Buffalo News Art Critic Colin Dabkowski Traces the Transformation of a Magazine into a Press
From the outside, the past few days might have seemed like a startling explosion of growth for Foundlings Press. Last Wednesday we announced our formal publishing partnership with The Public, Western New York’s alternative weekly newspaper, and teased the cover of our first title under the “Public Books” imprint, Bruce Fisher’s Where The Streets Are Paved With Rust: Essays From America’s Broken Heartland, Vol. 1, to be officially released Friday 6 April at Community Beer Works’ new Jersey Street location. This Friday, 16 March, at Hotel Henry, we’re releasing our first poetry collection, Lytton Smith’s My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, winner of the 2017 Foundlings Artist Residency and Chapbook Contest, designed by guest book artist Stephen Fitzmaurice. Meanwhile, we’re nearing the end of our open submission period for an upcoming release celebrating the life and work of the poet Frank Stanford.
These projects may all have come to fruition within the same short time frame, but, as Buffalo News Art Critic Colin Dabkowski explains in today’s paper, all are the products of a long period of gestation, as Foundlings gradually transformed from a biannual print publication with a modest circulation into what it is today: an independent literary publishing house with a national audience and roster of writers.
“With this book launch, a planned second residency, and another book on the way,” Dabkowski writes, “the fledgling Foundlings is off to a good start.”
More About My Radar
Book Launch Reading and Reception
Hotel Henry
444 Forest Ave, Buffalo, NY 14213
100 Acres Restaurant and LBAC Gallery
6pm: Cocktails
7pm: Poetry (Noah Falck, Janet McNally, and Lytton Smith)
8pm: Book sales and signing (plus more cocktails)
Lytton Smith’s My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, winner of the 2017 Foundlings Press Artist Residency and Chapbook Contest, is a deeply sensitive, wide-ranging, and lyrical exploration of human connection, technology, proximity, the past in the present, and the natural environment.
“With each poem that begins with his namesake’s classic line, Lytton Smith’s chapbook tests the limits of language just as it tests the limits of human relationships,” the poet Anthony Caleshu writes.” Words hold us together even when we’re questioning their validity. Our linguistic (and so our human) scale has just gotten bigger and bolder.”
The book features illustrations and conceptual design from Philadelphia-based artist Stephen Fitzmaurice.
Lytton Smith is the author of two books of poetry from Nightboat Books and the translator of several books from the Icelandic. The novel Öræfi—the Wastelands, from the Icelandic of Ófeigur Sigurðsson, will be published by Deep Vellum in spring 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo.
