Using the Internet to make books

Using Kickstarter, a small Latino-owned press hopes to bring poetry to the world offline.

Más Wired | December 17, 2012 | 1:54 am

By Yago Cura

In 2007, I resigned my high school teaching position in the Bronx and started library school at Queens College. Because my library science degree had evolved to incorporate an invisible “I” (MLIS vs. MLS), I took several classes on web and image design in library school. As a result, the whole Internet-veil thing became demystified and I could clearly see the Mr. Oz in the machine.

In 2009, I bought some server space in Canada and purchased a stack of ISBNs from Bowker and started a literary journal, Hinchas de Poesía (www.hinchasdepoesia.com). I used Dreamweaver to design the first couple of issues and we are publishing our eighth issue on December 21, 2012–the day the Mayan calendar ends. Hinchas de Poesia directly addresses the aesthetic interconnectedness between North America and Latin America, and attempts to comment on the evolving dialogue.

A week ago Hinchas Press started a kickstarter campaign to raise $2,000 to cover the costs of publishing our first book, Jim Heavily’s The Bringer of Culture.

Jim’s book of poems is a raucous ride through syntax and cognates and words we don’t use anymore but totally should resuscitate (words like affect and emendations, et. al.) One of the great things about the book is how it flits from the steppes of a city in Mexico to the backalley compunctions in Metarie, Louisiana. The book is truly a wild ride which makes it a great read, and a book that deserves to be published and in wide rotation.

Jim Heavily also happens to be the Poetry Editor for Hinchas de Poesía, so I also believe in his poems and feel them to be part and parcel of the aesthetic we deploy every time we publish a new issue or try our hand in the publishing racket. Jim is not a Latino and that makes comepletely no difference at all to us because the work is solid. Jim’s book is titled after Quetzalcoatl, one of the major deities of the Aztecs, and the one responsible for agriculture, culture, and astronomy.

Check out our Kickstarter here.

[Image via Donkey Hotey]

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