Imprints, Magazines & Presses
Morbid Books
L. Parker
London, UK
2015-
London, UK
2015-
Lewis Parker. Suicide Notes.
"Morbid Books was founded as a result of a surrealist activity: automatic writing. My friend and I had quit our jobs and were working as Poets for Hire, churning them out as fast as we could. When an art gallery in Paris commissioned an exhibition of my work as an ecrivain public—a 'best of' collection to put on the walls—I needed something to sell at the exhibition that I hadn’t already given away for donations, so I agreed to hand-type some books on my Olivetti. It was named Suicide Notes because I used to have a sign offering them as a joke, but people started asking for them. Typing the books by hand, I put a slightly different arrangement of work in each book, so no two were the same, and on the title page I decided to add Morbid Books as the publisher. Even though it’s an art book with no ISBN, and I only managed to type 37 copies, I still regard this as the first Morbid Books publication.
A month or so later I made a joke on social media that I was writing 100 Haikus about Haemorrhoid Cream and invited my friends to join in. Plenty of people did—none who consider themselves poets, which I like—and so I put them in a collection.
Morbid Books was really an accident crossed with a necessity, and it was based initially on fun and games, jouissance. Because so much poetry is dull and overly serious, it’s vital for its longevity to work as a popular entertainment first and foremost, and have as its aim not a single author’s vanity, but what Breton eloquently termed 'collective revelation.'
Now I have a distributor I have upscaled our ambitions considerably. We have A VOID magazine coming out in summer 2017, where we will use the magazine form to do things no other literary periodical is doing. No political magazine has good poetry and no lit mag has interesting politics. We aim to rectify that.
As well as more poetry collections by single authors and collectives, we’ll also be releasing some really ambitious fiction in the Autumn. I can’t say too much about that at the moment because we’re still working on the manuscript, but the story itself is off-the-wall and the design is will be an homage to the German publisher Reclam.
Morbid Books accepts no money from governments, charities or benefactors. It is entirely funded by me and the people who buy my work."
—L. Parker, April 2017
.
A month or so later I made a joke on social media that I was writing 100 Haikus about Haemorrhoid Cream and invited my friends to join in. Plenty of people did—none who consider themselves poets, which I like—and so I put them in a collection.
Morbid Books was really an accident crossed with a necessity, and it was based initially on fun and games, jouissance. Because so much poetry is dull and overly serious, it’s vital for its longevity to work as a popular entertainment first and foremost, and have as its aim not a single author’s vanity, but what Breton eloquently termed 'collective revelation.'
Now I have a distributor I have upscaled our ambitions considerably. We have A VOID magazine coming out in summer 2017, where we will use the magazine form to do things no other literary periodical is doing. No political magazine has good poetry and no lit mag has interesting politics. We aim to rectify that.
As well as more poetry collections by single authors and collectives, we’ll also be releasing some really ambitious fiction in the Autumn. I can’t say too much about that at the moment because we’re still working on the manuscript, but the story itself is off-the-wall and the design is will be an homage to the German publisher Reclam.
Morbid Books accepts no money from governments, charities or benefactors. It is entirely funded by me and the people who buy my work."
—L. Parker, April 2017
.
Selected Output
Lewis Parker. Suicide Notes (September 2015)
Lewis Parker & Friends. 100 Haikus about Haemorrhoid Cream (December 2015)
Edmund Davie. 100 Haikus about Penetration (December 2016)
Lewis Parker & Friends. 100 Haikus about Boris Becker's Breakfast (May 2017)
L. Parker. Sex with Theresa May and other Fantasies (May 2017)
A VOID (2017, forthcoming)
Lewis Parker & Friends. 100 Haikus about Haemorrhoid Cream (December 2015)
Edmund Davie. 100 Haikus about Penetration (December 2016)
Lewis Parker & Friends. 100 Haikus about Boris Becker's Breakfast (May 2017)
L. Parker. Sex with Theresa May and other Fantasies (May 2017)
A VOID (2017, forthcoming)