In 2025, Chicago-based independent publisher, Piżama Press (piżama is Polish for Pajamas) released their debut title, Disintegration Made Plain and Easy by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi. Their first book set the precedent for the press' burgeoning surrealist-forward, "the weirder, the better" house style. This spring, Pizama is set to release its second and third books on May 28. The next two titles follow in the dreamy, avant-garde footsteps of their predecessor, and usher in a powerful new voice in the Chicago publishing scene.
Piżama Press is managed and curated by Benjamin Niespodziany, host of the popular Logan Square-based reading series, Neon Mic Night, and author of titles including Cardboard Clouds (2023) and No Farther than the End of the Street (2022). The three volumes now soon to comprise Pizama's catalog form a tight aesthetic triptych and a unique vision amongst the indie press landscape.
The first of two new releases, John's Table, by Lesle Lewis is a book of 45 "mono-stitch" poems, each capped with succinct, one-word titles—"Talk," "Jump," "Boy," or simply "Not." Taken together, the poems are a postmodernist collage of simple and metaphysical truisms splintered through with splashes of paint, triangles, squares, and the nearly-invisible threads that connect the portrait of a life. Moving through the poems is reading one person's obsessive cataloging of material facts: zero exists before one, "whatever happens, happens now," and, one "cannot love and not love you." As the truisms collect, they disassemble into questions that interrogate not only the physical world but also the paper-thin boundary between what is and what could be. Throughout the collection, the pill is a recurring image. Popping pills. Cutting pills. Swallowing. Are pills hard truths or an emblem of a soft consciousness of one's flimsy stake on reality? Late in the collection, the narrator declares "I cannot save you, but I also can't turn away." We find the book's humanist core in such moments—that in the "whirling center of an infinite sphere" how extraordinary it is to find an "I." An "I" that can talk to "you," or point to a table, a chair, a tractor, and exclaim with delight at the experience of witnessing together.
The third title Pizama will release concurrently with John's Table is a true surrealist two-in-one composition. At the halfway point of the collection, the book Game of Little Deaths gives way to a second title Split, asking the reader to turn the book upside down and begin again.
Split is a riveting work of autobiographical collage, combining fictionalized reimaginings of the artists Unica Zurn, Hans Bellmer, and Francesca Woodman's diaries with that of the author's own. Reka Nyitrai positions herself as an artistic grandchild of these artists, but other surrealists also come to mind in her style and themes, most notably Leonora Carrington and Mina Loy. The poems comprising Split don't quite merge the identities of these disparate voices, yet neither do they linger in the divergences. One can imagine the author clipping and pasting the lives of her narrators together like a living scrapbook.
Behind Split, Game of Little Deaths similarly shuffles and recombines a series of surrealist favorite images into parable-like distillations of childhood, ancestry, and the path to selfhood. One of the most striking contemplations that tethers Split to Game of Little Deaths is the repeated exposure of an artist/poets failings Though she fails, the poet's grasping towards love, poetry, and belonging is rendered as a glorious struggle in Reka Nyitrai's expansive vision.
With the release of Jacob's Table and Split/Game of Little Deaths, Piżama Press breathes a breath of exuberance and abandon into Chicago's literary scene. Pizama brings with it the brightness of hope that against the drudgery of AI art and the corporate-market gaudiness of mainstream publishing houses, there's still a space for the weirdos of the poetry world to frolic and play.
Find more information about these works on the Piżama Press website.
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