Hello fellow art and poetry lover!

It’s your friends Joe & Katie from Consonant Collective, here to introduce the third release in On the Record, a series of poetry chapbooks and records curated by the collective and released through Displaced Snail. 

How to Make Money and Other Poems is a new poetry collection by Ali Liebegott, a poet, painter, and television writer currently residing in Los Angeles. Ali is also an accomplished exhibiting artist, and her paintings are featured on the cover and throughout the chapbook. 

Ali's books include: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and The Summer of Dead Birds. She is the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards (2006, 2008), a Ferro-Grumley Award (2008), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1999), and a Peabody Award (2015) for her work on the television series Transparent. Katie has been a fan of Ali’s work for years, and we had the honor of meeting her several years ago when Katie read at the RADAR Reading Series in San Francisco, of which Ali was managing director. We were so pleased when Ali agreed to participate in the On the Record poetry series. 

Let’s talk about the records. To make hers, Ali started by sending us a recording of a reading of her poem. We then put them onto 10” records using two record lathes, a ~1937 Presto 6DSP and a ~1947 Rek-O-Kut Challenger TR43H. The major difference between traditionally pressed records and lathe-embossed records is that lathe records are created one at a time, in real time, instead of being pressed in multiple units per hour. Using discs made from polycarbonate plastic (a softer but similar plastic to the polyvinyl chloride that pressed records are made from today), the record lathe pushes grooves into the plastic with a sapphire embossing cone. It literally plays the music into the disc. 

As you listen to your record, take in the fact that you’re listening to a disc made by hand on nearly-antique machines. Because that’s what you’re doing.

TIER 1

First, you can get the beautifully handmade chapbook of How to Make Money and Other Poems. This will be designed and printed by us in-house, and will be a full-color, 32-page chapbook of Ali's poetry and paintings. The book features a cardstock cover, a lovely separation page of vintage paper, and inner pages printed in lo-fi to give the colors a vintage, slightly blurred look, similar to the warmth you get on an old TV playing a VHS tape. Each chapbook will also come with a digital download of the poetry reading featured on the records. 

TIER 2

In addition to the chapbook, we have a clear, 10" lathe-embossed record of Ali's reading. The records are created one at a time on our vintage record machines, and the old technology gives the records a wonderful, vintage character while retaining the clarity of the poet's voice. Here are the credits for the records:

Side A

1: Someone’s Learning to Play Tuba in the Park
2: The Great Commission
3: What Does It Mean to be Stuck?
4: How to Make Money
5: Only Trust a Seagull
6: I Don’t Want to Dance on Anyone’s Grave
7: Key West to Cuba
8: Painting for Poets

Side B

9: Square Wheels
10: The Glacier Gods Slough Off Hunks of Ice
11: We Already Knew Where We Wanted to Go
12: Someone Will Remember Us

Poems & art by Ali Liebegott
Poems mastered for vinyl by Chris Baldys
Records cut by Joe Carlough & Katie Haegele of Consonant Collective

TIER 3

Lastly, when we heard Ali's poems read aloud, we couldn't stop thinking of musician & poet Spencer Moody, a friend and frequent collaborator of ours who is the vocalist for beloved garage rock group Murder City Devils. We knew we wanted to get these two together, so in addition to the chapbook and record, you can also get a clear, square 7" split record single featuring Ali's poem "Painting for Poets" on Side A and Spencer's poem "A Halloween Poem for Children" on Side B. The single features a risograph-printed cover.