Editor’s Note: Planned Obsolescence

I forgot to write an editor’s note this year. I had thought that doing one on May Day forever would be fun and funny for a tiny fatalistic publishing project, in the save-our-ship sense more than a gesture at some labor politics, but not not that either, exactly. Then May 1, 2026 passed. I totally forgot. It didn’t matter, I miss deadlines all the time, but there is something about failing one’s own arbitrarily self-imposed deadline for one’s own unpaid project of self-appointed self-importance (what else is “being a publisher”) that stings a little more than just whiffing on a work thing. I don’t know about you, whoever you are, but I have been feeling increasingly behind and befuddled these days and increasingly unequipped to catch up or do anything about it. I’m not sure if that really is the tide of tech-capital cultural “progress” sweeping up some core human faculties in its accelerant holy froth, the ambient always-ramping magnetic field of anxiety we all get to just hang out in everyday now; or if I really have lost the ability to read and think to the degree that I cannot adequately make sense of this sensation and what it means anymore; or if the entire experience is a hallucination whose contours delimiting personal and collective effects can no longer be perceived accurately, our days melting out of planetary sufficiency to render lived time a single continuous skirmish with content, which is capital, which is global violence. Everywhere embedded, all of us in it.

I read a new book earlier this year that was trying to think hard about this stuff and the end of history, but as it tried and failed (convincingly) to convince of that condition I realized that its discussion of the end of history as such was actually more effective as an illustration of the end of rhetoric, not only because language had failed so totally as a technology (Though: When does a technology “fail”? What is the difference between failure and disuse? What is obsolescence? Where is the border between a device and its user?) to relate and inform and convince, but that we had failed ourselves totally by totally failing it. One could make a connection to the many forms of cognitive offloading our daily tools and lives increasingly facilitate and even require us to permit, which take as their operative materials language and thinking itself, just as one might make some connection to the infinitely necrotic nature of our political discourse, an activity of language and cognition as much as anything else. In both cases, we stop listening. We no longer want to understand. We no longer understand why we want or would have wanted to understand. 

If it sounds like I’m hopelessly back on some convoluted doomer bullshit, well, this press is called Community Mausoleum. As a project, a technology, it has been invaluably negative and hope-affirming over these last two and a half years of my life, which in a global context have been some of the most violent and humiliating in the modern human record, at least from my own personal historical position, approaching only four decades as an American on earth. In that period, despite and in spite, though not because of, certainly, I’m not insane, the press has managed to produce ten titles and publish more than 120 new poems, stories, and essays on Coma. If you missed it, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard recently summed up our first years of print publication activity with an excellent and sharp multi-title review in Annulet. There have been some other nods and affirmations out there as well, and I hope I’m not missing too much of that documentation in the world by failing to mention it here. Lest it dissolve or go unappreciated. I’m disorganized. All to say, learning and continuing this publication practice has been a huge pain in the ass and a crucial structure for my life. I love it and am grateful for it, especially thankful for every reader, you, a kind of person who is disappearing. Supposedly. Where are you going?

Some things have changed during this period, personally, which I hope you’ll excuse my updating for the sake of far more minor historical records and contexts. The main ones are: I don’t live in Cleveland anymore. I have one full-time job instead of three or four part-time ones. I have health insurance. This only bears mentioning insofar as these facts support the continued operation of this press, which I intend to keep up until I run out of resources (time, money, motivation). I guess I feel a little self-conscious because I specifically mentioned the role of the above details in the very first editor’s note, insisting the best reason to start a press is probably because you can’t, or something, but I think it’d be weird to keep operating under some auspice of ongoing self-reported privation. Report: My life’s fucking easy.

Things are changing, though, still, and I want to get to the important point here while there’s still time. Which is that, between you and me, over the past year in addition to behind and befuddled I have also become increasingly disheartened, disinterested, and skeptical of “publishing” “literature” on the internet. I think there was a time when it all felt very possible and powerful, and even up until a recent point like copping to tools owned by corporations such as X and Meta in order to disseminate weird, vital, experience-altering language and art was a reasonable enough compromise to make (forgetting ideas about co-optation or re-inscription, surely we’re past that). And I know there are clever ways to do this self-reflexively, but I am not doing anything that deep here. I have just been trying to publish literature that I think is necessary using the tools that seem most useful and available. But I am not so sure about some of them anymore. Their trade-offs feel increasingly offsided. There are always a few things in a given year that I’m glad to have found out about, a few exchanges I’m glad to have had, by remaining reluctantly plugged in to social media, but the surveillance creep has been taking on new dimensions, and even at its best our participation in so-called online community still becomes a longer soak in self-replenishing infinity pools of nefariously applied data. It’s all more than enough to make one want to climb out entirely, and yet our relations to attention and relation itself, information and each other remain governed by these data systems on a fundamental level. Maybe my biggest problem when it comes to formulating an adequate response to them is that I am not convinced by any extreme or total measures. It’s true that we gave up our ability to opt out long ago, but even if we had consented to opting in, this world would still keep getting made for us by entities that do not have any of our interests, health, or personhoods in mind. They do not care and they need us not to either. We can break and disconnect from them all we want, which will feel good, but it won’t matter. There will always be another device. There is always another scab. We each have to figure out how to live together in this perpetually compromised, involved, unabsolvable state. There is no such thing as agency anymore. There are no more good answers.

I’m getting carried away I think, but I think that’s what publishing is. That’s all I have, anyway. I didn’t develop any other skills. So, to keep it all going in a way that can still be reasonably sustained and emotionally wholesome, Community Mausoleum will be putting a lot less work online in the future. We’ve got a backlog of new stuff scheduled at Coma, which I’ve been reading through since I closed submissions this summer, and I’m excited to get it all out in the coming weeks. After that the journal will publish digital work only on occasion, no longer the every-Wednesday clip we’ve been keeping since May Day 2024. This is mainly because I’d rather focus the time and effort on publishing books. To that end, new full-length poetry collections from Corey Qureshi and Austin Miles will be out before the end of this year, and 2027’s catalog will include new titles by Philip Sorenson, Colin Russell, Kate Kramer, Geoffrey Detrani, and Katherine Duckworth. Maybe a few others if I can find the money. None of this is going anywhere. I admittedly have a lot more thoughts and feelings and wish I could express them all well enough here, but I really do seem to be losing the language. I think this is an important thing to keep finding new ways to respond to. That is the point. Sign up for the newsletter if you’d like to stay in touch. It’s the easiest way. Or write to P.O. Box #1, Madison, ME 04950. Easy too.

Thanks for reading.

Time is on your side.

Zach Peckham
Labor Day 2026