About

The Heavy Contortionist, founded in 2014 by Mark Anthony Cronin and JB Henry, publishes fiction, philosophy, and poetry that resist compliance. The press exists to support work that places formal demands on both writer and reader, and that remains uninterested in market intelligibility or institutional smoothing. It operates from the premise that some writing requires space outside prevailing standards of accessibility, consensus, and taste.

The press is oriented toward work that still attempts total articulation—projects willing to think at scale, sustain risk, and accept failure as a condition of seriousness. In a cultural environment that favors speed, legibility, and partial claims, these books insist on effort, duration, and formal consequence. The task here is neither preservation nor provocation, but stewardship: maintaining space for ambitious writing to exist long enough to finish saying what it is trying to say.