Bret McCabe, of the Baltimore City Paper, recently featured Narrow House Recordings in a recent article entitled Wordsound: Narrow House Recordings Puts Poetry On Plastic. Both Justin Sirois and Jamie Gaughran-Perez have contributed to the Small Press Exchange in the past, and maintain profiles. Below is a short excerpt of the piece. You may read the complete feature at the Baltimore City Paper.

Jamie Gaughran-Perez is disappointed in the total absence of zombie-on-zombie poetry in his life. “I’ve gotten haikus from zombies, about zombies, about zombie pets, about zombie love relationships, killing zombies—but no love letter to zombies yet, though there’s still time,” he says as he mentally scrolls through the upward of 50 submissions he’s received for a June poetry contest he sponsored. “And no zombie-zombie action.”

“Really?” asks Justin Sirois. “I’m going to have to start writing.”

Sirois—a congenial 27-year-old with a close-cropped skull, black-rimmed glasses, and tattoos on the rebar arms of a bricklayer—is entering for the creative buzz, not to win the prize. He made the prize. A graphic designer at the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn by day—the main reason he chose his home in the verdant West Baltimore Gwynn Oak neighborhood, where he and Gaughran-Perez sit at the kitchen table—Sirois started his Narrow House Recordings poetry CD label in 2003, and passed Gaughran-Perez a copy of his most recent release, Buck Downs’ Pontiak Fever, to pass along.

And so far the submissions are as madcap as you’d expect. “Zombies are just one of those pop-cultural things that make people think about ideas—zombies as slaves, zombies and consumerism—and yet are always funny as crap,” Gaughran-Perez says. “Shotguns, dismembered things, eating brains. Zombies are just funny. I even taught my daughter to say, ‘Brains, brains,’ just last weekend.”

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