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Kelsey Street Press is delighted to announce that Denise Newman's The Redesignation of Paradise is available for preorder.


Expected to ship in early December 2024.


"With sparkling intensity, she asks anew, what is paradise and what is our relationship to it? Where is the eros of living beings in the scent map of our awareness practice? In bliss, in woe, or in between, every living being reproduces, creates, decomposes. Whether they are “doing it,” in nature or imagining it from the Garden State, “this is happening.” Rising and falling, there’s always a first day (and night) to create exceptions to a rule. Readers, Newman’s luminous, lambent poetic examination hits the mark.

— Norma Cole


Denise Newman reveals a fecund, lusty world infused with the sheer energy of life, where “earth itself is having sex between particles of dust.” This paradise isn’t the protected space of the walled garden, but the churning, chance-driven wonder of everything everywhere. From the intricate mating dance of a damselfly, to a mother dying after a long illness, Newman’s inclusive paradise erects no barriers. In the finely-hewn tracery of her language, in her blend of exuberance, grief, and hope, Newman challenges us to recognize paradise as the thing we're already part of: life, and its urge to go on.

— Mary Burger, author of Then Go On and Sonny


In The Redesignation of Paradise, Denise Newman offers an account of “going into the gut/ where opposites meet,” reminding us that “ripening is simultaneously withering.” She renders being on this earth as “the history of falling together,” drawing on deep attention and/as collaboration with human and non-human persons. Newman invites us to consider the ethics of our relations in that expansive space we call “nature,” the role of poetry in the face of “the beating rain of capital” and the shadows cast by war and climate change. “[S]tudy everything as you/ and not you,” she advises, and her book conjures one of many guides for this practice in the woman who “listens six stories up/ to grass walking in the dark.” Listen to these poems listening for you and the echoes of that beyond that is beside you.

— Brent Armendinger, author of Street Gloss and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying

Featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Ching-In Chen





Please join Kelsey Street Press to celebrate our 50th Anniversary on Saturday, October 26, at 3pm.


Light refreshments & Kelsey Street Press books will be available.


260 Utah St

San Francisco

ADA accessibility via Potrero Street (255A Potrero)





Kelsey Street Press was founded in 1974 to address the marginalization of women writers by small press and mainstream publishers, encouraging women to write directly from their own creative imperatives. Its catalog includes Erica Hunt, Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Camille Roy, Cecilia Viçuna, Etel Adnan, Fanny Howe, Barbara Guest, and the first books of Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim and Andrea Abi-Karam. The Press centers the pleasure of the written page and books that can be held and carried.


With fifty years of publishing, the Press remains true to its commitment to publish a wide range of feminist voices, including the work of trans and genderqueer authors as well as its ongoing commitment to publish books by BIPOC and queer/trans authors, including its QTBIPOC Book Prize. 



Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including five from Kelsey Street Press: Sphericity; Four Year Old Girl; Endocrinology (a collaboration with the artist Kiki Smith); NEST; and Concordance. Her other books include Hello, the Roses; Empathy; I Love Artists; and A Treatise on Stars. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts.  She won the 2021 Bollinger Prize for Poetry from Yale University and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Before Columbus American Book Awards, two Asian American Writer’s Workshop Awards, and a PEN West award. She lives in northern New Mexico and in New York City.


Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member and have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice.

















The Poetry Foundation will be hosting a reading in honor of Kelsey Street Press's 50th Anniversary on Thursday, October 3 at 7pm. The readers will be Kiran Bath, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, Metta Sáma and Rena Rosenwasser. It will be followed by an open bar and reception.


As the Poetry Foundation has said, "Kelsey Street Press, a small press with an explosive history of publishing radical queer and trans BIPOC and women authors, celebrates its 50th anniversary. Publishing experimental feminist poetics since 1974, Kelsey Street Press has been pivotal in addressing gender disparity in publishing."


The reading will be live streamed -- we hope you can join us in person or online!


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