San Press

Morning Poems 

Poetry by Darian Razdar
Edited by Jasmine Gui
Design and layout by Abby Ho

Darian Razdar’s debut poetry collection emerges in the liminal space of dawn, before consciousness has fully gathered itself. Meditating on the worlds that hover between and beyond maps, Morning Poems dreams in language elemental, atmospheric and slow.

“Is there a traveller who will come
— I dreamt him once before —
across the sea, over dunes
without a compass or a map?”

Darian Razdar is a writer, photographer, and textile artist with roots in the Great Lakes and Caspian sea basins. Practicing in both independent and community contexts, his work emphasizes poetics, landscape, abstraction, and collaboration. Darian designed and edited the anthology, COUNTER-MAP: A Poetics of Place (Reflex Urbanism: 2022). His work can be found online or at darianwrites.substack.com.

Abby Ho is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto. Her artistic practice uses sculptural drawings, paper cuts, and painting to create alternative scapes or visualize intangible desires. She is one-half of the creative duo jabs.

There is no wifi in the afterlife

Poetry and Short fiction by Emily Lu
Edited by Jasmine Gui
Layout by Ryookyung Kim
Special Collaboration with Abby Ho

There is no wifi in the afterlife is a refusal and a betrayal, written mostly during the pandemic. In this mixed short story and poem collection, fan-fiction, email, houseplants, housefish, and at least three ghosts sit in the same waiting room falling asleep to unhinged reimaginings of justice.

“What do you consider in your life, mandatory?”

Emily Lu is a poet and resident physician, born in Nanjing. She is the author of Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019), shortlisted for the bpNichol chapbook award, as well as works appearing in Waxwing, X-R-A-Y, Honey Literary, Arc Poetry, filling Station, etc.

Abby Ho is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto. Her artistic practice uses sculptural drawings, paper cuts, and painting to create alternative scapes or visualize intangible desires. She is one-half of the creative duo jabs.

Ryookyung Kim (they/them) enjoys referring to their Self as an un-disciplinary artist. An ever-evolving alchemist, dreamer, and a shapeshifter, their most recent creative exploration through Party Noodles is all about devotion to the expansion and unfolding of their Being through ritual, ceremony, and divine celebration.

Currently in Third reprint 

Poetry by Natalie Wee
Edited by Jasmine Gui
Cover Design and Layout by Ryookyung Kim
Special collaboration with Wenting Li

A survival manifesto and celebration song both, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines by Natalie Wee, special edition, is reimagined as both poetry collection and art object. Featuring never-before-seen poems and re-interpreted older poems, this edition asks us to consider what it means to exist in bodies that are pathways to extremes of grief and joy. Illustrating the body as a site of resistance, lineage, and testimony, this collection invites you to explore both the tremendous suffering and radiant possibilities of living:

“watch me swallow / the hardest thing / my body has made / & live.”

Natalie Wee is a queer community-builder and the author of Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines. She was named the first runner-up for the 2020 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, the winner of the 2019 Blue Mesa Review Summer Contest for poetry, and a finalist for the Best of the Net. Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, she is currently a settler in Tkaronto.

The first print run of this special edition was accompanied by a special illustrated print by Wenting Li.  

Wenting Li, an illustrator, painter and comics-maker born in Sichuan, China & working out of Tkaronto. Wenting is interested in colour and shape, nonlinear storytelling, the subtleties of complementing diversity in story with representation and image, and tracing curves.

Ryookyung Kim (they/them) is a Tkaronto-based, interdisciplinary artist with a focus in visual storytelling through zines, tattoos, and ceramics. Through a queer, diasporic lens, their ever-evolving work tends to grief, spirituality, and radical love. Rooting into freedom through stillness and play, they invite flow into their creative practice that honours their human experience of feeling and dreaming—alongside tension and discomfort that comes hand-in-hand with expansion and growth. 

Gradations I & Gradations II

Poetry by Jasmine Gui, Illustrations by Mirae Lee
Layout by Ryookyung Kim

Gradations I & II is a pair of risograph printed illustrated poetry zines. Each zine is a single long poem where the speaker goes for a meandering walk and has a tender conversation with somebody. The landscape is real. Or not. The speaker is the same in both zines, but the stories are set a decade apart. Despite all the relationships found, lost and changed along the way, here we are nonetheless.

Excerpts

there was already too much:
sweetgrass prickling our shadows teetering
on white fence tops;

- from Gradations I

How should we get there,
asks the pressure of your finger
on the spine of my question,

- from Gradations II

Mirae Lee is a cultural producer, translator, and illustrator from Tkaronto. She is also the co-founder of choa magazine, an online publication bringing together voices of Korean women in the diaspora. Her creative practice is grounded in her relationship with the land she resides, with music always playing in the background.