When painter Pat Adams first told me about her small collage pieces, she explained their origin as a necessary adaptation to back pain. I was intrigued, given what I knew of her paintings and her process. Her studio, located in a separate building on her property in Bennington, Vermont, is equipped with a large pulley system designed to hoist large canvases from vertical to horizontal positions for the purposes of applying paint and other media. When getting to the studio became too challenging, she converted a guest room in her home into a workspace. There she has assembled hundreds of small, yet intricate collage pieces, a selection of which will form the centerpiece of our book.

Her materials range from magazine and catalog clippings, photographs, and mailers, to jars of paint scrapings, remnants of bubble wrap, and dried flowers. A xerox machine in the corner of her workspace replicates patterns that she later cuts into shapes, or uses as backing. The patterns she produces are likewise experiments in mark-making: some resemble layered grids of graphing paper, others the swirling stems of dried nasturtium. In a 2022 interview with the Brattleboro Reformer, Adams described her process this way:

As I was here, spending more time in the house, I would move around, I’d come upon a scrap of this, a scrap of that. Something would be blue, or glossy or a little unnameable, usually. But I would find that my eye thought there was something marvelous about it. I’d go over to the dustpan and pick out what I thought was interesting, and start to put it into a piece of paper that had some kind of activity, usually, a smudge or a line or something. Those two would begin to interact, and then I find another little scrap someplace…1

As I write this, I find myself reflecting on the distances Adams has traveled, starting as a young painter, to gather her subjects and materials. A tour of Europe in 1951, for example, brought her to view the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Museum, an experience she credits with inspiring her ongoing exploration of forms and her smaller-scale work of that period. Throughout her painting career, her movements have exposed her to new materials, such as the natural elements (shells, rocks, sand, mica) that she collected and ground down to create pigments and textures for her paintings. Travel also prompted a sense of practical necessity, specifically concerning the size and format of her work: “I was thinking about the materials I had at hand, how I would pack my work and get it back to the studio.”2

In other words, in ways very different from the limitations of confinement to a home studio, travel likewise imposes creative constraints. And both circumstances hold the potential to prompt new ways of seeing and working. That Adams continues to create using the materials she has “at hand,” gathering and layering them in the form of small collages, demonstrates how, well into her nineties, an artist can continue to adapt while maintaining the essential elements of her work, and its meaningful continuation.

Practical considerations aside, Adams has expressed an affinity for “working smaller,” pointing to “a spiritual intensity” that takes place. And she has often described an appreciation for smaller-format works, in particular, to “convey feeling or certain states of mind.” Her preference for interiority, or a subjective experience with art and art-making, is evident throughout her work and teaching. In a Bennington College lecture given in 2012, she urged students to cultivate and appreciate their inner lives:

Regarding the subject of painting Delacroix declared, “Your subject, O Artist, is yourself.” I shift that “yourself” to “consciousness”: individual human consciousness, deliberating with itself within a temenos of the imagination. That is the marking of the artist within a format wherein one gathers the stuffs of oneself, wherein one leads out from that self the notice of that which has been noticed.3

Adams’ emphasis on interiority, on feeling and sensing, might surprise some critics, who have misread her work as intellectual expression or calculation. These viewers will have missed the point. While a first encounter with her larger paintings may give the impression of something expansive and external—something to get your head around, like an abstract landscape of a world that exists beyond us—given sufficient time with the work, a more private, even intimate, space emerges. Adams might use the words “temenos” or imagination to describe this space. The best I can do is say that, during a recent show at Alexandre Gallery, I felt as if I were in the presence of otherwise unseeable, inside worlds. Put more concretely, the experience of viewing her work in person is comparable to peering through a microscope. You can feel alone with what you’re viewing—quiet and almost inside it—even as others stand nearby.

It’s worth noting here that since our first visits to discuss the book, Pat’s eyesight has diminished considerably. Our conversations about her recent work, and her modes of working, have addressed this topic in ways that help me better understand how a diminishment in physical ability can enhance, or put greater emphasis on, one’s inner life. Without question, her insights about the importance of thinking, imagining, and dreaming are helping to shape our work together.

