Celebrate our 10th anniversary with us! Since our first releases in 2016, by Eileen Myles and Rae Armantrout, the press has released over 55 projects, across multiple mediums and genres, from LPs, EPs, and cassettes to chapbooks, broadsides, and full-length books. In 2026 we will be releasing 10 full-length books, by canonical and debut authors alike.To help the press continue for another ten years and beyond, this year we are raising $10,000, in support of our publishing efforts both now and into the future.In honor of our 10th anniversary, a generous donor has offered to match every donation made in 2026 up to $10,000, thus equaling out to $20,000 for Fonograf Editions! Help us reach our 2026 fundraising goal by giving today! All donations are tax-deductible and support independent literature and publishing.
3 Questions with Nora Claire Miller
author of Groceries and winner of the 2023 Fonograf Ed.’s Open Genre Book Prize contest
1. How do you begin a poem?
Before I made a document named Groceries, I made a hypertext-based computer game poem called “IT’S THE FUTURE.” The words in the game are all different, but the book grew out of what it was trying to access. In some ways it felt like a prequel.
Groceries is one long poem. When I started writing Groceries, I was calling it a novel and the whole thing was written in chapters, each page being a chapter, but that felt like too much division. You can’t have a grocery without other groceries or it just becomes a piece of food. Groceries have to exist all at once.
2. Groceries describes sundry objects, symbols, shapes and things: light switches, apostrophes, sunglasses, nouns, Microsoft Word, canned soup, cereal, telephones, oatmeal, and fridges. The book-length poem converses with these things, catalogs them non-linearly, and places them in new context and light. What inspired you to write Groceries? What was your process of writing it?
I didn’t know what to do about objects. There were more and more of them everywhere, and everyone was so obsessed with the fact of the objects being objects, and the fact of the objects being products, and the fact of the products being rectangular, easy to fit in boxes, to be stacked into trucks, to be splayed out in a grid on a screen.
I sold my during-the-day writing as a product named copy. My during-the-night writing went like this: every night I wrote a little square of text in Microsoft Word, a product my job made me to use to create the copy. One day, I realized that I had a lot of squares that lived together as groceries, enough to make either a quilt or a book.
3. I’m curious about the rectangle ▯s which create a distinct visual poetry throughout the Groceries. How did you decide on this particular form for the poem?
I didn’t plan on the ▯s being part of the poem. They began proliferating halfway through without warning and eventually flooded the whole piece.
I say this like it was a glitch. It wasn’t, though a glitch in the form of a ▯ often happens to digital text. You get them most often if you try to convert one type of document file into another, or place an emoji in a space where emojis can’t exist. But in this case, the ▯s showed up in the manuscript because I put them there on purpose.
I was trying to find a word for things that take up space without actually existing. A corrupted file that can’t be opened but won’t leave your computer. The place you go when the number you have dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service. Those three notes before the voice on the phone says it, ▯ ▯ ▯.