Horse Less Press

Our Kickstarter drive is your first chance to pre-order Anne Cecelia Holmes’ first full-length book, THE JITTERS, which will be released in July! We are SO excited about it. Some other people are too:

There’s a beautiful epigraph that invites us into The Jitters: “… am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” The jitters, the junk, the pain, the fortitude to remain here as “a new creature /… brave enough / to be wounded.” Anne Cecelia Holmes has the courage to say carefully, and measure shrewdly; to sing sadly, and sing boldly. To paraphrase her: hold your breath, read this book. Her poems don’t flinch or back away from our darkest thoughts.

—Dara Wier

Anne Cecelia Holmes’ The Jitters constructs an “I” that wobbles between a dangerous and endangered outer world and an estrangement from its own interior, seeking to rebuild a past it can barely recall via maps it has forgotten how to read. In clean, ritualistic sentences that “travel by assembly line” and are fueled by hysteria, the speaker announces the security breech. This is the American “I” in the era of terror, breaking it down in a tone whose wit is born of trauma and whose metaphors, like lost children, seek signification. This collection is pitch-perfect, a sustained masterpiece of alienation and hunger.

—Diane Seuss

You can read some of Holmes’s writing at Birdfeast, H_NGM_N, ILK, and iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. Pre-order your copy of THE JITTERS now!