We publish books—which is to say, we typeset seeds and seek to scatter them, generally flinging them pretty far from our mountaintop hamlet in the Polish Highlands.
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Nhatt Nichols’ This Party of the Soft Things, an ambulatory meditation on how an unpeopled planet will flourish beyond us, came out last December. Nhatt had spent the previous year whittling the titular book-length poem and then plugging away at a sheaf of graphite drawings in her coffee-scented hut (big mug in a small shed) in the woods of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. The book isn’t dirty, but it’s dirty, and its soil is of Cascadia.
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We began printing the finished edition, in Kraków, on a late November morning of etched snowflakes landing on hard brown ground. Asia, who normally oversees production, was in the hospital with three-year-old Hania, who had a virus and needed an IV. So eight-year-old Maya and I woke real early, breakfasted monosyllabically, and then drove the ninety minutes north to Kraków, warming up with a cozy Magic Tree House audiobook and thermoses of coffee and cocoa.
Interior and cover sheets printed like we’d hoped and then some. Maya and I celebrated afterwards with low-quality convenience-store donuts, enjoying every bite. Then it was back home. The brown ground was now white—still hard but soft, too.
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Poet Sara Dian has been crisscrossing bike trails threading Washington’s Olympic Mountains, a stone’s throw from Nhatt, with This Party of the Soft Things—a companion volume ever since a friend gave it to her—in her fanny pack.
On a recent ride, Sara “sped up when the body asked & slowed down when the poetry asked,” then resting in gravelly grass read some Soft Things out loud through cracked lips mended by muffin and tea, holding the book between fingers caked in common ground.
