Wet Cement is a micro-press publishing small handheld books. Our tastes run toward the lyrical and spontaneous, the raw and unsmooth. We are interested in writers & artists who are established in their craft but have not yet been recognized, perhaps because their work is not easily classifiable, or because it falls outside of current trends and approaches. We also support work by more recognized writers and artists that represents a departure from what they are generally known for. We believe that the cement is always wet and that the world waits to be marked.

Wet Cement is a micro-press publishing small handheld books. Our tastes run toward the lyrical and spontaneous, the raw and unsmooth. We are interested in writers & artists who are established in their craft but have not yet been recognized, perhaps because their work is not easily classifiable, or because it falls outside of current trends and approaches. We also support work by more recognized writers and artists that represents a departure from what they are generally known for. We believe that the cement is always wet and that the world waits to be marked.

Wet Cement is a micro-press publishing small handheld books. Our tastes run toward the lyrical and spontaneous, the raw and unsmooth. We are interested in writers & artists who are established in their craft but have not yet been recognized, perhaps because their work is not easily classifiable, or because it falls outside of current trends and approaches. We also support work by more recognized writers and artists that represents a departure from what they are generally known for. We believe that the cement is always wet and that the world waits to be marked.

New Books Fall 2020

Bookshop

Three visually inspired and inspiring books in a beautiful 6.5" square format.

Enter code Fall20 at checkout for 20% off our new books.

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Andrea Clark Libin

Orphan of the Moon

Notebook of a Girl in a Moscow Station

88 pages

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Michael Sohn

Still Forms

Visible Poetry

116 pages

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Ninso John High

Without Dragons Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely

Ensos, Parables & Koans

152 pages

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Forthcoming

A Boy Named Boy

Growing Up Black in “Whitetown” During the 1960s, Hampstead, NC

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by Earl S. Braggs

“People have long told stories like our story but most never quite as long.”

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And so begins Earl S. Braggs complex jazz memoir of growing up black and poor in rural North Carolina. What is long about Braggs’ story is not its length but how deeply the roots of race and history reach through the narrative in every unexpected direction. From the haphazard pleasures of a childhood in a rural shack in segregated “fishtown” to the civil unrest of Wilmington NC in the Civil Rights Era to the poet’s coming of age as a writer in San Francisco. In the midst of familiar injustices, Braggs blows open our conceptions about good and bad, revealing violence where we expect safety and friendships where we expect derision. A white man presses a revolver into the boy’s head, the bookmobile lady stops so he can get on. While the borders of Hampstead were segregated black and white, the design of this narrative never is.

Dispatches Blog