LEAFE PRESS
Leafe Press publishes poetry, mainly of the modernist / post-modernist variety. It’s a 21st century press and a digital press; it was founded in April 2000 with a launch at Nottingham Central Library and was run with digital printing and desk-top publishing software, which was still new, and which was helped by my working in the IT industry. The press is named after Leafe Close, the street I was living in at the time, and that was named after James Leafe, one of the munitions workers killed in the Chilwell explosion of 1918 who would probably be bemused that a poetry publisher was named after him. For a couple of years I was joined in running the press by John Bloomberg-Rissman, the American poet and photographer who helped to broaden the initial focus from UK poets. The first books were stapled pamphlets which I built at home, buying a long-handled stapler and guillotine for the job. In 2007 I moved to Lightning Source (now part of Ingrams) which I still use, and which allows me to produce larger books. The biggest one was a 500-page, large-format book of poetry by American poet Ed Baker (no relation) which included artwork by Baker. Lightning Source also provides international distribution, allowing me to fulfil orders in the US and elsewhere.
Leafe Press is very small. A micro-press. Or, in Andrew Duncan’s phrase, a “boutique publisher” (which I like). Micro presses play a vital role in contemporary poetry. Leafe published two pamphlets by Lee Harwood who has now gone on to have a monumental Collected and is regarded as a major figure in 1960s and 70s poetry. When Leafe published him, all his work was out of print. Leafe has published several debut collections, including Carrie Etter’s debut UK collection, “Whether”. Carrie is now widely known and published by major publishers. The press has always had an interest in translation and in 2007 published a sequence (in English and French) by the Moroccan poet and dissident Abdellatif Laabi. This was the first UK publication by this major figure who is now published by Carcanet and received the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary honour. Alongside that, the press has brought out work by significant poets of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, notably Geraldine Monk, Kelvin Corcoran and Frances Presley. Work by exciting young contemporary poets has also found its way onto our list. None of this is remarkable in the sense that hundreds of micro-presses do this kind of thing. But publishers like Leafe do vital work, each in its own small way.
I should mention Litter, the online magazine of the press, which has now been running for twenty years.
The most recent Leafe title is by Nottingham-based poet Linda Kemp, who is at the post-modernist end of the spectrum, to be followed soon by translations of the Roman poet Horace by classical scholar Aidan Everett. And I’m excited about the Selected Poems of Martin Stannard which will appear in the foreseeable future, and which will be a major event in British poetry.
Leafe Press: https://www.leafepress.org/
Litter: https://www.littermagazine.org/
Alan Baker
Appendix – Complete List of Leafe Press titles. ‘*’ = still in print
C. J. Allen – How Copenhagen Ended
C. J. Allen – A Strange Arrangement: Selected Poems
Tim Allen – The Indescribable Thrill of The Half-Volley *
Ed Baker – Stone Girl E-Pic
Kathleen Bell – Do you Know How Kind I Am? *
John Bloomberg-Rissman – No Sounds of My Own Making
Yves Bonnefoy – The Beginning and End of the Snow
Tilla Brading – Notes in a manor: Of Speaking
Adrian Buckner – One Man Queue
Adrian Buckner – See Saw *
Simon Collings – Sanchez Ventura *
Kelvin Corcoran – Roger Hilton’s Sugar
Sarah Crewe – Sea Witch *
Peter Dent – Settlement
Peter Dent – Yarn *
Carrie Etter – Yet
Patricia Farrell – High Cut: My Model of No Criteria *
Melisande Fizsimons – Life Here is Full of Tomorrows *
Alan Baker & Rebecca Forster – Early One Morning *
Julia Gaze – Aphrodite and the Weatherman
Mark Goodwin & Julie Julia Thornley – Tones Fled All
Lee Harwood – Evening Star
Blossom Hibbert – suddenly, it’s now *
Linda Kemp – The Moral Theology of the Devil / Clothed With The Sun *
Abdellatif Laabi – Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis *
Abdellatif Laabi – Little Things *
Dorothy Lehane – Umwelt *
Julie Lumsden – Naked by Profession
Geraldine Monk – Lobe Scarps & Finials *
Daniel O’Donnell-Smith – cOdes
Simon Perril – Newton’s Splinter
Frances Presley – sallow *
Ernesto Priego – The Present Day
Peter Riley – Chapters of Age *
Andrew Shaw – Paper Lampshade Hotel
Phil Simmons – Dark and Evil Music
Martin Stannard – Coral
Martin Stannard – Poems For The Young At Heart *
Martin Stannard – Postcards to Ma *
Martin Stannard – Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters *
Paul Sutton – The Sorry History of Fast Food *
Aaron Tieger – Purple Notebook of Raquette Lake
Tristan Tzara tr. Lee Harwood – The Glowing Forgotten
Gareth Twose – Psychodography
Andrew Taylor – The 140s *
Andrew Taylor – Northangerland: Re-versioning the poetry of Branwell Brontë *
Lauren Terry – Museum of Lost and Broken Things *
Catherine Wagner – Imitating
Steven Waling – Lockdown Latitudes *
Various – 1,000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’
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