20th Anniversary Spotlight: Aaron Tucker
Our 20th-anniversary celebrations continue with another Author Spotlight interview. Today, we’re shining a light on the one and only Aaron Tucker. We’ve had the great honour of publishing two poetry collections by Aaron, including Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp and Catalogue d’oiseaux. Aaron is a delight to work with and one of the kindest and coolest people we know (ask him about film sometime and you’ll see what we mean). Our Sales and Events Coordinator, Reid, did his undergrad at York University while Aaron was doing graduate work there. Aaron would often buy him coffee out of the kindness of his heart. That’s just one example of Aaron’s kindness.
In our Q&A with Aaron, he shares what it means to be part of the Book*hug author family and a title from fellow Book*hug Marianne Apostolides that has left a lasting impression on him. Happy reading!
B*: What does being part of the Book*hug Press author family mean to you? Please share an anecdote, reflection, or backstory about your publishing experience?
Book*hug Press has always taken chances on the strange and personal, and I’m grateful that they have nurtured two of my books of poetry, alongside countless others. I am proud of how bizarre my first book with the press is and how restlessly the press believed in it: Irresponsible Mediums (2017) the book uses an app I built with Jody Miller to translate all of Marcel Duchamp’s chess games in poems; the book is playful and confounding, and I am so appreciative that it is out in the world. My second book, Catalogue d’oiseaux, is the flip side, a deeply personal love poem that happened to come out during Covid. Despite all that was going on in the world, the press made sure that this bright light of a book made it out to readers, and I’m very lucky for that. I’m grateful to have the two books be part of the wide-ranging and always interesting legacy of Book*hug.
B*: Can you share another title from the Book*hug Press catalogue that has left a lasting impression on you as a reader? Tell us about a book that has been a touchstone for you, one that you found meaningful, interesting, or simply loved.
I love and admire Marianne Apostolides’s I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind (2020). This book has only gotten more relevant with the rise of Generative AI in the past two years. While it rings out in my mind for how it fits into the contemporary moment of human-machine symbiosis, it also stands out because the writing is aching and intelligent and unsparing. As much as anything, this novel is a sensual reflection on what it means to exist alongside and in relation to other humans and machines in an ecosystem that is porous and malleable and full of intimacies.
