The O:JA&L FREE PRESSES Pamphlet Series

Click on the titles to explore or download the free PDFs.

BUTTONHOOK PRESS

Buttonhook Press, O:JA&L’s literary imprint, gathers free chapbooks and pamphlets in poetry, prose, mixed forms, craft essays, and writer portfolios. Across Americana, haibun, haiga, flash, ekphrasis, and formal verse, it showcases contemporary writers whose compact works invite reading, teaching, discovery, and lasting conversation across international literary arts.

Buttonhook Press: 2026

The Land of the Ice Medusa: Writing from Your Fear
An essay on the writer’s craft by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto

Buttonhook Press: 2025

WEST Toward Squalicum Mountain
Poems by Richard Weiderkehr

A WEEK LATE…
Haibun & Tanka Prose by Carolyn Martin

Mississippi River Delta: A Bestiary
Poems by Larry D. Thomas

Buttonhook Press: 2024

Needful Things
Micropoems by Ronald J. Scully (Americana)

Designation
Poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

California Summer
Poetry by Michael Lee Johnson

Once Is Enough
Formalist poems by Peter Austin (Americana)

Garden
Poems by Jianquing Zheng (Americana)

Let Me Say This Up Front
Poetry by David James (Americana)

GEMS
Poems by Larry D. Thomas

BESTIARY: Far West Texas
Poems by Larry D. Thomas

Buttonhook Press: 2023

Rain Comes to the Central Valley
Poetry by Adrienne Pilon

DECIDUOUS
Poetry by Jean Kane

Potter’s Valley Road
Poetry (Americana) by Richard Widerkehr

Old Barn or How Things Go On
Poetry by Penelope Schotte

Nothing To Be Sorry For
Poetry by Lynn Cohen

Small Lantern
Featured Haiga Collaborations
Haiku by Hassane Zemmouri and Photography by Megali Bretou & Bea Bauer

A Sport and a Pastime
Haiku (Americana) by Ron Scully

Night Train
Haiku by Jerome Gagnon

The Aquarian Foundation
Poetry (Americana) by Jeffrey Gray

Once There Was a Way
Poetry by Steve Myers

Local Habitations
Poetry by Edison Jennings

Occasions for Listening
(Excerpts from a WIP) Spencer Silverthorne

Buttonhook Press: 2022

Poems for Families
Poetry by Kirby Olson

Mogollon Rim
Poetry by Allisa Cherry

Hanno
Poetry by John-Michael Bloomquist

Poem scrawled on a maize-sheaf for her (last offering)
Poetry and art by Arturo Desimone

The Curve of the Open Page
A poem by Bruce Bond

Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee
Poetry by Jessica Purdy

War and Riff
Haibun by Keith Polette

Family Photo of America
Poetry by Lynn Potts

Chester River Reverie
Poetry by Priscilla Long

Salton Sea
A short story by Mike Murray

The Fiddler
Poetry by Tim Hunt

A Balloon Called Young America
Poetry by Jennifer Clark

High Fashion
Featured Collaboration
Poetry by Adjei Agyei-Baah & Fine Art Photography by Jerome Berglund

Buttonhook Press: 2021

Salt
Poetry by Amanda Leal

Deer in Fog at Twilight Near Squalicum Lake Road
Poetry by Richard Widerkehr

Democracy has Lifted Up Its Voice
Poetry by Mike Puican

2YC Review: The Works
Poetry and creative prose by members of the Two-Year College Caucus at AWP

Promises
Poetry by Ellis Elliott

Home
Poetry by Amanda Leal

Study of Burkas
A poem by Dana Sonnenschein

The Open Window
Flash vignettes by O.G. Rose

Light in the Cathedral: Russian/English Poems
Poetry in two languages by Andrey Gritsman

Buttonhook Press: 2020

Safe Spaces: A Pretty Lie
Editorials on Issues of Poetic Practice by Rachel Custer

Against Art as a Radical Subjectivity
Editorials on Issues of Poetic Practice by Rachel Custer

Songs on the Way to God: A Theory of Poetics
Editorials on Issues of Poetic Practice by Rachel Custer

The Artistic Power of Silence: On Letting Art Speak for Itself
Editorials on Issues of Poetic Practice by Rachel Custer

Special Edition: Experimental Discourse
…are serious offenses, and…
A closet drama in two acts by Anthony Hamilton

How to Love a Headstone
Poetry by Sloane Asakura

The Last of the Gallants
Poetry by Atar Hadari

HOT BUTTON PRESS: Contemporary Controversies

Hot Button Press: Contemporary Controversies gathers provocative fiction, poetry, and commentary confronting culture’s flashpoints. From satirical stories and counter-revolutionary prizewriting to war icons, crossroads poems, and argumentative essays, the imprint invites readers into contested public questions where literary pressure, political friction, and aesthetic risk become urgent creative form today.

Hot Button Press: 2026

Hot Button Press: 2025

The Future Is Mao!
An excerpt from the short story collection PEOPLE with whom I am quite pissed by Mick McGrath

Rule & Innovation
An excerpt from the short story collection PEOPLE with whom I am quite pissed by Mick McGrath

SUPERFLUOUS SUPER LOUIS
Winner of the 2025 WEITZ PRIZE for Counter-Revolution Writing
Perry Genovesi

MUSING THE CROSSROADS
Poems by Larry D. Thomas

Hot Button Press: 2024

Woes Innumerous
Based Fiction Mick McGrath (Americana)

Hot Button Press: 2023

Lamentations: Icons of War
Arab-Israeli Conflict image-as-poem collection by Tony Brinkley

In Praise of Columbus
Poetry by Kirby Olson

Perseus with the Head of Medusa
Editorials on Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics by Contributing Editor Mick McGrath

Democrats by Trippin’
Editorials on Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics by Contributing Editor Mick McGrath

Let’s Talk About Female Academics
Editorials on Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics by Contributing Editor Mick McGrath

Diversophiles Everywhere!
Editorials on Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics by Contributing Editor Mike McGrath

The End of the “Black Victim” Narrative?
Editorials on Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics by Contributing Editor Mick McGrath

FIREFIGHT PRESS: Trench Arts & Letters

Firefight Press: Trench Arts & Letters presents compact military writing shaped by lived experience, memory, and witness. From naval flash nonfiction and Vietnam-era recollection to poems of shipboard service, the imprint gathers urgent field notes into free pamphlets that honor service, danger, camaraderie, and the literary force of testimony.

