And our history is about place.

HISTORY

Rob Cook, a native of Warren County, New Jersey, and Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowan raised on a farm, brought their rural roots with them to Greenwich Village where they met in a writer’s workshop. Cook had published the successful Asylums and Labyrinths, an anthology of small press psychologial horror/sci-fi poets, and had established contacts in the world of design layout and printing. In 1998 Skidrow Penthouse launched as an annual print journal with Rob Cook and Stephanie Dickinson as co-publishers/co-editors. The premier issue numbered less than 100 pages and featured on its cover a 1940s photograph of a swing band, the editor’s grandfather on the saxophone, framed in red and black, and now a collector’s item.

From the start the journal combined artwork and photography with poetry and prose. We wanted the textual presentation to be a visual experience as well. The photography of Lawrence Applebaum and the artwork of Spiel (Tom Taylor), Guy R. Beining, and Ric Best helped make that possible. The name was chosen in part from our location in the East Village bordering the mile long Bowery, the first thoroughfare on Manhattan Island. The neighborhood’s aura dimmed in the 1930s and 1940s when the unemployed and unhoused congregated in its flophouses. The Bowery became known as Skid Row. Gentrification has since populated the area with high rises, and we embraced both visions in our name choice. From the lowbrow to highbrow, we wanted a cacophony of voices and styles. While the first issue was modest in number, Skidrow Penthouse grew to an annual 360-page anthology sized volumes. The journal welcomed everything from long form prose to haiku. We published Donna Baer Stein, Catherine Sasanov, William Packard, Samuel R. Delany, Jill Hoffman, Johannes Göransson, Colette Inez, and David Chorlton, among many others.

I believe that only the beautiful
Shall survive on the earth.
I believe that the perfect shape of everything
Has been prepared;
And, that we do not fit our own
Is of little consequence.
–Kenneth Patchen “What is the Beautiful”

From their inception Skidrow Penthouse and Rain Mountain Press have kept their offices in the editors’ walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. The neighborhood layered in a dense past and present has a magic. The Ukrainian Shoe Repair and the Korean Hardware have disappeared, the old immigrants making way for the new diaspora. There’s a moodiness here that has helped Skidrow Penthouse and Rain Mountain Press thrive—the ambience of NYU students in their bloom and enthusiasm, and the shadow people, their clothing and bags the color of the sidewalk.

We look out the office apartment’s rear window from four flights up and absorb the beauty of Marble Hill Cemetery. Under the markers lie subterranean yellow fever graves. Second oldest non-sectarian cemetery in Manhattan, one of its buried notables is James Lenox, co-founder of the New York Public Library. In 2010, crumbling military explosives were found by a caretaker next to a 19^th century grave. Another thematic meeting of the sacred and profane.

Skidrow Penthouse began publishing full length poetry collections beginning with Issue #2, which featured Walter Griffin’s Nights of Noise and Light.

In Issue #8 our full-length poetry collection featured poet Allen Brafman and can be viewed at www.skidrowpenthouse.com.

That was when he realized
there weren’t any birds.
It was the tree itself that had been singing.
Allen Brafman, “In the Beginning, Smoke” from Stone Feathers

And in Issue #9 we featured Anthony Seidman’s collection Black Neon.

I coast through green light after green light: Sunday, and the Valley is a plain of empty parking lots, with the Tongva gone, bones beneath the macadam. Their women of ochre-smeared faces, now dance and feast in the underworld. Their men hunt ghost deer.
Anthony Seidman, “Strata” from Black Neon

Beginning with Issue 10 we moved away from incorporating full-length collections within Skidrow Penthouse. The collections deserved their own length and breadth, the authors their own book, and Rain Mountain Press was born to take up the cause. In poetry we have published an eclectic array of work from the formalism of Philip Dacey’s New York Postcard Sonnets (2007) and Church of the Adagio (2014), the sonnets of Andrew Kaufman’s The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets (2010) and Elinor Nauen’s So Late into the Night (2011), called a “rollicking road trip on the model of Byron’s Don Juan with over 600 stanzas of ottava rima,” to Harlem streets celebrated in Gil Fagiani’s A Blanquito in El Barrio, (2009) the urban Midwestern surrealism of John Goode’s Graduating from Eternity (2013) a gorgeously executed duende of image and manifesto. We released Alexandra Van de Kamp’s alluring Kiss/Hierarchy (2016) called an “elegant canvassing of romance, lost love, and the methodical way time weaves between these moments.” In fiction, we’ve proudly brought out Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s exquisite Insect Dreams (2007) and The Absent (2016), a tour de force that Mary Gordon called “an astonishing combination of dreaminess and precision.” First to celebrate in print the satire of Chris Belden’s Shriver (2013), the book is now a major motion picture entitled A Little White Lie. Vincent Czyz’s hauntingly lyrical prize-winning Adrift in a Vanishing City (2015) is a timeless marvel of mood and texture.

