Flash Art Checks in with Stuart Krimko and Arlo Haskell of Sand Paper Press

Have you heard of Sand Paper Press? Follower or newbie, this recent Flash Art interview with co-publishers Stuart Krimko and Arlo Haskell introduces readers to the finer points of San Paper Press. SPP is a small press publishing outfit with big ideas about poetry and translation. From Flash Art:

A small poetry press based in Key West, Florida, featuring authors such as Harry Mathews and Héctor Viel Temperley, Sand Paper Press is about to publish an anthology of two writers from Buenos Aires, Cecilia Pavón and Fernanda Laguna, founders of the art space Belleza y Felicidad, which gives the collection its title. Belleza was also a publishing house and a literary salon of sorts, and became a turning point in the contemporary intellectual history of the city. Translator Stuart Krimko and co-founder and lifetime friend Arlo Haskell tell a bit about the book and their commitment in publishing to the most secret of objects — poems and relationships.

Your involvement with Buenos Aires and its literature is very peculiar.

Stuart Krimko: I first read Héctor Viel Temperley and Osvaldo Lamborghini when I came to study in theUniversidad de Buenos Aires as a guest student in 1999. And I began translating them right away after coming back home. Then I came back in 2010 to work on Lamborghini and I happened to meet César Aira, who then introduced me to La Internacional — a bookshop where many writers gather — and I first met Fernanda and Cecilia there. Everything then evolved naturally. We became friends and I came back in February 2011 and in the winter of 2012 to work and to spend time with them.

At the same time you began translating Cecilia, she began translating you and other young poets from the USA, like Ariana Reines and Dorothea Lasky. Two separate strains of contemporary poetry came into rich contact.

SK: I was happy to learn that some of what I love about Ariana’s poems — for instance disarming frankness, from a feminist perspective, about sex and relationships and metaphysics alike — could also be found in Cecilia and Fernanda’s writing going back more than a decade. This is very much on display in their co-authored epistolary work Ceci y Fer (2002), which served as an initial inspiration for the Sand Paper Press volume. Given this common ground, it made sense that, through translation, an extended literary family would be formed. [...]

Continue reading at Flash Art.