New Chapbooks!

I'm really excited to be back at it with some handmade chapbooks this summer. 

Currently available:

The Lives of Clouds // Jennifer Denrow

how to make a poem move // jj rowan

Space Is Big // Sam Lohmann

Virginia // Erika Howsare

Send $9 for one title or $15 for any two books to jen.tynes@gmail.com at PayPal or Venmo. 

Be sure to let me know your address & which titles you want! 

Book Distribution After SPD's closure

Since the closure of SPD, I've opted to have most of our titles returned to me so that I can fulfill orders directly, for now. 

All four of Magnificent Field's full-length book titles (by Tony Mancus, Shelly Taylor, Alban Fischer, and Nathan Hauke) as well as all the full-length titles from horse less press are available via a "name your own price" donation. 

You can use this link to purchase any title; specify the book(s) you want in the "special instructions" part of the order. You can also use that link to make donations to help cover the cost of recovering our books.

Thanks for caring about poetry and community! 

rob mclennan on All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus

 Great to see this brief review of All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus over at rob mclennan's blog: https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2023/02/tony-mancus-all-ordinariness.html

"This book-length poem writes on the daily and the immediate, but through the concrete and abstract of language and ideas that propel the line as much as the specifics of daily action. There is such a staggered musicality to his rhythms, and something quite compelling on how this poem writes around and through particular narrative space..."

Thanks, rob! 

And more good news: we'll have another small shipment of All the Ordinariness arriving here around mid February, so if you haven't gotten a copy yet and would prefer to order it directly from the press, you can do so, and choose what you pay, here : https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=ZV79RGVH6JXUN

Greetings from Bowling Green by Becca Klaver

 Our final chapbook from a series that was supposed to be completed so long ago I cannot actually remember when it was supposed to be completed is finally available for you, and it is really something to celebrate. In the notes for Greetings from Bowling Green, author Becca Klaver writes, "every day in April 2017, I composed a poem for a friend, typed it on a postcard fed into my Brother Compactronic 58 electric typewriter, and mailed it from Bowling Green, Ohio." 

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Midwinter Constellation, a book co-written with 31 other poets in homage to Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, was published in early 2022 by Black Lawrence. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is currently co-editing the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants and Across the Social Distances. She grew up in the Great Lakes region, where she now lives again. 

Name your price and order a copy of Greetings from Bowling Green here, while they're available. 

SPD Recommends All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus

All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus is on SPD's Recommends list right now! Thanks SPD. If you haven't already gotten a copy, you can order this title from SPD now. 

ALL THE ORDINARINESS by Tony Mancus now available at SPD

Thanks for your enthusiasm for this title, friends! We've sold out of pre-order copies of All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus here at the home office. Good news, though: if you're still looking to buy a copy, it's now available at SPD: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780998127279/all-the-ordinariness.aspx

Pre-Order ALL THE ORDINARINESS by Tony Mancus

At long last, All the Ordinariness, a full-length title by Tony Mancus, is almost here, with cover art by Patrick Joust and book design by Alban Fischer. 

If you're in the US, you can pre-order All the Ordinariness directly from Magnificent Field. We are a pay-what-you-want press; $20 is the recommended price to cover the title, shipping, and to support the press. Pre-ordered copies will ship in November. 

Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, including Apologies (Reality Beach), Bye Sea (Tree Light Books), Diplomancy (Horseless Press), and City Country (Seattle Review). This is his first full-length collection. He works as an instructional designer and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse and he lives in Colorado with his wife, son, and two yappy cats.

Tony Mancus’ All the Ordinariness contains poems with an ambition for the extraordinary— poems that both pleasure and disrupt with their sly music. New compound words such as “growagain,” “wetlooking,” “daystressed,”“sametwin,” and “pluckliked” erupt from the page, while cunning eye tricks flourish such as, “your name before I act— a cat/in my throat.” Or, for instance “something wheeled and welled from another/ago, another slipform, another clipshop/…strain gazed, dry eyed and picked over/ repeat reaper, repeat restraint” or, “dry tears on the dollar/ dead present, depressed/dead president.” Mancus’ musicality of lines, often aided with the work of alliteration and assonance, dances the eye and delights the ear. Yet, his poems are much more than technical feats of line magic— at the heart of this book are philosophical musings and interrogations of how to exist in our frequently confusing humanness— to drag our bodies and brains around— to be responsible for each other and society at large. The intermittent apocalyptic setting of late-Capitalism (“…we are busy/building pyramids of trash and glass to buy/our lives back”) and the recurrent theme of shifting, fallible memories build pathways throughout the entire collection of poems. Mancus writes, “When you were a child you thought it might make a difference. It does and/doesn’t. The size of a belief after it has been disproved.” In another poem the speaker says, “I am not sick with emotion. It’s just, what drowns in me. As a question.” This debut collection startles with wonder and rages with compassion. Or, perhaps, Mancus says it best when he writes, “Say your curtain call and the sparrows knit a shadow into/ the sky. If you remain. If you leave.” These poems will remain and leave the reader with the desire to return to them over and over again.

—Steven Karl, author of Sister

In All the Ordinariness, Tony Mancus busts up and builds back language to explore the tragic injustice of imagination: the imagined self you carry in your head and the one that spills out in front of others, the imagined, possible world and the one we wake up in every day. Mancus grounds us in the gore of a fractured civilization with feverish lists—Here this bag of stone, here a cricket saw, a claw from a crayfis —the way we might list five things we see, four we hear, three we feel, to fend off an anxiety attack. He upends notions we abide through habit, kettle calling the pot back, the yeahs in every song, and copes with the chaos that creates by summoning new words—mothwalks, seedpit, deadlipped, lackabody. I admire Mancus's honest voice, the acknowledgement of a certain depressed resignation, more imagetext/more-tisements, and I am awestruck by the way he always writes us back into finding delight in the world: You can always go now. You can always go on. Like a light. Really like it. I love the way this book trusts language, and how it makes me trust in it, too.

—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors

Pre-order All the Ordinariness.