if you are not a billionaire, read this note
Pattern-book is now available for UK and Ireland preorder. You people of North America, please hold for the next available operator
Yet again and as before, I am mostly not here. Yet again and as before I like to hang out in places where billionaires would never. Get low! is my motto the past few years and yes, Lil Jon is singing it in my head. Nevertheless occasionally I (containing multitudes) contravene my own principles to return to the Billionaires Bar because there are about a thousand of you here and “That’s Some Audience (For A Poet Remix)”. Multitudes!
Let me make it worth your while. Here are some things you can enjoy that Billionaires Could Never:
Every week, I get one (1) simple email from Steve Himmer, editor of Necessary Fiction. And every week, I enjoy it. It’s like, a real letter? With a limited amount of information? About small-press stuff I actually care about? You can totally sign up for the mailing list here, and you should.
Did you know that there are platforms you can use to host your newsletters that don’t belong to accelerationist techbros, or harbor creeps? There are. And apparently, if you make money (I do not, see also Billionaires Could Never, also filed under “How To Be More Free, In Every Sense Of The Word”), you may make more money elsewhere. FYI it is very easy to move your posts elsewhere, ask me how I know. All my past posts are now safely stowed on my website, though not publicly viewable.
Tim Groenland and I have launched a Utopian Venture and you can play along. WELCOME. The Dublin Small Press Fair will happen in late November 2025. Applications to table are open now (info at the link), so please spread the word and/or signal your interest and/or come and buy some books in November. We will never spam you, but you can find us on Bluesky here.
Speaking of Small Presses (though this is resolutely Not One), you can send in a classified ad for Abundant Number vol. 4. Deadline is Friday 25 April, so be quick. Obituaries, book announcements (in this economy!?), want ads, for-sale ads, information about your weird project, votive notices, etc., etc., etc. If a miniature prose poem were to slip in there, who would be able to tell? Keep them short and pithy, management reserves the right to refuse any ad. You can send your ad here (and if you include your address, you’ll get a copy in the mail). If you sent an ad for AN2 and didn’t get a contributor copy, please know this is because the printer I used was horrible and I was shorted copies. Yours are coming.
All right, so: Pattern-book will be out on the eastern side of the Atlantic on May 29. Carcanet have kindly made a code that lets anyone in the UK order, get 15% off the cover price, and receive free shipping. That is ELPB15. Preorder a copy here! You can also put your email into this form to get a notification about UK readings this summer.
Are you in Ireland? You are very welcome at the launch of Pattern-book on June 5, 6:30-8:00 p.m., at the Gutter Bookshop, Cow’s Lane, Dublin. You can preorder a copy of the book from the bookshop here. If you’d like to, you can RSVP for the Dublin launch here.
Are you in the US? Pattern-book has a 31 July release date on that side of the Atlantic. My sources tell me that the book is making its way through the maze now and should appear on US sales platforms in the next couple of weeks. Will I post again to tell you when it has? I will. Thank you to my wonderful US people who have reached out to say your local bookshops can’t yet put preorders in. It’s coming! Please keep Pattern-book in mind as summer is icumen in. Want to hear about US readings this summer? Please put your email address into this form. I will not spam you.
(If you preorder the collection, there’s a place in the linked form to put your mailing address—I’ll send you a postcard like the one above, or another book postcard.)
As every writer will tell you, preorders make a book go. So let me sell you on mine.
Are you a writer? Well, this is a book about writing. It’s a book about learning to write—the way we do as children, by tracing shapes and by being walked through it at the hands of trusted adults, and also the way we learn to write as writers, which is to say by reading and repeating, tracing shapes that others in our traditions traced before us.
Do you have friends? I do too. This book is full of correspondence with them—real and imagined. Living as an immigrant and a college teacher on short-term contracts has meant that many of my closest friendships play out over distance, and over the media of distance: letters, phone calls, text messages. A series of ‘postcards’ links three of the book’s four sections, but there are also poems that record friendship both over time and distance and in the beautiful moments of being-in-the-world-together. You can read two of the postcards here (the form is slightly off due to Substach’s norming, but the idea is there).
Is your life ever boring? Yes, the condition of our shared existence, when we are lucky, is that exactly. This book tracks my attention to what is boring—growing up, living in a house, reading books, passing through time, having a family—which, it turns out, are also the most precious things. Lucky are we who are granted such boredom.
Do you like plants? You’re in luck. There are a lot of plants, and other living things, in this book. However, this is not a nature guide. You may be disappointed to find it does not cover the region where you live. Some plants appear primarily as tools of metaphor. User caution is advised.
Has someone you love turned out to be mortal? I am sorry. I understand, because people I love have turned out to be mortal, too. The last section of this book is a series of elegies—for places I can’t return, people who have died, and even the passage of ordinary days and years. The last poem in the book is my vision of heaven, which is, in words I borrow from Emily Dickinson “an Ampler Zero –”. The Portland Press-Herald published one of the elegies a while back. You can read it here (again, with formal changes due to the paper’s CMS).
Are you a non-native speaker? So am I (not of English, though). A lot of the poems in this book were written while I lived in and through languages that I didn’t grow up speaking. The ways non-native speakers speak and change the dominant language of their adopted places are intensely poetic (i.e. making-new, making at all) to me. One of the poems, “Sonnet for the second-language speaker” will be in Poetry Ireland Review #145. You can go to the launch on May 15 (I will be there in spirit).
Are you interested in the received forms of the anglophone poetic tradition? I am, too. Pattern-book is held together by sonnets that fall apart (just a little) across the span of the book. Here’s one, in Beloit Poetry Journal. The book’s title maybe gives away my primary preoccupation, but to be clear, I’m interested in things that repeat with small variations, like seasons, and also like the color of the sky. And also like the form of the sonnet.
All right. I think that’s probably enough for now. If I can think of any other reason you might consider preordering Pattern-book (from the Gutter Bookshop, if you’re in Ireland; from Carcanet—with the code ELPB15 for a discount and free shipping if you’re in the UK; more information to come if you’re elsewhere), I will be certain to let you know. Oh—and again, if you do preorder a copy, I will send you a postcard. Drop your mailing address here.
Thanks for reading! Thanks for considering! Thanks, special thanks, to those of you who order the book—you make what I do possible in important ways.
As ever, my eye is on the sparrow.
Great to read you here again Éireann! I’m off to check dates and see if I can possibly be in Dublin for your launch.