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Broken Jaw Press Inc.
Box 596 Stn A
Fredericton NB E3B 5A6
Canada
www.brokenjaw.com
Welcome to our publishing house!
“Great writing needs great publishers. Broken Jaw Press is one of this country’s treasures.”
—Sean Wilson, Artistic Director, Ottawa International Writers Festival (onstage, Spring Edition, 2005)
“In Fredericton, Joe Blades’s Broken Jaw Press is a prolific source of new poetry.”
—Roy MacSkimming, The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (M&S)
“All praise to Blades and Broken Jaw Press for putting this work before the public. Let there be many, many, many more.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Herald
“I like Broken Jaw. The press has jam, personality and takes chances that no other press takes in this country.”
—Joe Rosenblatt
Independent Canadian literary arts publishing house Broken Jaw Press was founded by writer–artist Joe Blades in the winter of 1984 while he was working in Banff, Alberta. After being in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1984–1990, the publishing house has been based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Incorporated in 2003, Broken Jaw Press Inc. and its imprints publish poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, by both new and award-winning authors.
More than a publishing house, Broken Jaw Press is an energy-centre that gathers in writers and readers from all of the margins. Located east of the centre of Canada and left of the mainstream, we specialize in highly contemporary writing by poets, writers, translators and artists who take risks and take the responsibility for doing something different. Diverse in gender, genre, age and origin, our authors and artists have one thing in common: they go out to the edge. Many of the writers are positioned on the outside, whether by their native language or by their work with language, and writing, for them, is a highly conscious act, at once deliberate and playful, reflective and releasing, political and personal.
The Broken Jaw Press name came from a medley of sources: a working of the publisher’s initials; letterpress technology—a “jaw” locks flatbed type and furniture in place, if the jaw is loose or broken, the type can move and, in printing, create a bad impression; response to a book review in Mondo Hunkamooga; and a summer 1985 The Globe and Mail article on reconstructive surgery. These fixed the Broken Jaw name with images by Joe Blades—collaged, carved in clay, cast in bronze, inked in skin. In it, we see something of the risk-taking element of writing and publishing poetry and other creative work.
We celebrated our first quarter-century in 2009. In 2010, we published La luna, Tango, siempre la luna / The Moon, Tango, Always the Moon by Nela Rio, Edith Jonsson-Devillers translator into English, shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ 2011 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian women in the previous year. We also published our first Spanish–French bilingual book: En las noches que desvisten otras noches / Durant les nuits qui déshabillent d’autres nuits by Nela Rio; Jill Valéry, traductrice. An expanded edition of Hugh Hazelton’s book antimatter, 2nd edition, again with audio CD, appeared. And then the surprise re:myth: Stories and Poems by the BlackTop MotorCycle Gang, Joe Blades and Biff Mitchell, editors, that features experimental writing by 17 established and emerging writers including Beth Powning, Jo-Anne Elder, Jo Griffith, Yolande House, Biff Mitchell, Dennis Poirier, Hazel Richardson, Todd R. Snow, and Andrew Titus.
2011 starts with fireworks for Congress 2011:
Los puentes del Río San Juan / Bridges over the Saint John River is a fully bilingual, Spanish–English, Capítulo de Fredericton de la AIP antología featuring eight Canadian poets: Lady Rojas Benavente, Joe Blades, Lynn Davies, Jo-Anne Elder, Hugh Hazelton, M. Travis Lane, Julio Torres Recinos and Nela Rio. Nela Rio & M. Travis Lane, editoras / editors.
William Forrestall: Objects for Study is a richly-illustrated art and meditations book by William Forrestall with essays by Virgil Hammock, Leopold C.J. Kowolik, and William Forrestall. Foreword by RM Vaughan.
More books are in the works including vispo and a graphic novel.
The accomplishments of our authors and their books show something of what we have done, how we have gotten to where we are today. The future is unknown, no matter how we prepare for it, no matter what we dream, but we work to see that Broken Jaw Press and its community of authors, editors, translators, and artists will continue to write and publish great books for great readers everywhere. We have added PayPal for your purchase/payment options and have started a blog to keep you up/down/in on what’s happening in house Broken Jaw and with our authors: visit Broken Jaw Presss blog.
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