We’re pleased to share that titles from Lost Roads Press are now available through the Foundlings page on Asterism. These titles include Jessica Baran’s Equivalents; Kamau Braithwaite’s Trench Town Rock; John Taggart’s Standing Wave; the anthology Hick Poetics, edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith; and Frank Stanford’s book-length poem The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. Readers, booksellers, and collections can place individual or bulk orders now.
Lost Roads Press has meant so much to us. Frank Stanford founded the press in 1976, and C.D. Wright continued it after his death. C.D. and Forrest Gander moved the press to Rhode Island during the many years they taught at Brown University, and it was there that Max’s father Gerry Crinnin worked as a Lost Roads “intern.” Gerry’s copies of The Singing Knives and You were among the artifacts of small press publishing that we treasured and studied before we launched Foundlings Magazine in 2016. This connection was part of what moved us to undertake the Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford anthology two years later—and it was that book that cemented our transition from a magazine into a press.
Susan Scarlata became executive editor of Lost Roads in 2009, taking the press out west and continuing its legacy, both by keeping the back catalog in print and publishing new works, including through the Besmilr Brigham Women Writers Award. We met Susan at the Frank Stanford Literary Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 2018, which Matt Henriksen and friends organized through Typo Magazine and the Open Mouth Reading Series.
Our literary community has changed enormously since then. Matt, Typo, and Open Mouth are all gone, along with too many other friends and the presses, magazines, and gatherings they made possible. The craven retreat of Small Press Distribution took tens of thousands of operating dollars out of the already fragile small press publishing ecosystem; it led to the closure of dozens of presses and the pulping or simple disappearance of countless books. Lost Roads was one of the presses that SPD left in jeopardy.
Happily, new leaders have stepped up and created new systems to sustain independent publishing. One of those is Asterism, which has introduced previously unimagined levels of care, transparency, and operational efficiency into the publisher-distributor relationship. We’re grateful that they made this transfer of the Lost Roads back catalog possible.
For now, visit the Foundlings store on Asterism to browse or buy the Lost Roads titles above. Please consider forwarding this newsletter to other readers who might be interested, and stay tuned for more information about this relationship.
