Essay Press

30/09/2025

We have two books coming out today — Kate Colby’s Paradoxx and Julie Carr’s The Garden. Happy pub day!!

https://www.essaypress.org

24/09/2025

Coming next week!

A one-hundred-day chronicle of a dark period in her life, Kate Colby’s tightly-wound lyric essay is also a poet’s memoir of growing up in the late 20th century and stumbling into the 21st.

22/09/2025

Happy pub day! Kelly Puig’s The Book of Embers is here.

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers reenvisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, lineage, and what it means to live at the edge of story, self, and structure. It braids fiction, essay, art history, and memoir into a thread that tunnels into the recursive nature of consciousness itself.

To open the book is to enter a psychic observatory, where Hilma af Klint maps a blueprint of inner vision, Georgia O’Keeffe distills form into feeling, and Yayoi Kusama installs her Infinity Mirror Room inside the text. Leonora Carrington rides through on the back of a beast, helping the book remember its animal body, while Etel Adnan teaches the sentence its tidal topography to redefine here. Around them flicker Borges, Bachelard, Carson, Cixous, Lispector, Pessoa—facets of a living prism. Ultimately, the book reveals itself to be burning flame and alchemical retort: a device that is also a process, a process that is also a person, transmuting endlessly.

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers reenvisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, .....

20/09/2025

Julie Carr’s The Garden is out on September 30th! Copublished with Pamenar Press

Julie Carr’s The Garden, book one of the trilogy Overflow, dedicates itself to two seminal figures in Carr’s life: the painter Tony Robbin, who paints four-dimensional space, and the theoretical physicist, feminist, and philosopher, Karen River Barad.

Through a spirited series of fractured and interwoven narratives, The Garden reorients themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship, and grief. The garden, as a foundational site of fallness, separation, and loss, is also where we discover desire, becoming, and poiesis. This work of essay-auto-fiction embraces the porous vulnerability of beings appearing in the overflow, the violence and rapture of the ongoing “now.” A city is invaded as a lost child is found, a sw****ka reanimates itself across the internet, a bullet grazes a girl in parking lot, a Moroccan Jewish grandmother witnesses Operation Torch from a Casablanca rooftop, a boy raised in Yokohama in the aftermath of the atomic blasts grows up to father a baby with a hole in his heart: these moments that resound backwards and at the same time shoot forwards, this “oftening, over-and-overing, and aftering,” is what we call history.

https://www.essaypress.org/carr-2/

19/09/2025

Out on Monday: Kelly Puig’s The Book of Embers!

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers re-envisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out.

https://www.essaypress.org/puig/

12/09/2025

The Book of Embers, winner of the Essay Press book prize, is almost here! Preorder by September 22nd

https://www.essaypress.org/puig/

07/09/2025

Praise for Kate Colby’s Paradoxx - available now for preorder, ships September 30th!

https://www.essaypress.org/colby/

04/09/2025

The Book of Embers is out on September 22nd! Available now for preorder

https://www.essaypress.org/puig/

02/09/2025

More praise for I’m Sorry But None Of This Is My Fault! Out now https://www.essaypress.org/shea/

“In the age of Babel where language suffers from misuse, our muse is misuse. Michael Martin Shea’s poems ‘survey dereliction.’ They offer us a stream of the quotidian, the grotesque; an echo chamber of our toxic culture, relentless as existence. Okay fine,’ he says to the horror. But still the poet chases that ‘lunar ache.

— Sara Nicholson

“I’m not sure what these are. At times confession, at times accusation, at times grieving declaration informed by the moral and political ecologies of spectacle, they are also just incomprehensibly weird. And ingenious. And uplifting.”

— Gabriel Gudding

“In the age of Babel where language suffers from misuse, our muse is misuse. Michael Martin Shea’s poems ‘survey dereliction.’ They offer us a stream of the quotidian, the grotesque; an echo chamber of our toxic culture, relentless as existence. Okay fine,’ he says to the horror. But still...

27/08/2025

The Taste of Pencils, adapted from Kate Colby’s forthcoming Paradoxx, is up now in the Paris Review.

August 22, 2025 – “It seems to me I’ve never forgotten a taste.”

26/08/2025

Kelly Puig’s The Book of Embers is now available for preorder! Out on September 22nd.

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers reenvisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, lineage, and what it means to live at the edge of story, self, and structure. It braids fiction, essay, art history, and memoir into a thread that tunnels into the recursive nature of consciousness itself.

To open the book is to enter a psychic observatory, where Hilma af Klint maps a blueprint of inner vision, Georgia O’Keeffe distills form into feeling, and Yayoi Kusama installs her Infinity Mirror Room inside the text. Leonora Carrington rides through on the back of a beast, helping the book remember its animal body, while Etel Adnan teaches the sentence its tidal topography to redefine here. Around them flicker Borges, Bachelard, Carson, Cixous, Lispector, Pessoa—facets of a living prism. Ultimately, the book reveals itself to be burning flame and alchemical retort: a device that is also a process, a process that is also a person, transmuting endlessly.

https://www.essaypress.org/puig/mbr y

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers reenvisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, .....

02/06/2025

From Kate Colby's Paradoxx - forthcoming!

https://asterismbooks.com/product/paradoxx-kate-colby