Horse Less Press

Here You Are by Sara Peck & Jared Joseph is here! We are so excited! Get your copy now! 

This book presents a clutch of lyric contacts, tenderness leaping like a spark across synapses to nest in in a thread of phrases. Here affinity, separateness, loneliness, compatibility, and the sense of being attuned to another send up a quiet array of small-scale yet endearing effects. A playful duet for the End of Time, or for Miller Time.   –Joyelle McSweeney

I hear the old folk tune here, again and again, the lullaby Jack Spicer threaded throughout “Fifteen False Propositions Against God,” the mockingbird, diamond ring., the absent savior. In Here You Are, again, Mama’s objects endlessly threatening to disappoint, even as new, better objects appear to staunch baby’s tears. Like the phrases from the news that fall, like leaves, into the mulch of the poem, e.g the “binders full of women” of Mitt Romney ’12. Peck and Joseph use word and line as counters—colorful steps with which to raise the reader (the dreamer) a gorgeous house of cards. “God right here still nothing on top of everything/ to be in all this beauty.” Joseph and Peck’s personae start out strong and united, like siblings, but as the book wears on, propinquity seems to play on nerves, and out of sheer anxiety the poem begins to throw itself back onto its own beach, the waves like iterations of rain and sun,” “pink,” “home,” “garden”; the poets Hiromi Ito and Mark Zuckerberg each make an appearance—it’s a theophany, a book of rite, and all who come and linger here, even for a moment, shall experience the rhapsodomancy of the adept.  -Kevin Killian

“Here You Are is a broken mirror held up to a broken world. It’s a troubled but exuberant challenge to the self, the lyric, the name, the language, the author, and the poem. A+ Five Stars Would Read Again Great Transaction Thanks!” -Leif Haven 

What’s that beautiful thing I overheard you saying I said in reaction to your arms being around? It was Lyotard insisting that we need to, “To make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible.” And isn’t that our on going / I heart you forever hang up about co sponsorship of a poem? Who had the idea rather than How had the idea / or better yet / something I recently read / in Mike Young’s book said, “Belief = imagination you give up measuring.” The correspondence that makes the poem is also not a correspondence but is a correspondence and also just a reverberation between two bodies as they make in the space between them. I really fucking wish I didn’t have to talk about the hang ups / we have / to talk about the co sponsorship / the co writing of these poems by / Sara or Jared or Sared or Jara / which is just a space you enter into / eagerly / together or not / “the root systems naked to the creek.” Oh call and response, / liquidate my preparation. -Carrie Lorig

Hurry! Dark grows when dawn is running there, as high as heavens. They admired each other’s ivory once again. They became parents.  It took 400 years to develop it. Father, you have forgotten the lamb for the sacrifice? Oh Sara, I said, you have placed me on the throne of Israel, but I’m like a child. Shut the lions’s mouths so they won’t hurt me. Jared, I said, drag your sword to this spot where I lay. Cut the baby in half, and give a piece to each woman, that it will stop this noisy quarreling. Becoming is a movement from someplace, but becoming oneself is a movement at that place. “It took four-hundred years to develop it”, we went in the sun, black fish, sucking together, death is beautiful, music shut off in the middle of silence, it’s all an aura. Tree, but two in a raw. You say oh you say I was going to…blow up. I think  I know you. Are you dead?  -Purdey Lord Kreiden & Michael Thomas Taren 

The best collaborations to my mind are the ones which preserve sympathy and difference, and Sara Peck and Jared Joseph’s Here You Are achieves this beautifully. Far from the seamless surface of musical thoughts presented in a given order that constitute most lyric poems, seams are suddenly everywhere, and in Here You Are they populate the space between two lines with the dynamic theater that Peck and Joseph maintain between their sensibilities. Lines like “I feel the flowers” are followed by “I feel my bald spot.” Their rapport is unruly, impertinent, and unfolds in this work as an ever-unpredictable and bizarre universe of things and feelings. They’re really smart, and funny, and they pay attention to each other, to things and feelings. They make it look easy. -Brandon Brown