Janet Holmes, director and editor of Ahsahta Press, based at Boise State University, took some time to answer questions about her press.

Could you describe the spirit and aesthetic of Ahsahta? I know the books aren’t easy. Editing a press is necessarily a subjective process, and basically, Ahsahta reflects my taste in poetry; it’s what I myself want to read. I love complexity (what some people think of as difficulty). I enjoy reading the perspectives of people who are not like me. I’m a sucker for innovative form. And I like reading a poet who engages with a reader instead of lecturing. One of the things I thought, early on, was that with the small stipend from Boise State, I didn’t have to try to second-guess a “market” for a particular book. I was going to be able to publish books that might not have a huge audience and still break even. Another thing I could do [was] publish new writers who didn’t have a track record. Kate Greenstreet and Lance Phillips are examples of that, as are many others—five of the eight Ahsahta titles from last year were first-book authors. A third thing would be to publish poetry that I saw as art, rather than as messaging, or narcissism, or bland recitations, or overly “crafted” work that has the passion wrung out of it. I’d rather publish something rough and daring than another highly crafted book about one’s perceptions, fine as that book might be. There are plenty of other presses looking for that book.

What happens to someone who reads the ten latest books from Ahsahta? There is a lot of poetry “about” love and sex and loss in there. Aaron Apps’s Dear Herculine is a prime example, interleaving the story of a 19^th-century French hermaphrodite with his own experiences as an intersexed body. Lance Phillips’s Mimer is a lusciously heterosexy sequence of love poems, whereas Gephyromania is like a body breaking up with its old form to forge a new one (while still loving both). Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Beast Feast practically remakes language in an eco-driven work that insists that everything in nature is natural. While Beast Feast is the most formally innovative, what Emily Abendroth does in Exclosures is also fascinating, exploring the prison-industrial complex in what are almost call-and-response poems. So what happens to someone who reads these books? I hope they begin to see that “poetry” is a much broader and maybe more exciting genre than they may have thought, and that they enjoy that discovery. If they’re writers, maybe they start to write something new. I think of Ahsahta as a champion for poetry that makes you think and feel, that brings you along on the journey as a co-participant, that respects your intelligence and your sensibility. I hope readers feel activated in some sense, not manipulated into an emotion.

Any good new books on the way you’d like to say a few words about? There’s a book of hybrid essay-poems by Anne Boyer coming out in March called Garments Against Women, as well as an epic coming-to-terms with the slaveholding past of her Scottish family by Susan Tichy, titled Trafficke. Both books require a lot of thought while reading. In the next couple of years, Ahsahta will bring out new books by Brian Teare, Gabriel Gudding, Julie Carr, Susan Briante, and Kate Greenstreet, among others.

Any words for poets considering the Sawtooth Poetry Prize? The contest is going on right now, with Ed Roberson as judge. He’s such a brilliant writer. I don’t really have advice for someone who has a manuscript in mind for us, except to send it in!

To view Ahsahta Press’s entire catalog, submit to the Sawtooth Poetry Prize ($1,500 and publication to winning manuscript, deadline March 1, 2015), or learn about the Ahsahta Chapbook prize and Open Submission period, visit http://ahsahtapress.org.