On the cusp of Bushwick, technically East Williamsburg, the annual Small Press Flea took place this year at a new location: The Amant, a sprawling art installation and nonprofit on Maujer Street. Run by wealthy art collector Lonti Ebers, the Amant tasks itself with funding attractive residencies to artists in a cosmopolitan city that’s known for egregious housing costs. It would not be presumptuous to assume that Ebers can largely do this because she’s married to Canadian billionaire Bruce Flatt, whose asset management firm manages some $725 billion worth of assets.
The building’s 21,000 ft. campus comprises four clay brick and galvanized steel, boxy buildings with professionally landscaped courtyards amid the progressively gentrifying neighborhood. Before it was colonized, the area was home to the indigenous Lenape people; years after, the area was populated by German immigrants, later Italian and Jewish immigrants, and by the 60’s, a large Puerto Rican community. Today, Ebers’ Amant juxtaposes its modernistic masonry against the post-industrial Brooklyn landscape that drips with remnants of communities that have barely withstood the impact of gentrification.
It was an ironically fitting backdrop for an annual event organized by BOMB Magazine, which began in 2013 at a small lower Manhattan bookstore called Unnameable Books, with just 13 publishers. By this year, this number has more than doubled and now there were ushers wearing black suits and ties and, nearby, a beverage station operated by the Liquid Death brand.
The people there, working for the various small publishers included in this shared their fervor for their favorite titles on the tables in front of them, which included everything from arduously crafted books, zines, chaplets, posters, and everything in between. Topics reflected included: decolonization across disciplines and places, genocide in Palestine, abolition, collectivist approaches to surviving peri-pandemic life, deconstruction of and rethinking of gender, exploration of feminist thought, examination of climate change, expressions of apocalyptic worry, racial and immigrant justice, grief of different capacities, and finding solace and irreverent joy in an oppressive political climate.
These progressive and sociopolitically confrontational titles seemed to pose an inherent contradiction with the flea’s new 2024 location. Beyond the unacknowledged billionaire pedigree, it was another artist space that may very well play a role in the continued erasure of long-standing communities of East Williamsburg. Somehow, there was wistful spirit of hope and perseverance, nevertheless, something relayed through these various books, created during a time plagued by the dangers of racial injustice, gender-based inequities, the loss of liberties for queer people, non-men, incarcerated people, immigrants, indigenous peoples, disabled folks across the nation, a never-ending pandemic, and colonization and genocide around the world.
Feeling the drops falling from the ominous sky, while a tropical storm was sweeping across the northeast, I was reminded of the impending calamity of climate change. Fortunately Common Notions Press was here, selling titles of “Decolonize Conservation,” a collection of essays that pointed to an antiracist and anticolonial examination of the true causes of environmental devastation: stealing land and resources from indigenous peoples by governments across the globe.
Another small press that caught my attention was Nightboat Books, which has been around since 2004. The staff there enthusiastically endorsed “Lonespeech,” a collection of poems written by the Swedish author Ann Jäderlund, translated by Johannes Göransson. I skimmed through several of Jäderlund’s poems, with their short, simplistic syntactic structure and references to Swedish landscapes that invoke a sense of stark awe and seclusion. Another book that I bought from Nightboat was Lauren Cook’s “Sex Goblin,” a collection of “non-narrative vignettes” written in a startling yet frivolous style,. reminiscent of the bizarre, intimate ramblings of 2010s social media posts. I could not resist the title, or Cook’s absurd fusing of the mundane and surreal happenings surrounding both sexual violence and eroticism on the book’s crimson pages.
I was also lured in by the stunning picture a of deadly nightshade belladonna that illustrated the booth run by the Belladonna* Collaborative, a “feminist avant-garde collaborative and literary press” that’s been around since 1999. They were selling numerous chaplets of varying colors, small, staple-bound pamphlets authored by local and international feminist writers, like Montana Ray, Seoyoung Park, Zoe Tuck and many others, on gender and labor, grief, diaspora, sexual violence, and non-cisheteronormative experience. I decided to pre-order a different book the publisher was putting out, Mia You’s latest collection of poetry, called “Festival.” The publisher says the title refers to “the migrant, female body as both the glorified and martyred totem of the festival-of-all-festivals we call globalization.” I can’t wait to read it.
Photos taken by Lindy Giusta.
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