). Mira lives and works in London.

Support Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide in Gaza. You can materially support Palestinian life in Gaza by donating money to a green resistance movement working towards reviving Gaza’s farmland by building food sovereignty.

Links in bio.

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