New from Gold Line Press: Jessica Poli’s The Egg Mistress and Alisa Slaughter’s Bad Habitats
Ricochet Editions, founded in 2012, is an imprint of Gold Line Press, from the University of Southern California’s program in Literature & Creative Writing. Each member of Ricochet’s small editorial team reads every submission Ricochet receives, and the editors aim to publish 2-3 chapbooks a year of “innovative, non-traditional, trans-genre, or genre-less works that have a hard time finding homes in journals, competitions, and with other chapbook publishers.”
It’s a laudable goal in its own right, but it also serves as welcome addition to Gold Line’s collection, which, though hardly “conservative,” is generally limited to distinct forms of “fiction” and “poetry.”
Ricochet Editions’ first three chapbooks. Layouts and designs for Unchecked Savagery and The Exiles by Scott Massey (nohawk.com).
Ricochet’s entry into the chapbook scene comes by way of three titles — Bradley Harrison’s Diorama of a People, Burning; Matthew Kirkpatrick’s The Exiles; and Glenn Shaheen’s Unchecked Savagery –each of which exudes its own organic form: Harrison’s, though classified by Ricochet as “poetry,” is a collection of erasures of his own prose source texts, which are presented once in full, then erased in varying ways in subsequent presentations; Kirkpatrick’s is a long short-story, of sorts, perhaps a micro-novel, told in twelve numbered sections / chapters; and Shaheen’s are short-short fictions / flash fictions — even prose poems, depending on how “poetic” readers find the prose.
We note these varying forms not only for their departure from slightly more “traditional” Gold Line titles, but also because each of Ricochet’s chapbooks, aside from their shared 5.25″x7″ trim size, have their own unique design. Harrison’s erasure chap uses color, photo-quality stock, which allows the author’s use of actual White-Out to stand out, textured, on the page. Kirkpatrick’s chap, the most straightforward in terms of layout, is simple and pleasing, using serif text with sans titles, but also boldly prints its page numbers, as well as author-name and title, vertically on verso pages alone. Lastly, Shaheen’s books inverts the sans and serif of title and text, and bolds the text as well — which actually works, in this chap, rather than looking like crap — and also makes use of black interior, here and there, to pleasing pleasing effect: one that seems to compliment the alternately humorous and heavy movements Shaheen’s work.
Copies of all five titles, from Ricochet and Gold Line proper, are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Please read our guidelines for details.