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About the Name
Golias Books takes its name in part from the Goliardic poets of the 12th and 13th centuries; excluded from political power by circumstance, temperament, or the logic of primogeniture, the Goliards appear in history as skeptical scholasts and sociable itinerants, known primarily for the kinds of Latinate heretical satires and elaborate anti-authoritarian festival lyrics that survive in the Carmina Burana. In this sense Goliardic poetry models critique both from without and from within; Gerald Bruns writes that “satire is the discourse of the Other against the Same,” and for us the anonymous Bishop Golias stands in this regard as a figurehead of an Other tradition that exceeds our modern sensibility, our contemporary passion for civility, rationality, and appropriateness. In this way the Goliardic vision is comic, fatalistic and yet rooted in protest, dubious of progress but temperamentally intolerant of complacency. Dulce est desipere: the liberties of foolishness safeguard action. Golias adumbrates an architecture in a deconstruction, a politics and a metaphysics in a celebration of carnality; assures us that in Latin, too, one may suborn the feast days.
The Golias Books device is taken from an illustration by François Desprez (originally attributed, spuriously, to Rabelais), published in Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (1565).
About the Press
Golias Books is a small, independent poetry press and a registered nonprofit; if you would like to support the press, or if you would like to support one of our authors directly, please feel free to contact us. We are always happy to entertain offers and suggestions for in-kind or otherwise unconventional support — administrative support, connections at local bookstores, opportunities for our authors, or anything else — and we are especially interested in ways to support our authors' travel for readings and book tours.
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For booksellers: all of our major releases are distributed through Small Press Distribution. If you are interested in other chapbooks or limited editions, or if you are interested in our books but do not have an account with SPD, please feel free to contact us directly [here] for wholesale inquiries.
Golias Books is managed and edited by Lawrence Giffin and Christopher Catanese. Please feel free to email us [here], or to find Golias Books on Facebook or Twitter.
Submissions Policy
We are a small press with only a few releases each year, but we typically extend an invitation to submit full-length poetry manuscripts sometime during the spring or summer months. We tend to be most interested in book-length long poems and serial works, as well as in work that engages creatively with received forms and genres; and please also feel free to take some time with [this excursus] on our editorial vision. We are especially interested in experiments in cosmological, didactic, and programmatic writing, as well as in work by authors from underrepresented backgrounds who can address traditional or hegemonic poetic forms from more expansive perspectives.
Please feel free to share this with others who you think may be interested or to contact us with questions; do sign up for our email list [here], and follow us on Instagram to stay apprised of submission periods, releases, and occasional announcements. Outside of our submission period we do not guarantee that we can respond to all queries, but we'll try – sometimes it can just take a little time.
Some other resources:
[Tradition and the Contemporary (2017)]
Some preliminary considerations regarding our editorial orientation.
[Golias Books at Small Press Distribution]
A link to our distributor, where you can arrange for bulk and wholesale orders of our titles. Individuals should consider purchasing directly from our site [here].