I learned to improvise. You can’t plan, it seems. Every day is a different-sized panel.

While nostalgia can be a comforting preoccupation, critical engagement is required to truly make sense of the past. Mere reflection without active intervention enables selective forgetting and a romanticization of complicated circumstances. This self-deception diminishes the present moment and leaves one longing for days they can never return to—if they even existed.

In Frames: A Memoir, Jeff Newberry curates personal experiences to process living in an incomprehensible world. Fragments find meaning via juxtaposition, each page a scaffolding through which patterns emerge. Cultural touchstones from Peanuts to Hamlet intertwine with details of a dysfunctional childhood and efforts to right painful wrongs as a father and teacher today. With these raw materials, Newberry constructs a series of exhibits in book form; text boxes multiply and interact across layouts increasingly complex. As one wanders its corridors, Frames provides a look at the power of refinement in remembering our individual and shared histories.

46 pages, handmade and numbered • 2026

“Jeff Newberry’s intriguing memoir examines how frames—literal and figurative—shape the stories we tell ourselves and others. From the borders of memory to comic book panels, museum walls, and caskets, Frames: A Memoir illustrates the unique power of brevity, innovation, and design.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

A key of sea glass floats, / Slowly spinning, / In the little puddle of my palms.

Robust rivers arise from humble headwaters. When runoff gathers and starts its flow, tributaries form rich with sediment and potential for greater things. These sources merge and move downstream, dispersing nutrients while shaping their surroundings through erosion and deposition. Tides trickle and teem, forever gliding onward.

Currents of memory, grief, and love drift through Headwaters. Emerging from stream-of-conscious exercises before being refined into their final contours and configurations, these poems retain a dreamlike quality even when depicting real-world experiences. In this collection, Isaiah R. Hicks finds "It was me that ached to write about all the / Water in the world, it was my mouth that / Refused to stop welling up with rain."

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

84 pages, handmade and numbered • 2025

i belong to myself these days / hasn't always been that way...

Muse finds Kelsey L. Smoot illustrating the zeitgeist of their current personal, social, and political orientation in poems decidedly southern and melancholic. These discordant freedom songs explore people, places, and events Smoot loves, reveres, and reviles. Conceived as the culmination of their "freshman year" writing season, Muse is the chaotic fraternal twin to the debut collection we was bois together—a timestamp of their work and life in increasingly challenging times.

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to the Weelaunee Coalition, an Atlanta collective focused on the #stopcopcity effort and organizing around Palestine and other human rights issues.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

60 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

"Kelsey is a master of turning a moment into a movement. After reading this text, I don’t know if being the same is an option. Muse has activated me in places that are ancient, present, and future all at once. Kelsey calls us to imagine ourselves more human, more aware, more intentional and to become those versions of ourselves. Taking us in and out of familiar imagery, Muse invites the reader to reckon with cognitive dissonance and increase our capacity to act courageously. Glory to this work for its radical authenticity and acceptance of things as they are, not as we might wish them to be."

—Kiera "Ashlee Haze" Nelson, Poet & CEO

Philosophy Media Group & Kiera Ashlee Talent Co

"In a world where capitalist colonial systems are fighting tooth and nail to keep us disembodied, Kelsey’s poems are a balm, a call to step back into ourselves. Muse is a physical experience, a work that asks us to read not just with our eyes but with our hands, belly, jaw, and scars. At the heart of this chapbook are the questions of kinship and what it means to be in community with one another. As Kelsey speaks truth to power, sharing the lived experience of transness and Blackness, and of witnessing genocide in real time, they are bolstered by friends, cousins, ancestors, and even a hitchhiker. The poems in Muse are crafted with careful sonic intention, and they echo long after the final page. Kelsey finds the words for feelings I didn’t know how to name, and reminds us “how fortunate we are/to have found one another/in all of this unluck.”

–Paula Turcotte, author of the chapbook Permutations

I meet a Korean American man and / a Chinese woman ... / Birds of a feather only because we happened / to rest on the same branch.

