And Gay
In Bushwick
Being Fat And Gay In Bushwick
In Being Fat And Gay In Bushwick, Hank Ladella deploys the strict brevity of the contemporary American haiku not as pastoral escapism, but as a razor-sharp scalpel for late-capitalist friction and nocturnal longing. Moving methodically through the hyper-local grid bounded by Myrtle Avenue, Jefferson Street, and the nighttime perimeter of Maria Hernandez Park, these twenty-eight short texts register the physical frictions of an unapologetic fat queer body occupying walk-up landings, sweltering bodegas, laundromat benches, and uninsulated bedrooms. Ladella refrains from decorative sentimentality; each line is calibrated with mathematical detachment, tracking how desire curdles, clarifies, or persists beneath overhead halogen lights.
Far from a conventional memoir, this sequence functions as a devastating urban inventory of rapid gentrification, rent debt, and bodily displacement. Ladella weighs the absurdities of post-industrial bohemia against the unflinching reality of somatic weight, appetite, and fleeting intimacy on asphalt. The resulting collection is at once hilarious, formally ascetic, and quietly monumental—an essential dispatch from North Brooklyn’s shifting margins.
“Ladella gives us seventeenth-century formal severity collided head-on with 3 A.M. delivery app receipts and Myrtle-Broadway train screech. These poems do not ask for permission to take up space; they measure the floorboards before they crack.”— The Red Hook Review
“Devastatingly dry, mathematically compact, and completely free of bourgeois posturing. Hank Ladella is writing the only contemporary Brooklyn poems that matter.”— Alistair Finch, author of Gantry Studies
| CAT NO. | PERIOD | TITLE & AUTHOR | PRODUCTION SPECIFICATION | STATUS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SP-002 | WINTER 2025 | Radiator Clank & Other Pastorals | Saddle-stitched chapbook, 20 pp., Risograph cover on French Paper speckle-tone. Hand-numbered edition of 150 copies. | SOLD OUT / OUT OF PRINT |
| SP-001 | AUTUMN 2023 | Sixteen Notes on the Myrtle-Wyckoff Transfer | Hand-sewn pamphlet, 16 pp., letterpress wrapper, handset Garamond lead type. Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies. | OUT OF PRINT |
Founded in 2023 beside Maria Hernandez Park, Suydam Press is an independent Brooklyn micro-imprint dedicated to hyper-local formalist poetics, urban pastoralism, and queer ephemera. After three years of limited hand-numbered chapbook runs distributed through local readings and chap-swaps, Suydam Press inaugurated its trade paperback series in 2026.
We operate without corporate grants, commercial advertisements, or institutional patronage. Our editions privilege brevity, typographic clarity, unbleached stock, and long-term shelf presence over rapid literary cycles.
SUBMISSIONS STATUS: CLOSED. Suydam Press is currently closed to unsolicited chapbook and broadside manuscripts for the 2026–2027 reading period. Solicited manuscripts and review copy requests may be directed to [email protected].
Distribution & Trade Inquiries: Direct standing orders for independent bookstores, university libraries, and archival collections may be submitted directly to [email protected]. Trade editions are also distributed via select North American small-press distributors and major book channels.