Via our spring pre-order/subscription drive, you can order Emily Brandt’s amazing chapbook SLEEPTALK OR NOT AT ALL, to be released this fall. You can read some excerpts from the chapbook at Sink Review, The Mackinac, and H_NGM_N.
Order SLEEPTALK OR NOT AT ALL as an individual title, or even better yet as part of our fall chapbook subscription, which also includes titles by Leah Rogin-Roper, Claudia Cortese, Amy Jo Trier-Walker, and Alyse Knorr!
Another sneak peek at the poems in our collab chapbook Pledge Drive, which you can receive for $10 through our spring subscription/pre-order drive!
PLEDGE DRIVE
Annie Won
a chicken that expects to be fed every day assumes
every day it starts to firmly believe that humans are kind
every day the chicken is fed a little more and every day
the humans come
the chickens dances so the humans come
the kind humans come to feed the chicken every day
the children come and the chicken is fed and
the chicken dances, so
the crowds come. nations of crowds come to watch
the chicken dance and tents and port-a-potties
all over town, and soon more adults come and
every day, the measure the chicken for size
the feeding continues and the chicken wonders
when it can sleep because right now
the chicken is being fed, and the children are happy
the chicken dances, the chicken is fed, and the child
who watches her stopwatch
because the chicken dances, it’s a timed routine
nothing in the chicken’s life points to
the fact that tomorrow it will be made into
a chicken pot pie
which will be delicious tomorrow and
contains the whole chicken
Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of: A’s Visuality (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY, 2015), I-
Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK, 2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008). She has co-edited (with Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 2015). She has collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book called “Swans, the ice,” she said with grants through the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also collaborated on large textual and/or visual projects with John Bloomberg-Rissman and Scott Helmes. She curates the reading series, Cadmium Text and co-curates (with Lynn Behrendt), the electronic journal Peep/Show at Her visual art can be seen at: www.theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.
John Bloomberg-Rissman has just finished a 5-year textual project/poem, In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life mashup called Zeitgeist Spam. Want to publish it? It’s only 1.5 million words, not counting the notes. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press, 2007), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press 2010). His working title(s) for the fourth section are In the House of the Hangman: The Baroque Feast and Adouéke, an untranslated plant name in a Kanaka war chant which wastranslated by Louise Michel while she was exiled on New Caledonia in the 1870s, after the Commune (adouéke makes warriors “fierce, and charms their wounds.”) In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, Black Widow Press has just published an anthology which he co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg, titled Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Anthology of Outside & Subterranean Poetry, and he’s just embarked on another anthology project, called Nuestra America, about which he’ll be more than happy to wear out your ear. He’s also learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).
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!
We are so excited to publish Megan Kaminski & Bonnie Roy’s collaborative chapbook Seven to December this summer! You can read some excerpts at Jerry Magazine, BOAAT, ILK, and Like Starlings, and Roy and Kaminski talk about their collaboration briefly at Jerry Magazine. Pre-order your copy of Seven to December now, or order our entire summer chapbook run, via our Kickstarter campaign.
Your asked for it and we said sure. We added an option on our Kickstarter page so that you can pre-order any single chapbook from our 2015 summer and fall series. For $10, support Horse Less and order your copy of
Pony at the Super by Rachael Katz
Goal/Tender Meat/Tender by Paul Cunningham
Seven to December by Megan Kaminski & Bonnie Roy
My Secret Life by Lisa Cattrone
Dirty Party Poems by Kiley McLaughlin
Sleeptalk or Not at All by Emily Brandt
Two Truths and a Lie by Leah Rogin-Roper
Red Essay and Other Histories by Claudia Cortese
Trembling Ourselves into Trees by Amy Jo Trier-Walker
Epithalamia by Alyse Knorr
Dear readers, our spring pre-order and subscription drive is off to a slow start, but we’re confident you can get us caught up! Your pre-orders make what we do possible, so thank you thank you. Our first chapbook of the summer will be Paul Cunningham’s amazing Goal/Tender Meat/Tender, for which he has made this terrific trailer.
You can pre-order Goal Tender/Meat Tender now, as part of our summer chapbook subscription, which also includes Pony at the Super by Rachael Katz, Seven to December by Megan Kaminski and Bonnie Roy, Dirty Party Poems by Kiley McLaughlin, and My Secret Life by Lisa Cattrone. It’s only $35 and free shipping in the US! Do it now! We will be so grateful, and you will be so happy to get these amazing books.
In honor of our spring subscription/pre-order drive, Horse Less Press authors have written some occasional poems! First up, Susan Scarlata, fantastic poet & editor of Lost Roads Press.
We have no tote bags, coffee mugs, or sweatshirts. Just good poems. Please get yourself some books and chapbooks!
PLEDGE DRIVE
-Susan Scarlata
The tough
part about
the pledge
drive on the
radio is listening
to people not
otherwise prone
to talk of no-
thing just
talk and talk
and talk about
nothing, about
what you will
get when you
pledge. Usually
it’s a mug, you
get a mug for
your pledge. Or
if it’s not a mug,
it’s a tote bag.
Lately it’s a tote
bag you get in ex-
change for your
money. Pledge
in this context
means money
not thought or
heart or dining-
room table
cleaner, which
are all other
ways to under-
stand the word.
Recently J pledged
and was almost
talked into pledging
more to get a
sweatshirt. She
would have paid
more for that
sweatshirt than
any other, but
“It would have
been a sweat-
shirt that
came with
a pledge.”
Horse Less Press is looking for some editorial help. We’d like to add a person or persons to our editorial team who’d be willing to read submissions for our book, review, and chapbook publications, and would also be willing/able to help with online PR and/or chapbook design. Distance is not an issue; all our editorial work happens online. None of our editors are paid for their efforts, sadly, so we need folks who are in the lucky situation of having a few hours a week they could donate to the press. An ideal new editor would be extremely familiar with and appreciate what we’ve done so far but also have ideas and plans to challenge and broaden our scope. If you think you might be interested, email jen.tynes@gmail.com with some information about you and why you think we’d be good for each other.
Horse Less Press 