Flint, Michigan gained national attention at the onset of its water crisis in 2014, but its problems began decades prior. The city followed a textbook boom-and-bust arc through much of the twentieth century, emerging as a global leader in automotive manufacturing until shifting economics led to General Motors all but abandoning the area in favor of outsourcing work to nonunion employees in other states and countries. Deindustrialization begat urban decay, with Flint's citizens facing an unemployment catastrophe, rampant poverty, and subsequent high crime. White flight more than halved the population, dramatically shifting demographics. Traffic remains primarily outbound in "Vehicle City" today, leaving a void for others to fill.

Vivian Kao documents her family's efforts to acclimate to Flint in Dear Mrs. River-Dragon, focusing on the challenges of being an Asian-American woman and mother in a marginalized city where AAPI residents comprise less than one percent of the community. Kao writes of parenting biracial children in a disinvested environment, relations between Asian-Americans and other groups, and the lasting impact of the water crisis as well as anti-AAPI sentiment in the early days of the pandemic. Her collection navigates the personal and political, exploring the complexities of finding a home in a place that neither needs, wants, nor claims you.

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to ETM Flint, an organization creating movements for environmental change through the development of diverse resident champions and issue advocacy.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

80 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

welcome, little one. you have always been here / & now here you are.

Practitioners of internal family systems psychotherapy approach their client's needs with an understanding of the mind as a composite of subpersonalities fulfilling different roles. Individual parts may harbor the pain of traumatic events, seek to protect a person from further harm, or engage in problematic behaviors to obscure difficult emotions. These coexisting pieces act with positive intentions but often lead to dysfunction. Internal family systems methodology works to bring balance by recognizing and healing these aspects of the psyche, developing positive relationships with the core self underlying their presence.

In heart of us, Kai Thigpen draws upon their professional work with IFS to explore the multiplicity of experiences held by a therapist and client as they collaborate on a path of growth. Respective features of each are depicted on the page as they manifest in life—through thoughts, memories, and sensations. Thigpen captures the vulnerability, embodiment, and change made possible by honoring our many parts as "the spinning slows down / just a little bit / & it is magic / magic."

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to Project LETS, a national grassroots organization creating peer-led mental health care structures for transformative, liberated healing.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

88 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

you weren’t perfect, maybe, but you toed the line, you respected limits. and then one day you woke up and the line wasn’t where it had once been.

Researchers have disproved the concept of an orderly grieving process with discrete stages and certain trajectories. The bereaved mourn in different ways and at varying speeds based on inherent traits and the nature of their loss, but not without an added element of unpredictability. Further complicating matters are bonds marked by ambiguity. Death may only serve as the final step for a broken relationship in which the person in question has been physically or mentally absent prior to their passing. Survivors are left to contemplate what exactly they have lost, and when.

In the experimental fiction Self-Portrait of the Artist Stupid with Grief, a young woman ruminates on the disappearance of her parents—her father to suicide long after her mother’s abandonment. Franziska Hofhansel’s protagonist examines her connections to both by reconsidering a series of photographs and drawings created throughout their years together and apart. These images remain just out of focus, leaving the reader to understand them only through the narrator’s monologues. Memories unspool to illustrate formative experiences shaped by her family’s eccentricities, as well as the banal cruelty of capitalism influencing her life today. Reflecting on these struggles, she finds "​...we could not endure it, not for a single second could we endure the true story of our own lives, of anyone’s life. only just this once i would like to try.​"

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

60 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

I do not have a daughter / therefore I have kept her safe.

The true prevalence of child abuse is unquantifiable due to the shadows in which it occurs; vicious acts are committed every day yet never reported. Young victims carry lifelong psychological trauma, impacting their daily lives and putting them at risk for a number of further issues—developmental delays, limited opportunities, and additional victimization, among others. These problems compound the social norms already engendering violence against children, contributing to a world in which even more youth are raised in perilous environments.

In Some Animals Eat Their Young, Dmitra Gideon merges public and private histories to address the impossible-to-voice cruelties of child abuse. They blend documented crimes with personal tragedies, incorporating the familial violence of Greek mythology and the formality of legal policies and statistics, ultimately bearing witness to brutality, conveying communal culpability, and dispelling the myth of evil. In poems, essays, and hybrid pieces, Giedon searches for patterns, deciding, "it seems a web; comes from everywhere, converges, spreads. Not cycle but saturation."

