I had the great pleasure of meeting Lachlan J. McDougall through a William Burroughs group on facebook. He posted one of his cut-ups there and I was sufficiently impressed. I later solicited his work for the online version of my magazine Blue as an Orange (that will be transitioning into a print magazine later this year). I may have been the first to publish his work, I’m not sure. Now he is churning out brilliant works and has even started publishing the works of others.

In 2023 while organizing my archives I came across a suite of extremely minimal poems. Coincidentally, Lachlan posted a call for chapbook submissions. I gathered the works and shipped them off, not thinking much of it. He decided to publish what became triskaidekaphilia. I will always be grateful to him for that. While the poems in this collection ranged in age from 10 years, to moments prior to submitting, they somehow united into a nice little project. Poet J.D. Nelson (please purchase a copy of his brilliant first full-length collection in ghostly onehead) even included it on his list of best small-press titles of 2023.

While the limited edition print run of this chapbook has long since sold out, it is available on Lachlan’s site as a free PDF.

Note on the font used: The collection required a mono-space font, and was thus written in Courier Prime, which was designed by John August‘s Quote-Unquote Apps. That font can (and should) be downloaded for free here. 

Some other words on triskaidekaphilia:

“It has you to put down. reflect, pick-up again; all in virtue of a simplicity you, in your ear, can complexify. And love to, anew, each time. Profound reading experience.” – Andrew Cyril Macdonald, poet and editor of Version (9) Magazine.

“If you’re hankering for some super wild, unforgettable asemic adjacent experimental concrete/visual poetry definitely don’t sleep on this extraordinary collection of minimalist writing by Kristopher Biernat. Truly one of the coolest collections I’ve seen all year.” – Jerome William Berglund, poet and photographer.