⌘ Dear Patrons and Readers
Bareknuckle Books is an independent small press run by professional writers based in Brisbane, Australia. We have championed and published contemporary avant-garde writing for twenty years in our open access online journals Retort Magazine and Bareknuckle Poet Journal of Letters (see history below).
Bowing to editorial pressures influenced by funding from government(s) and/or corporations doesn’t happen here at Bareknuckle Books. We care about great writing and supporting living breathing writers for whom living and writing are interchangeable terms. Since the beginning we have always been wary of government arts funding (who is in power anyway?) and we, the editors, finance the press ourselves. In 2013 we graduated from a purely online presence and began publishing paperback anthologies and books by individual authors (see catalogue at website below).
We have reached the critical stage where Bareknuckle Books needs your help. Our long game is to publish writing often marginalised for purely commercial reasons and in the process contribute the writers we publish to the English language literary canon. Consider the following quote from the Journal of Higher Education:
For those who protest that most of these thousands of journals can be dismissed as marginal—that we need pay attention to only a handful of “prestigious” ones, like Poetry and The New Yorker-—may I suggest there could be a few Blakes or Dickinsons swimming with the guppies in that wide prosodic sea? If a truly titanic poet were to appear, wouldn’t one of the less visible but more adventuresome journals—-Retort Magazine be more likely to be his or her publisher than would status-conscious professional journals like Ploughshares and American Poetry Review?
The Chronicle of Higher Education Washington D.C, U.S.A Feb 21, 2010
This is the truth, (especially in todays webculture of flash fads) if you read ‘status-conscious’ to mean status quo.
As a patron of Bareknuckle Books and our online open access literary journal Bareknuckle Poet you will go down in history as someone who contributed to bold, edgy and enlightened 21st century writing.
With your help we will continue to publish our open access online journal and pay the writers we publish. With your help we will continue to publish print anthologies and openly solicit individual author manuscripts from acerbic, bold, dangerous, epicene, marginalised and transgressive contemporary writers in all (and as of yet undreamed of) genres.
Think Grove Press only it’s today . . . that’s us, and with your help we’ll prove it. Click the button below, choose your tier and that’s it, you are supporting an indy small press 🙂
