Tin House and Octopus Collaborate on New Poetry Series

Tin House Books and Octopus Books have announced a new collaborative poetry series. Acquiring titles in the new line will be Matthew Dickman, poetry editor of Tin House magazine, and Zachary Schomburg, editor at Octopus Books. First in the series will be Brandon Shimoda’s Portuguese. The two editors discuss the reasons for the new collaboration in their editors’ note:

“We represent two different types of small presses, with two different aesthetics, and two different audiences, but we’re both based in a city [Portland, Ore.] that has a palpable collaborative energy that is proving itself every day. And at a time when many larger presses are thinning their poetry rosters, we wonder if publishing collaboratively is a model that presses are missing out on, a model that smaller independent presses are capable of, because there is nothing to lose in teaming up to publish books for a multiplied and overlapped audience. This is a model that is necessary for a new kind of conversation to begin, not to see how we can meet in the middle, but how we can meet at the edges.”

Portuguese will be published by Tin House Books and Octopus Books on March 12, 2013 and distributed by Publishers Group West. Shimoda is the author of three previous books of poetry and is currently coediting, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writing by Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, forthcoming).

In 2014, Tin House and Octopus will again collaborate to publish Bianca Stone’s new collection, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.