​For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to Hutton House, an emergency shelter and drop-in center for teenagers who run away, are in crisis, or are experiencing homelessness.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

76 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

the softened sound / of clinking glass, the curling / of a stinger embedded in her tongue

Upwards of one in five American men, and half as many women, experience alcohol use disorder—to say nothing of its impact on countless families and society at large. While this behavior was often seen as a moral failure in earlier times, practitioners now view it as a medical disease. Alcoholism develops for most during their adolescent or young adult years, and research finds its causes to be split between genetic and environmental factors. Although a consensus has emerged regarding its origins, debate remains over its management. A diverse range of philosophies, programs, and treatments are available to those who seek support. Regardless the path chosen, commitment and confidence are key.

In addiction is a sweet dark room, Amanda Nicole Corbin shares her own story of recovery, recounting the dark depths of drinking and the light thereafter. She “unlock[s] the cage in her chest and release[s] a thousand flaming moths of her past.” Corbin introduces a teenager creating freedom with abandon, describes the loneliness of apartments full of empty bottles, and tracks the nonlinear journey of her healing. Empathetic but never sentimental, these poems avoid romanticizing her former life and reintroduce her restored self to those who waited. Free from the control of alcohol, she instead chooses to “drink in the sounds of what it means to have meaning.”

​For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to Maryhaven, a comprehensive behavioral health services provider specializing in addiction recovery for adults and adolescents in central Ohio.

Read "thanks, i think," "we leave the past in knots," and "revisit" previously published in Impossible Task.

88 pages, handmade and numbered • 2024

My kids, / wildfires that cracked me, / first born on the Fourth of July. // One knocks her tooth on / the door. Nothing to do, / watch her mouth fill with blood.

Experts have long debated the mechanics of tooth eruption, identifying a common timeline for this process of dentition but failing to determine its underlying causes. Doctors throughout the ages have employed a variety of unpleasant treatments to ease an infant's discomfort, including the application of mercury, leaches, and lead. While toddler's gums are no longer lanced to free a path for emerging teeth, researchers have yet to establish a conclusive theory for how nature completes the enterprise independently. Of course, none of this matters to the child themself; they must simply learn to endure the agony and uncertainty, a trial run for life's many misfortunes.

In Eruption Sequence, Meg Thompson conflates her young daughter and son's teething with the postpartum depression she concurrently faces—feeling she too will slowly explode from the unseen stress of motherhood. "Dumb Happy Mom made / the mistake a few years back / telling everyone that / she was a little bit sad. / Dumb Happy Mom thought / everyone was kind / of on the same page / about how hard it is / to raise children." Thompson bears her burden alone but does not wallow in it. She reflects on the daily routines of parenting, finds humor in trips to Target and the zoo, appreciates the quiet moments of togetherness her role provides. She considers the troubled world awaiting her kids and the fates of families less fortunate, ultimately taking relief in recognizing "My girl is good. / My boy is good."

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to New Moms, an organization serving young mothers experiencing poverty and homelessness in the Chicagoland area.

Read an excerpt published in Impossible Task.

60 pages, handmade and numbered • 2023

My heart shatters / with each possibility, adding to the roadside debris / something less reflective than fiberglass / but just as sharp.

While the environmental consequences of our automobile dependency are rightly lamented, car culture's everyday dangers have become so commonplace as to be all but ignored. Collisions are nothing more than obstructions of traffic, drivers craning their necks to take in a scene forgotten just as quickly as they speed away. Tragedies involving pedestrians may be fodder for the nightly news, but little is done to prevent their occurrence. Thousands perish in such catastrophes every year, leaving loved ones to process their sorrow as they likely remain reliant upon a vehicle of their own.

"In SHOVE THE LIGHT BACK IN, we accompany Rachel Nolan on their painstaking, authentic, artful investigation of grief. After the hit-and-run car accident that kills their dear friend, they take the reader on a journey of introspective mourning, a honing-in on small details, going over them again and again, demanding answers—yes—but the agonizing questions, in this case, make this book so viscerally, painfully human. For who among us has not felt as though an accident that breaks our hearts, takes our beloved from us, can be anything other than a grand conspiracy. In response to unbearable loss, they create an alternate universe in which the only things red or exploding are the flowers at your bedside, in which you are both not of this world and walking through the door. SHOVE THE LIGHT BACK IN is a book for anyone who has ever lost someone suddenly, to circumstances beyond their control. It is for anyone who wishes their imagination and their grief could raise the dead."