Early in our project, Pat presented me with a box of typed lectures, written and delivered over a fifty-year teaching career. To start my reading, I selected three, written roughly a decade apart—1977, 1999, and 2012. She has also shared with me her “boxes of words,” collections of notebook pages and paper scraps of different types and sizes, on which Pat jots down her thoughts as they come. Between visits, she will mail me new collections of words in batches. They offer me a look inside her way of thinking, through rough sketches, idea lists, and short journal entries. Some read like philosophy; others are vaguely mathematical, a form of problem-solving. Still others read like poems.

What strikes me about the materials we’ve gathered so far—our conversations, the lectures, and boxes of words—are the common threads, the returned-to language and concerns that have occupied Adams over a lifetime. She applies the term quiddity to describe the essence, or “whatness,” of a painting as it comes into being, the “calling into flesh what is not-as-yet.” And she uses discernment to try to pin down the experience of finding direction when working, a direction she insists originates with the artist’s “self-sense,” a hunch.

One long-held and pressing concern in Adams’ work relates to the question of art’s origins, its genesis: What is art, and from where or what does it begin?:

Because painting draws up into consciousness matters that are blind at their point of origin, it bestirs an understanding difficult to parse. … I have always questioned what is art? Why art is? Why my necessity to make marks? What activates my will, what supplies the energy for me to—for example—tack a 6’ by 10’ length of primed linen onto an 18’ free-standing wall attached to a chain hoist which allows the panel to be pulled upright or dropped onto my studio floor—there to paint on?4

On a recent visit, she returned us to this topic: When she sits down to work, the blank page or canvas brings to mind the image of a still expanse of water, the formless void that precedes, in the book of Genesis, the first acts of creation. A first mark on the page creates a ripple, and the making begins.

Then, just yesterday, I pulled this out of a box of words recently shipped to my home in Beacon, New York:

Churn

What determines choice?

Range of awareness at the time predisposed.

At this moment, time, space, materials at hand.

I can’t help but see, in this jotted-down note, the generative force of an artist in her ninth decade. The movement of the waters, the churn, “the will to form.” The paper and pen, the materials at hand.

- Elizabeth Murphy

In 2019, I visited the painter Pat Adams at her home in Bennington, Vermont, to talk about books. Pat had hired me to help finish a project begun by her late husband, the historian Arnold Ricks. I would be acting as production editor for a short biography of Arnold’s father, James Hoge Ricks, a lifelong Quaker and Virginia judge who became a leading voice of the Progressive era’s juvenile court movement. Pat and I were meeting to discuss the various considerations that go into a bound object’s look and feel, such as trim size and choice of materials, the paper stock and cloth for binding.

Pat showed me some books off her shelf that she hoped could serve as models. Most appealing was a small catalog published by the Bennington Museum in 1960, showing the work of sculptor and Bennington professor Simon Moselsio. The cover was simple yet elegant, green with a leather-like shine, and embossed with the artist’s name in a muted gold.

For Pat, the look and feel of the book we were making was as important as its contents. It should be hardcover and cloth, and the trim size should take into account the book’s length. It would be a thin volume, but she wanted it to feel, in readers’ hands, like an object of some weight–a book worthy of its subject. Most importantly, she wanted the book to reflect an attitude of simplicity and humility, Quaker values that were central to Hoge Ricks’ work on behalf of society’s most vulnerable.

As a point of reference, Pat also pointed to a book I’d recently published, a collection of poems titled Little Prayers, which takes the form of an exchange with my friend, the late poet Taylor Stoehr. She appreciated the book’s size, its small heft, which can be held in one hand, or carried around like a prayer book. In an appreciative and somewhat conspiratorial tone, Pat leaned in to tell me how, these days, she too was working and painting in smaller formats. She referred to her recent pieces as “little nothings.” But I immediately understood, without seeing the work, that her words were not intended as self-effacement. In fact, I took them as an invitation.

