I first discovered Tsaurah Litzky’s “Blessing Poems” in Beet, Joe Maynard’s wonderful little magazine published out of Brooklyn. I think I found a copy at Tower Records. However it happened, I remember reading the poems and immediately falling in love with them. They made me laugh. Anytime poetry makes me laugh, I want to publish it.
The result was The Blessing Poems, synaesthesia press chapbook #5, published in late 1996.
The book occupies a special place in the history of the press because it was completed during one of the most transitional periods of my life. I had just moved from Arizona to San Francisco to begin graduate school. Half the edition was finished before the move, and the rest came together in Room 419 of the Mayflower Hotel on Bush Street, between Geary and Taylor.
The room was tiny. There was a hot plate, a small television, my typewriter, stacks of unbound pages, and a stapler spread across a kitchen table positioned in front of a window overlooking the city. I spent countless hours there collating and binding books by hand. And writing. A lot. I should have never left that place, but at $95 a day, it wasn’t sustainable. Plus, what a view.
The Mayflower sat on the edge of Nob Hill, though I’ve always preferred the term “Tender Nob.” The hotel was close enough to the Tenderloin to feel its energy, but high enough up the hill to offer a different perspective. Not long afterward I left to manage a residential hotel down the street at Geary & Jones. I’ll say it again: I probably should have stayed at the Mayflower the whole time I lived in San Francisco.
A.D. Michele provided the illustrations, and I hand-lettered the colophon and ISBN in each copy. There are still a few unbound sheets tucked away in the archives. Every now and then I come across them and am transported back to that little room overlooking the city.
Tsaurah Litzky has been widely published, including appearances in the Best American Erotica series. She has described her work as a search for the light. Living in Brooklyn beneath the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, she once wrote that she believed New York was the Promised Land.
So did I.
And in many ways, despite everything that’s happened since, I still do.
