Open Sky by Allison Dubinsky and Clare Carpenter

Please contact 23 Sandy for current availability.
I wrote this poem in the summer of 2004, while I was living on Southeast Belmont Street in Portland, Oregon. I had taken a taxidermy workshop earlier that year, and a friend suggested I write about the experience (thank you, H.), so I did. Eventually I realized I wanted the poem to exist as its own object, and this year my friend Clare Carpenter helped me make it into this book. Clare is a bookmaker, letterpress printer, and fine artist who runs Tiger Food Press out of her studio in Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood. We designed the book together, and Clare and I printed it on her Vandercook proof press. The text was hand-set in 11-point Bembo, and each book was bound by hand.  —Allison Dubinsky

Artist Bio

Clare Carpenter is the proprietor of Tiger Food Press in the neighborhood of St. Johns, located smack-dab between the Willamette and Columbia Rivers in Portland, Oregon. Her work is influenced by place and how our landscape is imbued with personal histories. Primarily a letterpress printer, her work blends writing, traditional and contemporary print methods, and humor. She is an Oregonian, and has lived and worked in Portland since 1997. Allison Dubinsky lives in Portland, Oregon. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon, where she received the Miriam McFall Starlin Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Hubbub, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, as well as a few other places.