666 5th Ave

Cactus Press is please to announce the launch of our new imprint: Prickly Exports.

Inspired by the great small-format series of the past, like the City Lights Books Pocket Poets Series, Prickly Exports is our own perfect-bound, small-format series. A series that aims to publish poetry that renews the faith, captivation and appetite for contemporary poetry.

On starting the original Pocket Poets series, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote that "the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic...an international, dissident, insurgent ferment."

We'll take those sentiments with us as we move into these uncharted waters and add that we are looking for poets who can tear apart language and rebuild it anew. Poets who shiver with inspiration-divinatory, visionary, awe-inspiring, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic inspiration.

With that in mind, we are proud to introduce the debut title in the series:

666 5th Ave by Simon Occulis

Cult icon, Simon Occulis, returns once again to the field of poetry after the triumphant success of his debut novel The Gospel of Now (Mosaic Press, 2022). Combining his signature, almost Ginsberg-ian, incantatory combination of esoteric wisdom and incendiary political commentary, 666 5th Ave reframes geopolitics through lens of the Apocalypse. His poetry cuts through the hell-scape unchecked wealth and power, touching on everything from the fall of the twin towers, to tech-bro messiahs, to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Praise for 666 5th Ave:

"No one on planet Earth writes like Occulis. His poetry is an exhilarating, intoxicating and irresistible mash-up of history, mythology, politics, outrage and hope. It's not up to me to tell you what these poems mean, but I can tell you this; they'll l take you places poetry has never taken you before. Strap in!" -IF THE POET

About the Author

Canadian American poet, novelist, and visual artist, Simon Occulis was born Brandon Pitts in Los Angeles, California. His teenage years were spent in a US Manhattan Project town, Richland Washington, where the military made the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, and his high school mascot was the mushroom cloud. After flunking out of school as a result of dyslexia, he embarked upon a long list of factotum occupations: arctic fisherman, coffee roaster, radio-jingle producer, and single parent, to name a few. After a best-selling poetry collection, Tender in the Age of Fury, and two international recital tours under his birth name, he published a novel, The Gospel of Now, which is being adapted into a motion picture. As a visual artist, he has had solo exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal and his art can be found in public institutions and private collections. Occulis lives in Montreal, Canada.