Garlic Press doesn’t invite open submission. Laskey offers to do a pamphlet for poets he knows whose work he finds interesting. It’s an occasional event, not in any way a business. ‘One of the pleasures,’ he says, ‘is that you can make this suggestion, to a friend, or someone you’ve work-shopped with for years. And then they let you have some poems — twenty or thirty, say, some of which you’ve seen before — and that’s where it starts. Some of them have been writing poems for decades, for the pleasure and interest of it, but this invitation can come as a sort of validation, permission to take their writing more seriously.’

The process is enjoyable, and a matter of quality not quantity. In 2015, there were two Garlic Press publications: Jenifer Smith’s Reading Through The Night and Marjorie Carter’s You Might Have Said. In 2016, there will be another two or three. And so on.