The Stoneware Jug

By Stefan Lorenzutti and John Porcellino. Published by Nieves, Bored Wolves, and Spit and a Half.

Softcover, 28 pages, B&W, 2022.

Poem-comix by Stefan Lorenzutti (words) and John Porcellino (pictures)

“Consisting of 13 of Lorenzutti’s short poems, adapted into comics by John P., The Stoneware Jug is plainspoken, lyrical, and lovely. Poet and cartoonist are the proverbial match made in heaven. The resulting visual poetry, observant, wry, and epiphanic, hits close to home. The sheer emptiness and quiet of the pages amaze me. This feels like art for cool gray days, or biting cold nights, but it’s full of life, and I could read it over and over with pleasure. In fact, I have.”

—Charles Hatfield, The Comics Journal, “The Best Comics of 2022”

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The Stoneware Jug is a collection of poem-comics by Stefan Lorenzutti (words) and John Porcellino (pictures), in which American comix legend Porcellino (King-Cat, Thoreau at Walden) “pours” the adapted poems into his pen-and-ink panels, as if into a handmade vessel.

Each one-page comic is a seasonal diorama of sorts, preserving a moment in time unfolding in the interstices of time: between the chinks of a log cabin in the Polish Highlands, fissures in late-spring ice, and the gap between coziness and creeping concern on a brutally cold winter’s night.

In the end, The Stoneware Jug is a quest for comfort zones, suffused throughout with the aromatic promise of panettone.

Co-published by Nieves, Bored Wolves, and Spit and a Half

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2022
28 pages, paperback, 14×20 cm, b&w offset
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115
Designed by Benjamin Sommerhalder

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Stefan Lorenzutti (Brooklyn, 1984) is a poet and publisher based in Kraków and the Polish Highlands. His books include the prose-poetry journal Great Known and At Tremendous Dam: Some Poems 2014–2021.

John Porcellino (Chicago, 1968) has been writing, drawing, and publishing comics and graphic novels for over thirty years. His celebrated self-published series King-Cat Comics (also available from Drawn & Quarterly in omnibus form), begun in 1989, has inspired a generation of cartoonists.

“John Porcellino’s comics distill, in just a few lines and words, the feeling of simply being alive.”
—Chris Ware