Richard Deming is a co-founder and co-editor of Phylum Press, a small, independent poetry publisher. Phylum is “committed to the belief that poetry is a gift economy” and therefore elects to circumvent typical marketing schemes in favor of giving away their books rather than selling them. With each publication, Phylum attempts to strike “a balance between an artist book, which is often rarefied and ‘untouchable,’ and the standard poetry book”—and, in so doing,
fostering “participation in a network of thinking about poetry.”

Phylum Press produces a select number of chapbooks and pamphlets each year featuring the work of young, fugitive artists who are, through their poetics, “revisiting in vastly different ways the questions of lyric subjectivity after the various problematics have been brought to light.” By necessity, such works follow a path that diverges both from mainstream poetry and the established stream of dogmatic experimentation. Phylum authors include, among others,
Susan Briante, Laynie Browne, Cathy Eisenhower, Dan Featherston, Graham Foust, Peter Gizzi, Anna Moschovakis, Charles North, and Roberto Tejada.