While Covid kept us from meeting again as we worked on her husband’s book, I kept her little nothings in mind. And recently, I had the chance to see them.

The year before last I came to Pat with the proposal that we collaborate on another book project, this one featuring her later work. At 96 years old, despite some physical limitations, Adams continues to think and plan and create like the artist she has always been. Her recent work includes hundreds of small yet intricate collages and paintings that feel both different from, and continuous with, the large mixed media works she’s long been known for.

Though small, Adams’ later work manages to encapsulate the full variety of forms and media that she’s explored, and expanded on, over a seventy-year career: planet-like shapes that float in the universe of a page, or backing; found materials, carefully placed, suspended in binding agents or applied with glue; and recurrences of patterned lines and arcs that can resemble at once the scalloped edges of a minute seashell, and some far off, mountainous horizon. These later works are small, in other words, and at the same time remarkably vast.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing an inside look at our work together so far. I’ll use this space to sort through the ideas we have put on paper, and the materials we’ve gathered, for a project that has become, in itself, a kind of collage. It has also been a collaboration. An infinitely rewarding one.

Since the press’s founding in 2003, nineteen of our thirty-six front- and backlist titles have been authored by women, in genres ranging from poetry, fiction, and criticism to visual art and multimedia collections. Our Board of Directors and Advisory Board are headed by women distinguished for their contributions to arts and letters, including poet and editor Jennifer Barber, literary scholar Bonnie Costello, author and literary consultant Amy Holman, and novelist and poet Kristen Holt-Browning. And past judges of our annual Off the Grid Poetry Prize have included award-winning poets Marilyn Nelson, Jennifer Tseng, and Marianne Boruch. 

I want to make a special mention of Jennifer Barber’s contributions to Grid’s development as a press. In addition to being a devoted poet and advisor to the press, Jennifer has served as Poet Laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts, since 2021, and I personally learned a great deal from her poetry workshop at Suffolk University a decade ago. In fact, it was her ongoing guidance that led me to my role at Grid, where I work alongside editor-in-chief Elizabeth Murphy as we navigate the challenges of managing a non-profit publishing house in these unpredictable, turbulent times. 

In a 2022 interview with Lit Hub, Elizabeth explained how for her, “the greatest benefit of working at an independent press is the ability to develop close relationships with the authors and artists we publish.” Her attentive leadership sets a high standard for the quality of each book we release. And our authors seem to agree, as several have returned to work with the press on a second, and even a third title.

So, as we close out this Women’s History Month, I want to celebrate the accomplishments of women and their contributions to arts and letters by acknowledging the writers, artists, editors, advisors, and readers who comprise the spirit of Grid Books. 

Here is a list of the women we’ve published as of this Women’s History Month, March 2025:

• Elaine Sexton – Drive (2022), Site Specific: New & Selected Poems (2025)

• Elaine Terranova – Dollhouse (2013 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner), Perdido (2019), Rinse (2023)

• Fanny Howe – The Wages (2020)

• Ioanna Carlsen – Breather (2019 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner)

• Jane Medved – Wayfarers (2024 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner)

• Janet Winans – Staircase of Roots (2009)

• JoAnne McFarland – Pullman (2023), A Domestic Lookbook (2024)

• Karen Whalley – My Own Name Seems Strange to Me (2018 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner)

• Lee Sharkey – A Darker, Sweeter String (2007)

• Lisa Sewell – Flood Plain (2025)

• Patricia Corbus – Finestra’s Window (2015 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner)

• Ruth Miller – Painted Presence (2023)

• Sharon Hashimoto – More American (2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner), Stealing Home (2024)

• Susan Okie – Woman at the Crossing (2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prizewinner)

When our press began its work two decades ago, founding editors Bert Stern and Tam Lin Neville were prompted by a wish to gather and publish the poems of their friend, the teacher and social justice activist Henry Braun. That collection, titled Loyalty, featured Braun’s new and as-yet uncollected poems, as well as selections from his first book, The Vergil Woods (Atheneum 1968). The motivating force behind our press’s very beginnings, in other words, was the compilation of a volume of new and selected poems.

