Mission/BIO

Ranger Press (RPRESS) exists to make space for work that pushes language and visual art to its very limits, and which is resistant to simple or facile categorization. We publish avant-garde literature and art that challenges readers. We hope to revive the cause of the modernist project, at a time when “big ideas” and grand, sweeping narratives in the arts are shunned as relics of a reactionary past.

We are committed to visual and concrete poetry, hybrid texts, and asemic writing; in short, work that thrives at the intersection of text, image, and design. Our list is intentionally small, allowing close attention to each project’s structure, materiality, and typographic life on the page.

As an independent micro-press, we seek out writers and artists whose practices are formally adventurous, and critically engaged. These are writers and artists often rejected by commercial publishing for not adhering to the dictates of the market. Ranger Press is dedicated to risk: for projects that might not fit elsewhere, even in other outlets that call themselves “experimental” or “cutting-edge”.

RPRESS is run by one person, David A. Bishop. He is an avant writer, dabbling in long-form abstract poetry. His current project is called the Noetic Variations, a multi-volume work dedicated to extreme poetic and visual abstraction. He’s been published in BlazeVOX, Word/For Word, Otoliths and other magazines. Under the pseudonym Drew B. David, he edited the now defunct Angry Old Man Magazine. He grew up in Queens, NYC, during the City’s “bad old days”— but now resides in Arlington, VA. You can find all of his work (and a lot of his thoughts) at https://www.davidabishop.blog

RPRESS is in the great tradition of the avant-garde small presses. As a result, the press receives no funding from outside entities at all. We publish all of our titles through Lulu, a POD service, and offer free downloadable versions of our books.

Free access to art is a guiding principle of the press.

“Art is not chaste. Or if it is chaste, it is not art.”—Pablo Picasso

“All art is both abstract and illusionistic. All human invention is an abstraction from reality. We observe, we learn, and we extract; and we use what we learn as the basis for making things. That is to say: we abstract and create illusions. Even linear perspective, which is designed to rationalize the world, is an abstraction from reality.”—Samia Halaby

“Once the practice of art becomes a career like any other, once artists give up their autonomy and become compliant employees and satellites of the economic, managerial middlemen they serve, whether consciously or unconsciously, they lose their identity as artists. The temptation to regard as freedom what is in reality a disguised tyranny is precisely what keeps art in our society so permanently off-balance. It should be obvious that radical art, of necessity, turns into its opposite when it agrees to play by the rules. At that moment, it no longer negates social practice, but complements it, and thus reinforces the logic of the status quo.”—-Suzi Gablik

“Make it new!”–Ezra Pound