It's really rewarding when a project is received well. We sold out the print run of Paper Fingers at Art Scene. And had one helluva time with our cohorts at 317 Art Collective to boot. Thank you so much to everyone who collaborated with us to make this happen. We'll definitely be doing another zine soon.
Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a poet, haikuist, editor, and publisher from Rockford, Illinois. He is the founder and editor of Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review and co-founder, with artist Tré, of Wolf Twin Books. His work ranges from haiku and short-form nature poetry to absurdist, comic, and surreal poems rooted in the strange details of everyday life.
Vaultonburg is the author of numerous collections, including Vanished Roads, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, Flesh Wounds, Submerged Structure, and Atrocious Poems A to Z. His recent work increasingly explores the landscapes, wildlife, streets, abandoned places, and overlooked corners of northern Illinois.
A longtime admirer of Richard Brautigan, Vaultonburg has often been drawn to poetry that can be funny without surrendering its strangeness: brief poems, unlikely metaphors, conversational language, and jokes that open onto something slightly larger than the joke. “The Yellow River” comes from that side of his work—a small comic poem in which the inflated language of warfare collides with the considerably less heroic realities of the human body.
Vaultonburg has also participated in Rockford's long-running experiments in bringing writing out of books and into public spaces. In March 2019, his work was connected with the Paper Fingers: Mechanical Typewriting in the Digital Age exhibition at 317 Art Collective in Rockford. Curated and hosted by David W. Pedersen, the two-day exhibition combined a type-in, creative-writing experiment, social experiment, historical exploration, and art exhibition. More than fifteen mechanical typewriters were displayed, with visitors invited to sit down and use the machines themselves.
That emphasis on writing as something physical, communal, and slightly unpredictable anticipates much of Vaultonburg's later work in Rockford—poetry appearing not only in books and literary journals but in bookstores, galleries, public-art installations, collaborative exhibitions, and on the streets themselves. Projects such as Hike You!, SECOND NATURE, and his collaborations with Tré continue the same basic impulse: take the poem off the page, put it somewhere unexpected, and see what happens when somebody encounters it.