The publication of a “new and selected” marks an important moment in a poet’s career, and one that resonates with our mission to celebrate the work of older writers who have been working and publishing for decades. When I took over as editor of the press in 2015, my first opportunity to embrace this mission was in my work with the poet Keith Althaus, whose collection Cold Storage had recently won our annual Off the Grid Poetry Prize. I developed such an affinity for his poems—and for Keith himself—that when five years later he suggested we collaborate on a new and selected, I was happy to say yes.

Our work unfolded over a three-year period, over many email and letter exchanges, as well as occasional visits to his home in North Truro, Massachusetts. We were wise not to impose a deadline, because we used the time we had to read and consider a large assortment of new poems, as well as the poems published in his three previous books. We went back and forth on matters of selection and sequence, given the time needed to sit with the work, and with each others’ proposed selections, and to mull over each new sequence until it all felt right. We even found ourselves considering newer poems, ones that Keith was drafting as we worked. For the first time in a long time, I found myself printing poems and laying them out on my large dining room table, so that I could really see the poems and the sequences and make my decisions with a kind of bird’s-eye view.

The process of compiling a volume of new and selected poems is very different from gathering work for a single collection. This project with Keith prompted a number of editorial questions specific to the genre:

• Should the collection as a whole have a title? In this case, we decided no.

• What principles would guide our selections? We leaned into Keith’s poetic sensibilities—his humor, his regional attachments and local interests, his painterly attention (in language) to areas of shadow and light.

• Should the new poems come first in the table of contents, followed by the selected, or the other way around? We chose to foreground the new work. We closed this section with an uncharacteristically long poem, “The Square,” which can be read as both an epilogue (to the new) and introduction (to the selected).

• And what about the selected poems—should they appear chronologically, oldest to newest, or the other way around? We went with chronology—it just made sense.

As with most editorial decisions, small as they may seem when you’re making them, each one seemed to place a stress or emphasis on some aspect of Keith’s poems, and at the same time to clarify and contextualize the body of his work as a whole. Even the visual texture and mood of the cover image—a detail of a painting by his wife, the artist Susan Baker—contribute to a sense of continuity in his writing and publishing life. Her work also features on the covers of Cold Storage and Ladder of Hours, after all. And the pair have collaborated on many publishing projects over the years, which I recommend perusing (in person, if at all possible). Here is the painting we chose on one summer visit, in 2023:

More recently I’ve been thinking about the editing and publishing of a new and selected as something like the launch of a retrospective exhibition. The poems selected from earlier books show us something of the poet’s origins, at least as far as publication goes, while the new poems ground the collection in the present day, reminding us that the poet is our contemporary, is still writing. In this context, the “new” is not merely another book of poems appended onto a life’s work—it is often the beginnings of yet another book of poetry, a work in progress.

In May, we will publish our third new and selected, Elaine Sexton’s Site Specific, featuring poems from her four previous books, Sleuth (New Issues 2003), Causeway (New Issues 2008), Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press 2015), and Drive (Grid Books 2022), as well as new and previously uncollected work.

While working on this book, reading and considering Elaine’s poems from her first collection to her newest poems, I felt I was able to witness the evolutions of a writer and artist. While the early selections locate the poet at the sites of her upbringing, among the “totems” of her childhood and young adult life, her later work announces an ever-deepening engagement with art and art making. In Prospect/Refuge she revels in ekphrastic. In Drive, her poetics shift mode from reflective to reflexive. I’m excited for readers of Site Specific to see how her early narratives of the self—her totems—become her materials for experimentation and art making, not merely their generator or starting point.

Very much in this spirit, I want to leave you with a recording of Sexton reading her poem “Nonplace,” from her 2022 collection Drive.