About the Press

Why can’t we buy individual poems like we do songs?

Architrave represents a new kind of periodical literature: poems printed as individual pages that allow readers to curate their own collection in the same way that music lovers create playlists. It also allows the poem to move more freely through the world, maybe as an item for a bulletin board, as a postcard to a friend, as a bookmark, as raw material for collage… whatever the reader is inspired to do. They can be purchased individually or as part of a subscription (if you’d like to receive all poems in each edition).

These aren’t typical book pages cut from their bindings. Each page is printed on 5 ½” x 8″ archival card stock using antique letterpress methods. We do this for several reasons: digital age readers have many choices, so any physically printed material must be special; poetry itself is special and deserves an elegant vehicle; and most of all, we want to catch the eyes of intelligent, artful readers who don’t yet realize there is poetry in the world they enjoy.

It is this commitment to reclaim poetry for non-poets that guides Architrave.