There’s a rumor that we’re buying abandoned match factories and turning them into a chain of small poetry presses, gentrifying the neighborhoods and displacing people. Not true. Abandoned factories have already been torn down or converted into condos and our neighborhoods have already been gentrified long before we showed up. 

Our name is a tribute to Aki Kaurismäki’s 1990 movie Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö, translated into English as The Match Factory Girl. The title of the movie, and to some extent the plot, is itself an allusion to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale “The Little Match Girl.” In Kaurismäki’s movie, the girl is a grown woman, and the vengeance is hers. 

It helped that when we picked the name for our press, no other press had that name. No film company had a similar name either. Now it does, but this planet is big enough for both our press and a film company to give a nod to one of our favorite filmmakers.