In addition to traditional poetry collections and chapbooks, independent press YesYes Books also publishes a number of experimental and multimedia works, many of which incorporate visual art. Since its founding in 2011, the press's innovative projects have included Poetry Shots, fully illustrated digital chapbooks; and Frequencies, Volume One, a poetry and contemporary music anthology. The Bones of Us, a graphic poetry collection by J. Bradley with art by Adam Scott Mazer, will be released in February. The following images highlight a selection of both past and forthcoming experimental projects from YesYes Books.
Released in January 2013, Frequencies, Volume One is a chapbook and music anthology that features poetry by Bob Hicok and Phillip B. Williams and short fiction by Molly Gaudry, with accompanying music by indie rock bands Here We Go Magic and Outlands and singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten. The cover art was created by Matthew Cusick, a painter and collage artist who creates realistic scenes and portraits using old maps.
In The Blue Teratorn, released as part of the Poetry Shots series in 2012, Dorothea Lasky’s poems are illustrated by Kaori Mitsushima. In a post on her blog, Lasky describes this digital chapbook as "a flock of scary birds" meant to accompany her third full-length collection, Thunderbird, published in 2012 by Wave Books.
Megan Laurel created illustrations for the title poem from Angela Veronica Wong's 2012 digital chapbook, How to Survive a Hotel Fire. Wong's full-length collection of the same name was published later that year by Coconut Books.
Art for Dana Guthrie Martin’s collection, Toward What Is Awful, was created by Ghangbin Kim, a student of Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Martin, who has published two other chapbooks, edits the online poetry journal Cascadia Review.
For the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us, artist Adam Scott Mazer illustrated J. Bradley's poems first in pencil, then overlaid in ink applied with a brush. In the poem "A Letter to a Wedding Photo That's Not Mine," Bradley writes, "May you never need / to throw your memories / out an airlock, watch / as they turn blue."
In "Cosmonaut," Bradley describes a house as "a pulmonary system of pocket universes" where "we lose ourselves in the vacuum of Auto-Tune, drift toward the outer rims of conversations and plastic Dixie Cups." He writes, "In the morning, we will smack our lips, ruin the cotton in our cheeks; our heads are capsules with cracks in the seams."
Mazer's illustrations provided inspiration for many of the revisions that J. Bradley made to his poems. In "Yale Street," Bradley writes, "When we traded electric currents through the tips of our noses, revenge evaporated from my body. I clutched your hip like the handle of a hammer, a box of nails; you are a home worth building."