“I am out of place they say” – Now digitized: from South Dakota by Kathleen Norris & Ed Colker

Travel to the Great Plains and experience from South Dakota, a portfolio of lithographs by Ed Colker and poetry by Kathleen Norris, released as a fine-press edition by Colker’s Haybarn Press in 1978. This work is the latest installment in our ongoing series Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution, which digitizes works published from the 1960s to the 1980s, when independent poetry presses proliferated across the United States.

What I find
Is wild mustard
And the green, hills
Where foxes run or stand
In the cool grass.
They say it is a dream that passes,
A fever: I am out of place they say.

—from “Calentures” by Kathleen Norris

 

Hand-colored lithograph by Ed Colker

Released in 1978 in a run of 25, from South Dakota features letterpress-printed text and beautiful hand-colored lithographs on unbound heavy-weight pages gathered into a paper cover and packaged in a custom box with the title printed on the exterior. This work represents an alternate pathway for poetry during the era of the Mimeo Revolution: the handmade book that is equal parts art object and poetry collection. It also reveals Norris at a critical juncture in her career—as a young poet who had just left a bustling literary life in New York City for small-town South Dakota, a move that would shape all her writing to come, including a half-dozen poetry collections and numerous bestselling memoirs, such as Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Read more about from South Dakota and flip through the portfolio yourself in our online digital chapbook collection.