The Clear Cut Future

Clear Cut Press, 2003

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Clear Cut as a whole might be seen as undertaking a sort of lyrical research. Far from idle reverie or quietist retreat, the terms of the undertaking seem to possess a strange persistence, insisting on utopia as practice and substrate of reality. Shortly after I hung up, Stadler called me back with an afterthought. Earlier I'd tried to suggest that Clear Cut might be a step toward cultural autonomy (admittedly a shabby word for what I'd wanted) for our region. "We're not interested in fighting battles," he said. "We're like a blackberry. Is a blackberry autonomous? Blackberries grow from clear-cuts--they don't struggle so much as just thrive."
-- Colin Booy, The Stranger

The Office has three pieces in the anthology, which also contains a piece each by a guy who sells poems on the street for one dollar and someone who used to work for Enron. Stadler named Gertrude Stein and (true crime author) Anne Rule when I asked about great writing. It seems that at Clear Cut there is no fixed agenda -- any kind of excellence is accepted.
-- Sid Cooper, Hipfish

The brainchild of Up Records co-founder Rich Jensen and novelist Matthew Stadler, Clear Cut emerged from discussions the two had in 1997 during a poetry workshop the latter taught in his native Seattle. Stadler, author of Allan Stein (1999) and the literary editor of the interiors quarterly Nest, realized that he knew about a dozen writers who weren't reaching the audience they could—or weren't being published at all. To remedy this, he and Jensen envisioned a press along the lines of early-20th-century subscription houses like the Hours Press. After some consideration of production criteria—size and durability were key—the pair decided to imitate the sleek design of Japanese mass-markets: pocket-sized, with brightly colored dust jackets and built-in bookmarks
-- Jason McBride, The Village Voice