FIREFIGHT PRESS: 2026

The Arabian Sea
An excerpt from Liberty: Part 1 (WIP) by LT Clement Valot

Ambush
Flash Nonfiction by Robert Hleton

Ode to a Gunner’s Mate (2015)
A poem by LT. K. Streeby, USN

HAL: HEURISTIC ALGORITHMIC LIBRARY

REVIEWS

HAL Close Readings

The Close Readings series foregrounds HAL’s commitment to sustained attention at the level of line, image, syntax, rhythm, and implication. Rather than treating poems as illustrations of theory, these pamphlets move patiently through particular works, showing how meaning emerges from pressure, pacing, diction, and structural choice. The series includes readings of poems by Bruce McRae, Richard Widerkehr, Samantha Padgett, Sean Wang, and others, often linking formal detail to ethical, civic, ecological, or metaphysical concerns. In doing so, the section models close reading as both a literary method and a disciplined act of imaginative listening.

Speaking the Overfull World:
A Close Reading of “All In,”
a poem by Bruce McRae

The Burden of Intimacy:
A Close Reading of “Two Solitudes,”
a poem by Richard Widerkehr

Procedural Dread: The Via Dolorosa of the Checkout Line
A Close Reading of “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store,”
a poem by Samantha Padgett

Procedural Dread and the Diagnosis of Civic Disempowerment
A Contextual Reading of “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store,”
a poem by Samantha Padgett

The Work of Living: Memory, Loss, and Endurance
A Close Reading of :Home Again,”
a poem by Lynsey France

The Spur of Meaning: Prosody as Impulsion
A close reading of “Ringwork,”
a poem by Sean Wang

HAL Reviews

The HAL Reviews series features engagements with contemporary chapbooks, pamphlets, and individual collections as occasions for serious critical attention. These essays consider books not as isolated products, but as living intersections of craft, place, memory, form, and moral imagination. Across works by poets and prose writers associated with O:JA&L and its imprints, the reviews emphasize accessibility without sacrificing intellectual rigor. They attend to how small-press literature carries aesthetic risk, regional texture, and formal experiment into public conversation. Together, the reviews establish a record of attentive reading, situating each work within broader questions of literary value and artistic endurance.

Correspondence Across Landscapes:
A Review of Wolf Tree & Agave,
A poetic exchange between Larry D. Thomas & Clarence J. Wolfshohl

A Howling at the Threshold:
Transformation and Wildness in Wolf by Bruce McRae
A Review

OPTIMAL OR NOT and Other Poems by Heikki Huotari
A Review

The Hinge of Attention: The Selborne Haibun by Gabriel Rosenstock
A Review

A Stillness in Motion
A review of little prose by David Person

Bad Road Ahead
Flash Discourse, Trauma, And Voice in Don Robishaw’s Just Willie Please
A Review

The View of What Remains:
Topology, Poems by Richard Stimac
A Review

Remembering in Fragments:
Haibun, Haiku, and Ethical Memory in DUST & RUST by Taofeek Ayeyemi
A Review

The Outrun by Julie Alden Cullinane
A Review

Miro’s Wars by John Brantingham
A Review

HAL Profiles & Perspectives

HAL’s Profiles & Perspectives series extends HAL’s inquiry beyond individual books and poems into larger questions about artistic prestige, experimental discourse, regional poetics, ekphrasis, archetype, and the cultural work of small-press publishing. These essays explore how literary and visual practices are shaped by form, tradition, technology, audience, and institutional value. The section reflects O:JA&L’s interest in work that takes craft and thought seriously while remaining open to innovation, accessibility, and independent judgment. By placing chapbooks, AI-assisted discourse, and contemporary art in conversation, these pieces ask how aesthetic value is made, revised, circulated, and remembered.

Larry D. Thomas
and the Cartography of Regional Poetics

Richard Widerkehr:
A Poet of Place, Memory, and Quiet Epiphany

Mick McGrath
and the Samizdat Tradition

Larry D. Thomas
And the Evolution of the American Chapbook

Experimental Discourse: A Productive Labor
An Overview of the Works of Jim Meirose

Craft, Light, and the Democratization of Art:
Larry D. Thomas’s Stories Begging Color
And the Expansion of American Ekphrasis

Singing a Hymn to the Sea:
Larry D. Thomas Returns to the Texas Gulf Coast

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.

The Buttonhook Press Masters Series

The Buttonhook Press Masters Series (from OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters and its Buttonhook Press imprint) gathers acclaimed writers for concise, downloadable chapbooks that pair fresh work with candid reflections on craft. Each installment—often framed by an interview with an associate editor—opens a window onto how masters of poetry, prose poetry, flash fiction, and related hybrid forms build voice, compression, and surprise. Designed as a reader’s invitation and a writer’s toolbox, the series celebrates literary art that moves fast, cuts deep, and lingers long after the last line.

Click on the titles below to explore or download the free PDF chapbooks.

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O:JA&L's FREE PRESSES||The Pamphlet Series