by Adam Horvath, with drawings by Jean-Jacques Grandville

From the publisher’s introduction:

Poetry : Prose :: Dancing : Walking – so said Paul Valéry, poet and philosopher. Adam Horvath, naval navigator turned editor, would have made a good philosopher. In a way, he has. His retirement brought on a contemplation of life, its absurdities and contradictions, expressed more often than not through poetry: he published his first book of poems on his eightieth birthday. Each toys with an idea. A quick twist of the philosophical screws, a clever flair, leaving the reader to unwind his Gordian knot. Dancing, indeed. What might take Nietzsche or Sartre or Descartes – philosophers he makes characters of in his poems – a ream to explore in prose, Adam dances around in a few lines. The idea is its heart, the poem its dashing attire. Why does dad look ever more like me as I grow older? Why am I blamed for offenses committed in others’ dreams? And what would life be, were the world ugly and the people sad? Flipped scripts and contradictions; time past and time present, both perhaps present in time future. He is a little Borgesian (and he once dined with Borges for breakfast) but really he is Horvathian, original to the point of requiring his own adjectives.

One of these is “conandrumic,” which to Adam is a matter of degree. Something is not conandrumic alone, but very conandrumic, or exceptionally conandrumic, or, on occasion, when the noggin needs a rest, only mildly conandrumic. Like any good sampling of flavors, these poems show off a variety of conandrumicity – from Eye of the Beholder (least conandrumic) to Basho Discovers Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence Avant a Lettre (most conandrumic, naturally). Few artists could be sufficiently Horvathian to illustrate these poems, but Jean-Jacques Grandville has somehow managed it, some hundred and seventy years beyond the grave.

This edition has its genesis in another, and steadfast collectors of No Reply’s work may be familiar with a few of these poems. They were among the very first pieces of writing which we took up. But what began as a chapbook ballooned into an opus, Melancholia, which we couldn’t feasibly print as a fine press edition. It became No Reply’s sole trade publication, which quickly sold out and was turned over to Babel Editions for wider distribution. Now, to celebrate our acquisition of a Vandercook Universal I cylinder press, we are returning, for its maiden project, to a few of these poems. Particularly, those which show in spades Adam’s love of conundrum. Nothing could be more conandrumic, anyway, than No Reply publishing poems from a Babel Editions edition first published by No Reply. But so it is. I am pleased, then, to present for our press’ fourteenth edition fourteen poems by Adam Horvath.

ARTIST NOTES

Adam Horvath grew up in Bayside, Queens, and studied English at Columbia, where he was infected by Chaucerian irony. He never recovered. After a two-year stint as Navigator of the cargo vessel USS Arcturus, he embarked on a career as a senior acquisitions editor at several university presses and a trade book editor for McGraw-Hill. His translation of Alejandro Casona’s play Suicide Prohibited in Springtime was published in Modern Spanish Theatre (E.P. Dutton) and was performed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio network. He once memorably had breakfast with the great Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. His desert island reading list includes Don Quixote, Archy and Mehitabel, and everything by Thomas Bernhard.

A devout polysemist who also relishes the occasional pun, Adam now lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with his wife, Julie, and a pack of very frisky pet peeves. He is preparing two new collections of his poems, Chuang-tzu Rides Again and Invasion of the Clerihews.

EDITION NOTES

• The edition is limited to 80 copies, numbered 1 through 80.

• The fourteenth imprint of No Reply Press, 2021.

• Set in 11pt Weiss type, with Kapitalen titling.

• Printed by hand on Hahnemüle Bugra paper using a Vandercook Universal I proof press.

• Bound in handmade papers made specially for the edition by Madeleine Durham.

• Housed in a moss green handmade slipcase.

• A conundrums unto itself, the book contains perhaps the only instance of a Non-Erratum slip, informing the reader that no errors have been made (despite what they’d think).