FENCE BOOKS Is Celebrating Its 25th Anniversary
Founded in 2001, Fence Books is an imprint of Fence Magazine, Inc., a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in the state of New York. Fence Magazine, Inc. is grateful to the New York State Council of the Arts for key financial support through their grant-making program.
Fence Books redefines the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. Fence Books supports writers who might have difficulty being recognized because their work doesn’t answer either to the mainstream or to recognizable modes of experimentation. Through this openness, Fence Books is free to explore and connect the many literary communities and aesthetic lineages. Please consider donating to help bring more early Fence Books back into print. Even $5 is appreciated!
Fence no. 43, the Spring-Summer 2026 issue, is published and available; it is landing soon in mailboxes and on bookstore shelves far and wide! In this special issue, in addition to poetry, fiction, translation, and everything-Other-than, you'll find a poets theater section, guest edited by actor and director Tony Torn.
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New from Fence Books
The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor
by Kathryn Cowles
2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize
Eleanor Eleanor and Kathryn Cowles were spooled side by side like thread until Eleanor abruptly disappeared. In the wake of Eleanor's leaving, Cowles lovingly compiles her unspooled residual poetry, full-color collages, and captions into this exquisite "fossil record," this ekphrasis-turned-on-its-head "partial catalog."
In Kathryn Cowles's deliciously innovative third book, Eleanor lays bare the depths of the confines still facing women in Western life, even while we're told we're free to choose. She affixes wings to feminine figures cut out of magazines, asks, is there a way beyond? A way to real freedom, to a femininity that looks and acts however we choose? Cowles opens the door for readers to imagine new beings far beyond persona, who might sit at the same table of the invented authors in Fernando Pessoa's world. In her introduction as editor, she writes:
"Eleanor Eleanor and I were born in the same place in the same month in the same year, and though we veered apart now and then (she liked to wander, to live in the back of a bad car, to waitress somewhere for a month or work a season on a farm), we always found our way back into each other's company before long. But it has been more than a year now, and it's never been a year. She's just gone. And where? Everyone always wants to know...
Some artists are excellent executors of their own fiction. Like so many women before her, Eleanor Eleanor was not. But she did write things down. She sometimes said that her art works did not feel actually finished when she finished them.
This partial catalog, then, is an anti-chronological selection of her writings, which I found loosely shuffled on her otherwise cleared-off desk--a desk I never saw previously cleared in all the years I have known her, which is to say pretty much always. Seemed like a sign. On top was an otherwise blank notecard with my name on it."
Fence Books are distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
New from Fence Books
new york ironweed
by Amanda Deutch
2025 Ottoline Prize
new york ironweed is a field guide unlike any other. An intimate companion to take along with you on walks in New York or anywhere, new york ironweed's poems are energetic supersonic living beings. Intentionally "imperfect," the electric poems invite typographical irregularities, mirroring ecological realities. The hyper-conscious poems emerge from our shared experience of climate and insect crisis, paying care and attention to the plants wildly growing from cracks in concrete. These strange, witchy creatures err without erring as they decompose like plants back into the soil. Deutch's plants-as-poems build new interspecies architectures through their transcendent being.
Fence Books are distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Steaming is the opposite of "Streaming On-Demand" Content.
An unapologetic celebration of Other-ly Content published exclusively at fenceportal.org.
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For the latest, see below. Click here for access to all Steaming.
America (Uncle Sam), 2022. Mixed-media collage, 3" x 4 ½"
From The Americans
Brandon Downing | July 4, 2026
The Americans began in earnest on January 6, 2021 and had been intermittently appended in the years since, particularly since someone's second Presidential term commenced. The project attempts, through juxtaposing American popular culture with collaged-collective language,
FENCE BOOKS Celebrates 25 Years
&
Over 120 books published since 2001
Find Fence Books wherever books are sold & request Fence Books at your local bookstore!
A not-for-profit corporation, Fence is mandated by its board to make decisions in keeping with its mission to maintain this venue, in print, aural, and digital forms, for writing that speaks across genre, socio-cultural niche, and ideological boundary, as accessibly as it can such that Fence publishes largely from its unsolicited submissions and is committed to the literature and art of queer writers and writers of color. Fence encourages collective appreciation of variousness by inhering collectively outside of the constraints of opinion, trend, and market.
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