Horse Less Press

We can give you a little peek of the cover design for Nikki Wallschlaeger’s book HOUSES, photo and cover design by Nikki and Brian Wallschlaeger. Horse Less Press is so excited about this book. Some other people are excited too (see below). Did you know you can pre-order a copy for only $14 and free shipping? Do it now! 

“In my father’s house are many mansions,” Jesus promised. In her deftly-aimed, disarmingly poised debut, Nikki Wallschlaeger leads us phrase by phrase through the many dim and brightly lit houses of our American psyche in this pitiless new century: “Hospitals. Lighted for end times. They run on glossy generators & backup generators, lights of all dreams.” Her long lines push the phrases into tight proximities which are sometimes painful, sometimes grate up a little spark: “Neighbor, our hearts pumped blood in the same room, looking onto lakes that teenagers drown in.” I admire the grave persistence of her vision, the precision of her eye and ear. Houses unflinchingly reports the extremity of contemporary existence and presents the “end times” as durational, as just something else to endure. “The bill, they say, is going through the house. Eventually we’ll have to get real.”    -Joyelle McSweeney

Nikki Wallschlaeger is not afraid to watch the furniture break down like a body and then come together against a brick wall, someone or something pounding on the other side.  If origin is a myth, it is also endless practice:  “There’s always a big knife in the kitchen.”  “We’re using the past instead of letting it use us.”  As white civilization drags its history of ruin and pillage into the 21st century, Houses rebuilds ancestry as force rather than simply loss, wielding the eye of vulnerability buried inside each scar through a face-off with the present:  “They’re vague about what they want with their violence so I shot them.”  This is not a book you will supervise.  This is a book whose supervision pierces the mundane and extraordinary, transforming dispossession into wanderlust, mending the spell of ill inheritance.  -Lucas de Lima

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses inhabits an eerie city of houses singing their displaced memories, their sprawling histories. This is a new world poetry pushing us to witness words peeled down to their own arrangements, to peer underneath the bandaged skins of our neighbors, to survive the wreckage of a monotonous and violent economy.   -Ching-In Chen

So happy to see & hear Nikki Wallschlaeger reading over at Real Pants for Bruce Covey’s WHAT’S NEW IN POETRY series, alongside readings by Peter Davis, Maryam Parhizkar, and Carrie Lorig. We’ll get to reveal the cover to Wallschlaeger’s forthcoming book HOUSES soon! In the meantime, you know you can pre-order a copy. 

At Electric Literature today, Alissa Nutting talks to Colin Winnette about Sara Woods’ SARA OR THE EXISTENCE OF FIRE. Hooray!

Two of our favorite book-makers, talking to each other! Shanna Compton interviews Alban Fischer about his book design work over at Real Pants. 

Up at Horse Less Review this week, sip by Sam Lineberger! 

Up today at OPEN: Horse Less Reviews editor Amorak Huey responds to Brian Clements’ A Book of Common Rituals. 

We are so excited to share this image of the front cover of Nathan Hauke’s upcoming full-length collection EVERY LIVING ONE. Design by the fabulous Alban Fischer and cover art by the fabulous David Ruhlman. Just a little bit longer to get this book at the discounted pre-order price of $14 and free shipping! 

Sara Peck & Jared Joseph’s HERE YOU ARE (late March) and Nikki Wallschlaeger’s HOUSES (early May) are now available for pre-order for $14 each!

About HERE YOU ARE, Kevin Killian writes:

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.

Pre-order Sara Peck & Jared Joseph’s HERE YOU ARE now. 

About HOUSES, Lucas de Lima writes:

Nikki Wallschlaeger is not afraid to watch the furniture break down like a body and then come together against a brick wall, someone or something pounding on the other side.  If origin is a myth, it is also endless practice:  “There’s always a big knife in the kitchen.”  “We’re using the past instead of letting it use us.”  As white civilization drags its history of ruin and pillage into the 21st century, Houses rebuilds ancestry as force rather than simply loss, wielding the eye of vulnerability buried inside each scar through a face-off with the present:  “They’re vague about what they want with their violence so I shot them.”  This is not a book you will supervise.  This is a book whose supervision pierces the mundane and extraordinary, transforming dispossession into wanderlust, mending the spell of ill inheritance.

Pre-order Nikki Wallschlaeger’s HOUSES now. 

Being disgusted by your body (admittedly, in some pretty specific ways) is pretty much criteria number one for being trans, and I think I was channeling this in some more general ways throughout the book. In the seeds poem, Sara gives birth to the wrong thing in the wrong way but makes the best out of it. Her dog has a harder time of it. This is absolutely what bodies do.

After Saturday, you will not be able to submit your full-length book or chapbook manuscript to Horse Less Press this year. Two more days! Send us something good!