Stone Girl E-Pic by Ed Baker

Ed Baker's new book, Stone Girl E-Pic, is now published, and available for sale at Amazon, or on the Leafe Press website (via Paypal). I have to say (immodestly, as publisher) that it's a fine artefact, and a snip at £15.95 (inc. postage). It's large format (almost a foot high and 8.5 inches wide) and it's a fascimile of Ed's original typescript (yes, he typed 500 or so pages on a manual typewriter) including artwork - sometimes full page. The artwork had to be in B&W due to cost contraints, but Ed's a fine draftsman, so it still works (and in any case, many of the drawings were conceived in B&W). Here's the write-up from the Leafe site:

Leafe Press are excited to announce the publication of this major work by American poet and artist Ed Baker. This is a large format book, which includes visual artwork. "Stone Girl E-Pic" is a remarkable visual and minimalist poem, in which Baker's drawings are integrated with, and indeed, form part of, the poem itself. Baker is "in that stream of & flows with" the Objectivist and the Black Mountain poets, and is part of a circle of poets that includes Cid Corman and Theodore Enslin.

"...here is work that manages to retain all the elements and yet make contemporary Vispo look very empty, leaving the reader to look for the essentials of a more tradition-based visual poetry: a minimalism that matters and the most purely 'concrete' art that ever illustrated text. Writing that cuts to the bone, iconoclastic and original, and a 'Stone Girl' art sprung out of the lines themselves. Writing and art on Baker's terms."

Conrad DiDiodato