 We’ve often joked about looking for the ones rather than the millions, or even the thousands, but those, the receptive readers who are passionate about literature and enjoy the experimental, the lyrical, the exotic in the familiar, and the sensuality of language itself. We’re also looking for those readers who for years may not have exercised their book-reading muscle except for online articles or business-related content. David Lawrence’s The King of White-Collar Boxing (2012) has been our Trojan horse into that audience. This darkly comic memoir chronicles the life of a Wall Street tycoon who lived for the exhilaration of his boxing bouts, to the point of losing his business, getting convicted of tax evasion, and landing in prison where he feels at home among the street fighters. Jen Knox’s short story collection After the Gazebo (2015) appeals to a generational range as well as a class range. A Knox tale begins in a recognizable place, often a blue-collar setting, but she confounds the reader’s expectations and ends them in eerily beautiful, untrod territory.

Designed in the Victorian Gothic style as a courthouse and women’s prison, the Jefferson Market Library was scheduled to be demolished in 1959 and saved only by a consortium that included e.e. cummings. It opened in 1967 as a library that Marianne Moore frequented. In March 2014 the Jefferson Market Library hosted the launch of Kafka at Rudolf Steiner’s by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Freighted with Greenwich Village’s past, the old court rooms where women were tried now house the library’s children’s section. Rain Mountain Press’ Gala Book Launch, held on September 21, 2017, in the library’s main meeting room, celebrated the launch of Palermo Stevenson’s The Absent. The reading included Nava Renek reading from Where the Survivors Are Buried (2017), and Deborah Clearman from Concepcion and the Baby Brokers (2017). And there was no more welcoming space to hold poet Philip Dacey’s memorial, which celebrated his life and poetic legacy. Readers included Gil Fagiani, Jill Hoffman, Austin Dacey, and Collette Inez.

I believe that we are going into the darkness now;
Hundreds of years will pass before the light
Shines over the world of all…
And I am blinded by its splendor.
–Kenneth Patchen “What is the Beautiful”

“We will lose everything we love,” says Zen teacher Joan Sutherland, “and everything that loves us will lose us.” On the cusp of the Pandemic, we published Allen Brafman’s luminous poetical meditation Wherever I Look I Am Never There (2019) that delves into the paradox of an earth that both sustains life and entombs it. And Michelle Somerville’s The Glamourous Life (2020) has been described as a “grand cosmic ride that walks a fine line between Iggy Pop and Jesus and between the profane and the sacred.”

Then arrived 2020, the year that wasn’t, and we along with the planet journeyed into lockdown. Zoom became our means of face-to-face communication and one in which we could invite the world. During the Pandemic Rain Mountain Press published two posthumous collections: Karl Gluck’s Blue Dwarf (2020) which illuminates the poet’s battle to escape mundane reality and enter a higher, more rapturous sphere of existence; and Lawrence Mallory’s Ned Considers Beckett in Key West (2020) wherein the narrator, a devotee of Kant, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, views humanity through a bemused philosophical prism, though his vision, like Beckett’s, is alive to what is rib-tickling in our foibles, misadventures, and tragedies. Bringing out the posthumous work of remarkable writers who were not well known during their lifetimes has been a labor of love since 2010 when RMP published Ronald Wardall’s extraordinary Lightning’s Dance Floor.

When lockdown ended there was a publishing uptick—under sheltering-in-place conditions writers wrote and those who had never written found they could write. Veteran writer Jiri Klobouk brought to completion How High the Moon (2021), in which a 19-year-old jazz lover confronts post-war Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian oppression, and in Nearing the End (2021) he creates his own dialect—a Czech, Japanese, and English phraseology that he uses to tell a wildly imaginative tale.

In 2022 Rain Mountain released Vincent Czyz’s The Secret Adventures of Order (2022). Essays that beg the question, according to Pulitzer Prize finalist James Goodman, “is there a hidden order that surfaces in strange ways—the route we take through a city, Jungian synchronicity, seashell patterns? If Lucifer isn’t Satan, then who was he?”

Scott Pariseau’s poetry collection Along the Way appeared in 2022. “Federico Garcia Lorca said a poet should be a professor of the five senses,” David Jauss writes, “and Scott Pariseau’s poems are marvelously sensory. Indeed, many of the poems read like verbal paintings.” Both formal and free verse, the collection includes a painstakingly researched essay “What’s in a Name.” Paul B. Roth’s prose poem collection Moments in Place (2022) immerses us in the poet’s “acute perception, and threads the reader right through the eye of his natural surroundings.”

John Goode’s magnus opus The Sun Held the Dice (2023) translates his experience of Pandemica into luminous, dramatically breathtaking verse. The 21^st century Chicago that erupts onto the page takes its place beside Carl Sandburg’s 1914 “Chicago.” As a reviewer puts it, “through plane-shattering imagery and Cubist juxtapositions, he’s out to rearrange your universe.”

We arrive on the shores of 2024, when independent publishing has not only flourished, but growing words and paragraphs and chapters are everywhere.

We are the books and the authors we’ve published and the journey through time.