The Stoneware Jug - Stefan Lorenzutti and John Porcellino

The Stoneware Jug by Stefan Lorenzutti and John Porcellino / ISBN 9788396596833 / 28 pages, 5.5 x 7.9 inches, staple-bound / co-published by Nieves, Bored Wolves, and Spit and a Half

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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.

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: An Autobiographical Cairn 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.