Poetry, Music & Delightful Media Beyond the Digital: The Bodily Press

Amidst the general feelings of uneasiness and chaos emerging from the 2016 election, Eliot Cardinaux founded The Bodily Press. A recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in contemporary improvisation from the New England Conservatory in Boston, Cardinaux describes a potent feeling of disillusionment emerging from the disappearance of physical media, paired with an increasing skepticism of the digital world.

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that the internet was as difficult to trust as it was ubiquitous,” he said.

While he had been writing poetry on his own for 6 years prior, it was not until he met Ruth Lebson, the poet in residence at the conservatory at the time, that his interest in the medium blossomed.

“My understanding that there's a world for poetry began to grow,” Cardinaux said.

In 2018, The Bodily Press broadened its horizons and began operating as a record label as well, after Cardinaux released his first solo album on CD, “Sweet Beyond Witness,” of piano compositions, improvisations, and spoken poetry.

“Everything was becoming digitized, I wanted to create a place where physical media was still a thing,” he said.

After attaining an MFA in creative writing at UMass Amherst, bringing together a network of poets from older generations and printing their work into chapbooks, eventually publishing full length paperbacks, Cardinaux has created a space which prioritizes the tangible form of the print book.

While the main avenues through which The Bodily Press sells their inventory are performances and readings at venues like Amherst Books, Unnameable Books, New England Visionary Artists Museum, and Iconica, they also sell online on the music streaming platform Bandcamp. The Bodily Press can also be found on Instagram, @thebodilypress.

The Bodily Press will have a wide variety of inventory for sale at the Northampton Book Fair including but not limited to:

A trio of poetry paperbacks by Eliot Cardinaux: Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room
forage acanthus, a chapbook by New Jersey poet Mark Scroggins
Four Episodes, a chapbook by Ohio poet Norman Finkelstein, the last in his series, The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust
Three new chapbooks by Eliot Cardinaux: Island, Rope of Sand, and Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer
and An Drochshaol, a chapbook by Irish-American poet and Duke University professor Joseph Donahue. Based around the Irish potato famine, the chapbook features into Donahue’s ongoing poem series, Terra Lucida (vol. VII, A Bad Time)

The press also has a number of chapbooks and full-length works forthcoming, such as:

The Etcetera Variations: Poems For and With Musicians, a full-length paperback by Brooklyn poet, Denver Butson, who has read these poems with musicians such as Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban, and Marc Ribot
Palestinian Freedom Suite, a full-length poetry collection, also in paperback, by New Orleans-based poet of the Palestinian/Lebanese diaspora, Paul Catafago
The Ocean from Here to Here, a full-length paperback poetry collection by Eliot Cardinaux
Chapbooks by Sarah Menefee, Deja Carr (AKA Mal Devisa), Shana Bulhan, and Suzanne Mercury
and Angel Alphabet, a book of paintings visually depicting the Hebrew Alphabet in angelic script, by the painter-among-poets, and protege of the beat generation, Amherst resident Tasha Robbins

Eliot Cardinaux, representing The Bodily Press will be at the Northampton Community Arts Trust the 22nd and 23rd of November located at 33 Hawley Street.