King, Bradley: “If they are not to freeze us to death;” i.e. How the Small Press Destroyed My Life

Spiral Editions, chapbook

Publication Date: January 26, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

IF THEY ARE NOT TO FREEZE US TO DEATH; I.E. HOW THE SMALL PRESS DESTROYED MY LIFE, Bradley King.

A chapbook-length essay by Bradley King, with a tip of the hat to Mr. John Fahey.

“But if the small press as a culture is really to help us parry with the society of brutalities, then we have to fight the ways the acceleration infiltrates our bubble; celebrity, chic hipness, fashionability, righteousness, and the disfiguring ambition to rise are all within our midst. Those of us tempted by the ego-drugs of attention hounding, provocateuring, or any crypto-careerism should remember the poet Dick Gallup’s omen about the small press community in the 70s: “As soon as ‘personalities’ are established as the no. 1 consideration people are going to hate one another and the scene is going to blow itself apart.” Another pitfall the small press should be vigilant against: faulty spines of books…”

King’s chapbook-length essay braids generations of small press poetic thought and practice to forge and understand new theories of power, collectivism, aesthetic resistance, and relevance of the “small press” world in this rapidly decaying time of fascist capture and continued atomization of the self. This essay brings together both poets of the present day small press in addition to those who helped build that world as we know it; Zan de Parry, Tilghman Goldsborough, Kyle Schlesinger, Ivanna Baranova, Kat Robinson, Anne Waldman, Noa Nguyen, Jonathan Green, Devin Johnson, Cedar Sigo, to name a few. Using Luciano Conchiero’s theory of “tangential resistance,” King parses out the current iteration of poets, publishers, friends, the world, “our shared acts of co-enjoyment […] sustaining mutual co-creation, not just artistic creation,” calling for “radical closeness” and “the ways of the shared interior.”