Sacred Versions of the Profane by John Dorsey

About the book

Sacred Versions of the Profane moves through river towns, hospital corridors, rusted steel, memory lapses, and half-lit rooms. John Dorsey writes from within the ordinary and allows it to open into something less certain. A couch becomes a mountain. A car becomes a time machine. A city holds both sweetness and rot.

These poems hold exhaustion without spectacle. They move between the intimate and the historical, where Bethlehem Steel sits beside snowflakes on a tongue, and where Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound flicker through working-class landscapes.

Edition details

• Catalogue: ASP 001
• Published: 28 February 2026
• Edition: 56 copies
• Copies for sale: 50, numbered by hand
• Format: Small square, 148 × 148 mm
• Extent: 24 pages
• Binding: Saddle-stitched
• Interior: 120 gsm recycled uncoated paper
• Cover: 250 gsm recycled uncoated stock
• Production: Designed, printed, assembled, numbered, and stamped by Analog Submission Press in York

About the author

John Dorsey is former Poet Laureate of Belle, Missouri. He is the author of several collections, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016–2020, Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, Pocatello Wildflower, and Dead Photographs.

The Small Run

Read a conversation with John Dorsey about memory, labour, influence, and the chapbook as a rare flower in The Small Run 001.