Shack Simple Press, LLC.
Responsible for every word.
We are a brand new indie publisher of poetry, essays, short stories, novellas and novels that reflect an interest in all that is local, communitarian, simple, frugal, beautiful, ethical and ecologically sound. We seek to publish works that arise out of a dialogue between community, ecology, ethics, religion, and traditionally grounded wisdom that go beyond mere convention to express a sophianically grounded aesthetic protest against all that is ugly, mass-produced, unsustainable, exploitative, and hostile to human flourishing. To this end, we are committed to publishing marginal works by writers who have something important to say, and say it well, but whose work no one else seems all that interested in publishing because of concerns about the bottom line.
Here at Simple Shack Press, we don't think the bottom line should be the bottom line, and are convinced that that there are enough readers out there who still possess a rational appetite for good contrarian writing in a variety of genres to support a press willing to take a few risks on behalf of excellence and beauty.
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At Shack Simple Press, LLC., we are always working hard to publish and promote new books. Browse through ourcurrent and forthcoming titles below
Zoom and the Neanderthal Girl
Olympia Sibley
Pre-Publication Praise for Zoom and the Neanderthal Girl:
“Teaching is given an edgy contemporary update in these cleverly constructed and keenly felt poems of our moment. Olympia Sibley has been paying attention, tempering anxiety with meter and form, and teaching her heart out. The result is a book that she was meant to write--offhanded and literary, surprising and inevitable.”
- Edward Hirsch, author of nine books of poetry including, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), and Gabriel: A Poem (2014).
"In this remarkable collection by Olympia Sibley, often depicting scenes from the author’s work as a college professor, academic culture is both lampooned and celebrated—and Sibley knows when it’s deserving of mockery, and when it’s deserving of praise.
Sibley’s work often transfigures well-worn aphorisms to reveal truth, as seen in the title of her poem, “Don’t Grade Your Students Before They Hatch.” Her deep empathy for students—and her ability to show this empathy without either sentimentality or condescension—radiates from every line.
The collection includes scenes depicting the Kafka-esque absurdity of pandemic-era teaching. In these poems, mundane tasks are transfigured into acts of grace. In “Changed Utterly,” the speaker concludes that even within this absurd new world of Covid-era teaching, “I must profess that a terrible beauty persists.”
Such terrible beauty perhaps only persists if we are capable of seeing it. Pick up this book. Read these poems. Olympia Sibley’s work will help you see."
-Lea Williamson, Professor of English
“I'm struck by the hope in Olympia Sibley's poems, her intentional peeling of surfaces for something more lasting in young people and literature, even in the shared acts of an academic ‘community.’ Olympia's poems declare a Psalter of blessing over the single body we comprise together -- eyes at the elevator, lacquered nails on test screens, a smile to cast shade on the Mona Lisa. ‘Pay attention’, her poems say. ‘Learn to read one another.’ To that I say: Amen and Selah.”
- Kevin Still, Professor of English and Philosophy
“The context is academic, but the concerns are personal and ethical, and the poems are sharp-eyed but big-hearted responses to situations that arise within the context of instruction, principally at the community college level.
The collection as a whole reflects a triumph of ethos, a winsome reflection upon the moral enormity of what one is engaged in when teaching. Whether humorous, tragic, or touching, Olympia Sibley’s poems speak to the responsibility that we have for tending to one another and seeking out the best in one another. As aesthetic objects, many of these poems are tender and beautiful. As reflections upon the obligation of being human, a few of them are rather more than that.
This book should find a small but passionate audience of readers among those who love poetry, who are engaged in learning or teaching, or who believe that art should still have some-thing to say about duty, friendship, and compassion for others.”
-Anonymous pre-acceptance manuscript reader.
Published Shack Simple Authors
Poetry
Olympia Sibley
For nearly a quarter of a century, Olympia Sibley has worked to convince college students that literature matters, creativity is a higher form of intelligence, and sentences are units of thought. She earned her PhD in English Literature from Texas A&M University (with a minor in Philosophy), graduating summa cum laude. Olympia was born in Iowa, raised in Minnesota, graduated high school in Kenya, and now resides in Bryan, Texas with her husband, a Russian Orthodox priest. In addition to being the winner of the Charles Gordone Poetry Award, Olympia has had her poetry published in a variety of magazines, anthologies, and, on one memorable occasion, transit buses (as part of the Poetry in Motion campaign). When she isn’t chanting, grading, reading, or teaching, Olympia enjoys writing poetry and spending time in the tree house her beloved husband built her in a century-old oak tree on their five wooded acres.
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
Joseph Brodsky
