Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

TRENDS

almost fifty years,” Hen-
derson says, referring
to the annual Pushcart
Prize anthology, which
showcases the best writ-
ing published by small
presses and journals
during the previous year.
Pushcart Press also occa-
sionally publishes books
that in-house editors
loved but were rejected
by their houses.
Lethem has long been
a champion of titles that have fallen
out of print. He points out that books
by many of his favorite authors, from
Philip K. Dick and Paula Fox to Mel-
ville, were at one time out of print. He
adores the New York Review Books
Classics series, which has republished
hundreds of long-ignored gems and
demonstrated that these books can still
awaken the public imagination—and
turn a profit. Lethem even coedited a
title in the series, a 2012 book of se-
lected stories by science fiction master
Robert Sheckley. Still, the novelist sees
plenty of room in the reprint market
for “scruffy books that are even more
lopsided and wonky or peculiar.”

Rosalyn Drexler’s Bad

Guy fits that bill. The

book revolves around a

psychoanalyst who tries

unconventional methods

of curing her patient, a

teenage rapist and mur-

derer whose sociopathy

has been fueled by tele-

vision violence. Drexler

boldly experiments with

narrative and depicts sex

and violence without

apology or pussyfoot-

ing. “It’s emotionally sophisticated and

savvy and street-smart,” Lethem says,

“and in another way, it’s raw, antic, off-

kilter, and unrefined.”

Drexler, who is ninety-two and lives

in New York City, is best known as an

early contributor to the pop art move-

ment. She has won Obies for her play-

writing and an Emmy for cowriting

Lily, a 1973 Lily Tomlin TV special.

She once toured the United States as

a professional wrestler named “Rosa

Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire,” and wrote

about the adventure in her 1972 novel,

To Smithereens. Bad Guy is the seventh

of her nine novels.

JULY AUGUST 2019 18

Small Press Points

“A poem can exist in a specific cultural or emotional moment,
but it can also sustain and be revisited over and over again,” says poet
Adam Deutsch, the publisher of Cooper Dillon Books (www.cooperdillon
.com), a ten-year-old press dedicated to “the values that make poetry
timeless.” Deutsch and assistant editor Christine Bryant Cohen run the
press from San Diego and Seattle, publishing one or two books a year.
So far they have released six full-length poetry collections and eight
chapbooks by writers such as Jill Alexander Essbaum, Melody S. Gee, and
William Matthews. Cooper Dillon’s most recent titles are Linda Dove’s chapbook Fearn
(2019), a meditation on fear, and Mónica Gomery’s debut collection, Here Is the Night
and the Night on the Road (2018), which Lillian-Yvonne Bertram says is “an exquisite study
in the suddenness of numbered days and the radiant pain of living with love ‘tumbling
forth.’” The press eschews contests and instead welcomes submissions year-round via
Submittable with a $10 reading fee, which is waived if you purchase one of the press’s
titles. Deutsch believes standard book-contest entry fees, typically $20 or $25, are too
high and prefers the press to “remain open for when a writer feels that the time is right
to submit.” He adds, “We see poetry as community, not competition.”

Continued on page 20

Jonathan Lethem

lethem: amy maloof