Horse Less Press

Here is another excerpt from our forthcoming collaborative chapbook, PLEDGE DRIVE, which you can order (along with many other great books!) via our spring subscription/pre-order drive!

Pledge Drive

by Siel Ju

1.

The reason you don’t have it is because you have not yet created the circumstances for it to come into your life. You cannot passively wait and expect it to arrive, you must actively co-create your destiny, setting your intentions for it, making room for it, finding creative ways to welcome it, both physically and psychologically. Once you have finally crafted the perfect, welcoming space for it, it will naturally come and fill that space.

The reason you don’t have it is because you are not yet content with your life. You are constantly starting this and stopping that, tweaking this and moving that, in the hopes of attaining it. Yet desperation never attracts. As long as you are trying so hard, as long as you are not quite satisfied with your life as it is, nothing will come to you. Once you are perfectly content not having it, then you’ll be surprised to find it suddenly enter into your life.

We are so excited to publish Amy Jo Trier-Walker’s chapbook Trembling Ourselves into Trees this fall! You can read some of her work at Black Tongue Review, and you can pre-order your copy via our spring subscription/pre-order drive. Or, heck, order the entire fall chapbook line-up, which also includes books by Emily Brandt, Leah Rogin-Roper, Claudia Cortese, and Alyse Knorr!

Here’s another excerpt from our forthcoming collab chapbook PLEDGE DRIVE! You can order it, and a lot of other great books, via our spring pre-order and subscription drive, which ends Friday! We are $625 away from our goal; thanks for helping us make books happen!

Pledge Drive

Tony Mancus

You put your foot to the pedal and through the floor.
There is something discotheques get right when
the light pours in. It’s only the beginning
once. Until the song and whatever noise comes
again. Swearing up and down your foot is
heavy. Thanking god or some economic
country song for genetic manipulation.
How we get swung out across the floors
the thump of bass into this kind arc above
the land – this how-to-reach-distant-places.
In a box or tube packed full of paper.
Some like it with explosives, the forest
full of combustible trees. You are an-
imal among the yawns, a fern pressed firm
again in slate. It’s late. There is the world
out there, we are told how it is as we
continue singing in it, sitting on our bets
placed for many years in the pedal growing
its own limp, its high cut fields and ruts
where the axe will admire any snap
able piece swapped out from the rust. The rest
is just filling orders, a point the sky
forgets as it dumps its light all over.

Here’s another excerpt from our forthcoming collaborative chapbook, PLEDGE DRIVE, which you can purchase via our spring pre-order and subscription drive! You can also pre-order Anne Cecelia Holmes’ full-length book THE JITTERS, forthcoming in early July!

Pledge Drive

Anne Cecelia Holmes

Again I am caught in the dream
endlessly pulling hair
from my throat like some dumb
trick I haven’t given my consent.
My skills exceed my needs
except in this scenario.
It is enough to slam my fist
into something soft if
what I need is already gone.
Winter has a rhythm
like all seasons but watch
me try to dismantle it,
cry until not even weather
knows what to do with me.
I walk down the back
steps with a stride meant
for better days. I pledge
to make a better day if
I can squint at all ugliness
like a glow to shoulder
lightly. How else do we
behave in sham crisis.

We are so excited to publish Alyse Knorr’s chapbook EPITHALAMIA this October! You can read some excerpts at Open Letters Monthly, Story South, and Construction.

You can pre-order a copy now, or even order our entire fall chapbook series, which includes titles by Emily Brandt, Leah Rogin-Roper, Claudia Cortese, and Amy Jo Trier-Walker. Your pre-orders and subscriptions make what we do possible, and we thank you so much!

Here’s another sneak peek at PLEDGE DRIVE, a collaborative chapbook from Horse Less Press, which you can purchase via our spring pre-order and subscription drive.

Pledge Drive

by Dan Brady

after E.B.B.

I thank everything
that has love in its heart
with a gratefulness
and love of my own—
my deepest gratefulness
to those who paused
close to the arrested walls
of my heart. My music
in its higher parts
may have appeared
avant garde,
but, under examination,
revealed itself low,
for what I said, I said
between my ribs.
Now in full meaning
I thank you,
for my soul
in the future years,
for the love
in resisted greetings,
for life
as it disappears.

Dear friends who love poetry: we started our spring fundraiser a little soon after AWP and Buffalo Small Press Book Fair and a handful of other events we could not get to this time around, where people buy great micro-press books, and I fear that means strapped budgets: our spring fund drive is pretty slow-going this year. We’ve got less than a week to go, and we haven’t quite hit our halfway mark. Can you help? And get some awesome books for yourself in the process? It’s your first chance to order any of our 2015 chapbooks; it’s also your first chance to pre-order two forthcoming full-length titles:  Anne Cecelia Holmes’ THE JITTERS and Kristi Maxwell’s PLAN/K. Feel free to forward EVERYWHERE!

Here’s another sneak peek at a poem from our collaborative chapbook PLEDGE DRIVE, which you can order via our Kickstarter project for $10.

Pledge Drive

Richard Froude

Like nothing

broken bottles

on the highway bridge

my dream house

of stickle bricks and lymph

the jetty walled off

by thieves

the sky

when the clinic is quiet

your absence

and all it surrounds

location turned out

as a face occupied

by agency

work undertaken

and memory

clothed into something

more like an argument

I crawled from the swamps

into a new world

of dust

developed and afraid

upon the earth where we

one day build cities

this distance

is your distance

your velocity

the light

a story

the autonomy of beasts

slow down

be savored

in circles

until the bus seats wear thin

decide a measure

by area or population

which roads are

boundaries and which

are thoroughfare

this dumb luck

that we come

to such casual existence

how natural it is

that the towers

are not standing

I want you to feel

all of this

the wrecking ball

the pat on the back

as smart as we know we are

we exploit each other so readily

Like nothing I watch you choke

an invisible man

his flesh first translucent

then solid

and I return to this

over and over

man who is not me

to remember

how intoxicating it is

to do things wrong

to dissolve

into symbols

to drink from swimming pools

piss in the corners

of motel rooms

bleed onto the carpet

for new and better

ways to hurt each other

to name the three rivers that

course around us

the means by which

all songs must arise:

the open ear

the hollow throat

the savage

lenten heart

We are so excited that we were able to add a fifth full-length book to our 2015 line-up, Kristi Maxwell’s PLAN/K, to be released in late summer. You can read some excerpts from PLAN/K at Moria, Double Room, and Failbetter, and you can pre-order your copy of PLAN/K now, via our spring pre-order and subscriptions drive. Pre-orders help offset the printing and design costs necessary to make these beautiful books. WE THANK YOU!

Here’s another excerpt from our PLEDGE DRIVE collaborative chapbook, which you can get via our spring pre-order/subscription drive! 

Pledge Drive

Daniela Olszewska

Who is on a wallet-thick kick. What gross animal income. Where amortized outlet bankers. When whimpering currency. Why gold standard-infused. How sugar patty deluxe. Who can’t cut cornices like a good pseudo-boyfriend. Which super money tree brambles. Where off-shore pigmented in passwords. When an old watchdog’s somewhat new tricks. Why Karl. How you think you’d love me more if I didn’t need. Who suckboy brackets. What looks like the current price of dateable. Where I blame our bad timing on the bourgeois. When calamity stock. Why paper trailed and then tendered. How deaf-doughed. Who neux wealthy in a beach setting. What covetous vehicle. Where my mouth is. When association gilds. Why Hampton haute. How additionally, Sallie Mae. Who parity markets. What compounded your interest in. Where socially net-worthed. When you assest. Why finance ruble. How coined.