Press 53 Immersion Series
edited by Christopher Forrest

The Press 53 Immersion Series is for authors who are writing immersive content in poetry and creative nonfiction on unique aspects of their lives or specific areas of expertise. These books focus on the generally unfamiliar, serving as both informative and engaging for curious readers.

Andrew Rihn uses 100-word prose poems to immerse us into the fifty-eight professional fights of Mike Tyson. The voice of an Old Testament prophet shines through the fight commentary, and relates Tyson to a modern-day Elijah—climbing the mountain to do battle, and climbing back down to a world of depression, anxiety, and alienating silence.

Meg Eden spent much of her youth in Japan, and this collection of poems immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what to make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.

What might a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and an eighteenth-century French architect have in common? Saint Teresa of Ávila and Charles-Axel Guillaumot both left behind a mostly invisible legacy. Hers was a vision of the interior castle of the spirit within us. His was to save Paris from collapsing back into the quarries beneath it by building a support city below ground. Today, we can read of the realm The Nun built with her words, and we can visit a fraction of the realm The Architect built beneath Paris. Hope of Stones invites you into a cross-century conversation among The Nun, The Architect, and The Poet that explores the desire to create and connect across time and other unseen things.

For thirty years, Charlie Gross of Princeton University headed one of the most consequential neuroscience labs of the twentieth century, hidden behind locked doors in a secret wing of an old stone building. Michael Graziano, a member of that elite group of lab mates for twenty years, writes about Charlie’s Lab, the place and the people in it. The result is a book every bit as strange, counterculture, and colorful as the lab itself and the man who oversaw it.