You Bring Your Whole Life to the Material
Mark Wallace
Leave Books
Buffalo, NY
(c)1992
From the beginning of this endeavor I have been interested in following a trajectory of a writer/press through the publishing history of a book/books. While it began with the sad tale (of which I was unaware when I just wrote of it in 2006) borne still by Michele Waters whose stolen child haunts her forever, many of my bloggers are merely snapshots, polaroids of a moment in time. A Singular captured frame.
But this is the exception, a chapbook by an author who has a history that can be traced through his own chapbook history. (how odd indeed), This early effort of Mark Wallace's was published in Buffalo by Leave Books. Wallace was at SUNY/Buffalo. By 1994 he was the host of a poetry series in Washington DC called the ruthless grip (which still chugs along) where he interacted with a young poet newly arrived in town named Buck Downs who started his own publishing effort, which in turn published a chapbook by Mr. Wallace. Due to his time running ruthless grip he also became friends with Rod Smith who runs Edge Books which published a few of his books as well.
I have captured a bio of Mr. Wallace from the early aughts:
Mark Wallace is the author of more than ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the New American Poetry Award and is forthcoming from Sun and Moon. His first collection of fiction, The Big Lie, was published by Avec Books in Fall 2000. His critical articles
and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary avant garde poetry and poetics. With Juliana Spahr, Kristin Prevallet, and Pam Rehm, he edited A Poetics of Criticism, a collection of poetry essays in non-standard formats published by Leave Books in 1994. He runs the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series and the "dcpoets" e-mail list in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at area colleges including Georgetown University, The George Washington University, and American University.
and from his page on Amazon:
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of a number of books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His most recent novel, Crab, was published in 2017 by Submodern Books. Other recent publications include a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy, and a novel, The Quarry and The Lot. Temporary Worker Rides a Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism.
