Without Panties

The poet

Maria Quintana is a Cuban-American poet who moved in the orbit of this Maine small-press circle. Beyond the book, the published record is essentially silent — no reviews, biography, or catalog entry surfaces — which is itself telling: this is poetry that circulated by hand and friendship rather than through the trade, and its author never entered the wider literary conversation.

The press

The book comes from Blackberry Books, the publishing side of the poet-bookseller Gary Lawless and his partner Beth Leonard, who together run Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick. Lawless is a figure worth knowing: a Colby graduate who spent a year in the Sierra Nevada studying with Gary Snyder — the imprint name "Blackberry" was the nickname Snyder's young son gave him, to tell the two Garys apart — and who became the American editor and publisher of the wandering Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. A book from this press carries that lineage of Beat, Buddhist, and bioregional poetry.

The copy

The rear cover bears a dedication to Beth Leonard and to John Doe of the Los Angeles punk band X — the kind of detail that fixes a book to a specific moment and set of affections.

For more context

Gary Lawless's own poetry (Caribou Planet) and his Blackberry Books editions of Nanao Sakaki (Let's Eat Stars); and the wider world of Maine bioregional and small-press poetry.

Sources

• Gary Lawless (Wikipedia)
• Gary Lawless, Gulf of Maine Books (Portland Press Herald)
• Gary Lawless (Maine State Library)
• Provenance shared by the owner, via the publishers Gary Lawless and Beth Leonard.