Poet and scholar A.J. Carruthers was living with fellow student Sam Moginie in the kind of mouldering subtropical sharehouse for which Sydney's inner west is famed. Rather than sit around and watch the environment decompose around him, Carruthers decided to become an active participant by stringing up a slice of bread in the lounge room so that he and his flatmates could sit around and watch it go stale together. Perhaps what happened next was in protest at the prospect of their home's inevitable decline, but from there it was a short leap to the formation of Stale Objects dePress which has lately released a series of chapbooks by some of the best young poets in the country.

Rhinestone by Ella O'Keefe (Stale Objects dePress, 2015)

Stale's chapbooks (along with Exostale, a collection of works by Autumn Royal, Rory Dufficy, Elena Gomez, and Toby Fitch) are available online as PDFs, but it is in the blotting paper terrain of the cream-coloured covers, the delicate infringements of the scraps of scarlet that forestall entry to and exit from the text that the freely-distributed chapbooks come into their own. Reading Ella O'Keefe's Rhinestone (Stale Objects dePress, 2015) was an unexpectedly emotional experience. The stoic vulnerabilities of  'I want to say that all the news is here / between the crisp bowls / but don't quite buy it' ('Salud') combined with the ever-so-slightly skewed alignment of the pages, the fragility of 'gritty buds', 'all the moments in the room / opening like the petals of a fan' ('aviatrix'), and then the plunging, macabre interventions in which 'I fantasise about freezing / then ingesting / cubes of my own blood' ('Particles in January') loosely buckle the reader to the seat of an emotional rollercoaster and pull the lever.

Metadata by Amelia Dale (Stale Objects dePress, 2015)

Amelia Dale's Metadata (Stale Objects dePress, 2015) is, as the publisher recounts, 'dedicated to George Brandis ... the instigator of a profoundly disruptive conceptual project in surveillance poetics: to collect and archive the metadata of every Australian resident'. Dale's Stale object is preoccupied with the staling materiality of proliferating information. To hear its stuttering incantations read aloud by its author, as I was able to at the Press's recent Melbourne launch, is to be reminded that there might yet be something of the human subject that remains out of reach of power's pervasive and terrorising grasp. Ezra Pound famously dismissed his early poems as 'stale cream puffs', but the genomic works being disseminated by Stale harbour the DNA of future greatness.

end motion/manifest by Sian Vate (bulky news press, 2015)

The chapbooks rising from the fermentations of Marty Hiatt's bulky news press are also somewhat carbed-up, as Melbourne poet Sian Vate's poem 'i'm bready' attests. With a cover that only looks and feels as if it has been hand-coloured in crayon, Vate's end motion/manifest (bulky news press, $5.50 pb, 16 pp, 9780992567859) evokes a tarrying with a lost or inexistent original that reminds us of Baudrillard's simulacra or, more intriguingly given the 'manifest' of the title, of Henri Bergson's account of his 'admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete'. In an article on Deleuze, Žižek quotes Bergson:

I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible insert itself there. Insofar as inpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been ...

This is a curly manifesto for an activist poetics and reminds us that the poem exists in the simultaneity of the page – '(make a sickie hand gesture on your sickie) (in the mirror) (call it 'captured – )' ('i'm bready') as well as virtually, where 'IT TAKES SOME MUSCLE TO ADJUNCT' ((thanks)) and 'we defrock the car in a circle / but how do we keep us free' ('but'). For Bergson, 'all the difficulties of the problem [of freedom], and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity ... and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable'. The poems in Vate's end motion/manifest wrestle with these in/tangibilities and their effects are exhilarating.

'Ezra Pound famously dismissed his early poems as ''stale cream puffs'', but the genomic works being disseminated by Stale harbour the DNA of future greatness'

The esteemed Tokyo-based Vagabond Press made its name through the publication of its Rare Objects series of chapbooks. Poems by prominent and little-known Australian poets were printed uniformly in runs of one hundred copies, with each of the soft cream-coloured covers featuring a hand-printed image by Sydney artist Kay Orchison. The objects are labours of love: the press is unfunded and operates with the help of volunteers under the guidance of the poet Michael Brennan. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the poetry-buying public, Vagabond now publishes full collections, novels, translations, and works of criticism from writers across Australia, South-east Asia, and the United States. The new dB (decibel) series picks up where Rare Objects left off. Each sequence from the series will contain ten books and invoke an array of forms, genres, designs, and formats depending on the predilections of the editor. The first instalment, edited by Pam Brown, presents works by poets as dissimilar as Ann Vickery (The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon), Toby Fitch (Jerilderies), and Anselm Berrigan (Pregrets).

As the Sydney poet Kate Middleton remarks in the introduction to her new pamphlet series, Office of Locutions, the pamphlet takes its name from the twelfth-century love poem Pamphilus, seu de Amore. The name of the poem's central figure derives from ancient Greek and means 'beloved of all'. In pointing this out, Middleton locates one of the key attributes of forms – such as the pamphlet and the chapbook – that blip, sometimes soundlessly, outside the reach of mainstream publishing radars. They are at once freely available and impossible to get. As a poet recently returned from poetry readings in Cambridge noted, chapbooks can circulate in a closed system of exchange – you must give one to get one. Elsewhere, the transaction follows a more post-structuralist French feminist line, eschewing a patriarchal system of goods to be published and priced according to their agreed value for one in which works are published just for the sake of it and delivered via pathways that appear indecipherable and excessive to those who are, as Irigaray had it, 'unable to discern the coherence'. Pamphlets and chapbooks are, then, at once democratic (anyone can have one) and egalitarian (not everyone can have one). As Middleton points out, the pamphlet is currently a commercial tool, seeding possibilities and disseminating images of goods for sale. In this sense, reclaiming the form as a space for literature, ideas, and art takes place as a form of activism that sets out to reign in the untrammelled proliferations of capital. This is just one of the shapes that these constantly shifting objects are capable of assuming.