​—Joan Kwon Glass, author of NIGHT SWIM

​For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to WalkMassachusetts, a nonprofit making walking safer and easier to encourage better health, a cleaner environment, and vibrant communities.

Read an excerpt previously published in Impossible Task.

48 pages, handmade and numbered • 2022

all explanation flees / from the mind / where once there was / a kiosk promising / information

Sunlight seeps through the splintered ceiling of Buzludzha, a deserted national shrine lost within the mountains of Bulgaria. Finished in 1981 and abandoned eight years later with the fall of communism, stone, steel, and glass form a towering and futurist edifice gradually worn down as the landscape has reclaimed itself. Vegetation climbs shattered mosaics covered by graffiti. In winter, floors strewn with rubble are coated with snow. The proud extravagance of a people with timelessness on their mind quickly gave way to disrepair, leaving a desolate memento to puzzle subsequent generations with its tarnished opulence and antiquated ethos.

Wounded Buildings is Jay Besemer's ekphrastic response to the 2015 exhibit “Grace of Intention: Photography, Architecture and the Monument,” a collection of works examining the sociopolitical impulse for memorialization and the inevitable tension between past and present ideals. Besemer adds a third level of remembrance and shifting symbolism to the artists' interpretative documentation of structures initially constructed for allegorically commemorative purposes. Narratives adapt and are ultimately forgotten though their physical tributes remain; Besemer provides a "meditation on / the void, embodied conceptual, / concrete."

Simple Machines engages with parallel themes from a more personalized perspective. The soil and moss of natural settings merge with windows and walls found in built environments, spaces through which Besemer moves with quiet intention as he accesses meaning in a chaotic world. "Slow, slow living" allows Besemer to find "the door is open / & there is no rain / on the other side." ​These collections merge the organic and made, the internal and external, the public and private. Another New Calligraphy is proud to present both as a single edition, packaged with a supplementary set of cards depicting excerpts of Besemer's rich minimalism and enigmatic reflections.

For every copy sold, ANC will donate $1 to Life is Work—a Chicago safety and wellness resource center for trans and nonbinary people of color—in memory of community activist Elise Malary.

Read an excerpt previously published in Impossible Task.

Double-sided book (64 total pages) w/ obi strip and ten full-color cards,handmade and numbered​ • 2022

once I lose my physical form there will be nothing left
of mine for men to take

Shifting alliances in the waning days of the thirteenth century were contingent on the arranged assault of a young Byzantine princess by a Serbian king more than four decades her senior. The child bride Simonida was only five when negotiations separating her from everything she had ever known were carried out. Subsequent consummation of the marriage led to uterine trauma preventing the birth of a future heir, frustrating dynastic intentions for both empires. Twenty-three years of strictly enforced matrimony transpired before Simonida was free. From her husband’s deathbed, the still-youthful queen returned to her homeland where she promptly become a nun in the Orthodox church. Immortalized in a fresco depicting her beauty, Simonida's image was irreparably damaged when raiders scratched out its eyes—an apt coda to a life defined by its abuses.

In WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN, Sophia Tempest Parsons examines what it means to survive without the comfort of overcoming. She finds “everything that has ever happened lasts forever.” One must learn to forgive in an unforgiving world or eternally scream into a void tired of hearing it. Themes of loss—of agency, of family, of god—and powerlessness weave through cathedrals and hospital floors, bridging the fantasy of wandering a desert for forty days with the reality of lying immobilized upon cold cement. Dreams factor heavily into these reflections, as do references to historically controversial women including Medea, Theodora, Alexandra, and Simonida herself. Parsons looks to these icons as a way to find her footing in a world where “you get taken from and get nothing in return,” tracing the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of universal cruelties.

For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to Between Friends, a Chicago social services agency dedicated to ending cycles of abuse through counseling, educational experiences, and legal assistance.

Read an excerpt previously published in Impossible Task.

60 pages, handmade and numbered • 2022