Dear Editors,

I was struck by “Publishing Poetry Today and Tomorrow: What Are You, In Love With Your Problems?” precisely because it names the entanglement of small presses in a distribution system that both promises salvation and erases the very voices it claims to serve. After SPD’s collapse last spring, hundreds of presses suddenly discovered that their “shortcut” to readers—this “economic hack” of non-profit distribution—was neither hack nor shortcut but a structural dependency. What I read in your essay is a call not simply to mourn that collapse, but to imagine publishing otherwise.

My own chapbook, NIGHT OF THE FIRE, will be released this month (May 2025) by Ethel Zine & Micro Press, where each copy is hand-sewn by the editor—herself funded by a full-time paycheck and sales alone. My poems center on sexual violence, intimacy in the midst and aftermath of trauma, and the genocide in Palestine—subjects that too often vanish, or are “sanitized,” in more established indie catalogues unless an author already bears a marquee name. It has been deeply disappointing for that silencing, reflected by the numerous occasions on which I was told by highly-respected literary journals that my poems were uniquely good but did not follow the "theme" the issue was going for, despite no set theme assigned during the submission period.

Ethel’s model embodies the very alternatives Oleander's essay gestures towards: community-centered distribution that refuses to treat literature as inventory or its makers as cogs in a warehouse. This isn’t a romantic nostalgia; it’s a necessary recalibration against the current implemented system. When SPD’s warehouses funneled some 300,000 books through Amazon and Ingram pipelines, the laborers—many underpaid or unpaid—were hidden from view, and the indie presses mentioned became dependent clients rather than active agents. That system collapsed spectacularly, revealing not only financial precarity but the moral bankruptcy of relying on a distributor answerable to no one but its own bottom line.

If we are to rebuild a truly resilient literary culture, we must ground it in grassroots funding as collective activism and resistance. Ordinary readers pooling small donations to support pamphlets, zines, and hand-bound chapbooks creates a direct bond of accountability and solidarity between writer and community. Such mutual-aid funding insulates artists from shifting policy winds, transforms patrons into partners, and enshrines literature as a shared endeavour rather than a commodity. When each contribution—no matter how modest—represents an act of solidarity, every publication becomes both art and armor against erasure. Without supporting presses like Ethel or the others that fund out-of-pocket, we risk the collapse of the last few literary anarchist movements that are left—and who then will be left to share our voices? 

Equally imperative is that we call out those presses that continued to prop up SPD even as workers sounded the alarm. True solidarity demands accountability: presses that remained dependent on SPD’s opaque practices must be challenged to justify those choices and to commit to transparent, worker-centred alternatives. Only by confronting complicity can we prevent the same patterns of exploitation from repeating under new names and new pipelines.

Thank you for illuminating the structural rot beneath our industry’s polite façades. I hope my chapbook—amongst the many wonderful others who are actually rooted in their leftist values—can serve as one small, burning testament to the power of community-funded art, and to the possibility of building a social publishing network that truly honors the labour—and the lives—behind every page.

Sincerely,

-Ali C