Horse Less Press

It’s great to see Tim Earley’s Descriptions of Rural Life and Scenery on Jonathon Sturgeon’s Best Indie Fiction and Poetry of 2014 list over at Flavorwire.  He has some great company! Check out all these books!

Did you know that you can pre-order Nathan Hauke’s Every Living One, due to release in January? Did you know you can pre-order the entire 2015 catalog of full-length books, including not only Every Living One but also books by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Anne Cecelia Holmes, and a collab by Jared Harvey and Sara Peck? There’s even a gift subscription option. Check it all out here! 

The word monster used in the passage above is particularly useful. As the word has been dragged from one century to the next, different associations have attached themselves to it. But despite those various iterations there’s consensus that monster means something dreadful. When applied to Earley’s poetry this label fits. I’m also inclined to apply monstrous to Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery because if we keep in mind the word’s Latin root monstrum – meaning “divine omen, portent, sign” – this definition validates and connects us to the book’s supernatural disposition. But more than a spectral jubilee, Earley’s work is a grotesque jig, a glitch in the natural order of things. His poems also sound like the incantations of an ex-preacher suffering from (or made divine by) what one doctor called (describing Rimbaud) “toxic delirium”

“I started writing [Sara or the Existence of Fire] in 2011 after reading C.A. Conrad’s “Book of Frank”; in it, he has written a series of these little blocks of prose that are moments in this character Frank’s life that ultimately add up to reveal something. I wanted to try that, so I made up a character named Sara and started writing spontaneously these little moments about her. A lot of times a word would come to mind, or I would ask someone to give me a word and I would write a poem about it. Eventually, my ex-partner told me that if I put these in a certain order I could have a narrative. Once it was put together I realized it was echoing a lot of things going on in my life that I wasn’t really talking about with a lot of people, like my marriage, mental health and my gender identity.“

What these disparate fragments eventually become is a mediation on the surveillance state. By the time we get to the poem’s final block of prose that these fragments are destined to become, we find (at first) the poet taking a quizzical approach to being spied on, as if accepting this new norm of being watched.

We are so excited that Nathan Hauke’s second full-length book of poetry, EVERY LIVING ONE, will be released in January, 2015. You can pre-order your copy now via Paypal. 

Composed through the accumulation and solve of discrete interwoven series, EVERY LIVING ONE attends to presence rent by attachment and loss—creation entrusted to itself, further bewildered by text(s) and belief. It picks through the razor briar of “born-again” religious rhetoric and culls the abstraction of transcendentalism to embrace visionary experience, cleaving to practice grounded in relinquishment and acts of salvage that accompany the transformative threshold of edges.

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“What if the secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent psalm?  These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living.  In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.” —G.C. Waldrep

Now up at O P E N: Arielle Burgdorf engages with Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah. 

Here’s a lovely interview with Sara Woods:

Our first full-length book of 2015 will be Every Living One by Nathan Hauke, due out in early January. Here’s some advance praise for ELO from Norma Cole, G.C. Waldrep, Paul Naylor, and Donald Revell. You can get our 2015 book subscription now, which includes ELO as well as books by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Anne Cecelia Holmes, Sara Peck, and Jared Joseph.

“To show and to affirm the image of the world is a rash act anymore, as nowadays we read and write for colorless grammarians. Nathan Hauke, thank heaven, is a rash man, a poet who loves the precipice he finds in every image and in his mind’s eye. He is the glad captive of a good world and of its graces. Every Living One tells the bright, bright story of that captivity.”

—Donald Revell

“This book of poetry is an active remembering. ‘But who / can say the order of things,’ asks the poet, along with Michel Foucault. See the clear and precarious moments of sun and snow, the world of industry and nature, the poignancy of human nature. ‘Addicted to language,’ Hauke’s cutting edge tracks thought’s shining immediacy.”

—Norma Cole

“In Every Living One, Nathan Hauke, like Ronald Johnson, works the compost heap left by the New England Transcendentalists—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau all leave traces throughout this careful, delicate, yet tough-minded book. Hauke’s world is—as it should be—a more broken, more littered world than his predecessors, a world composed of as much consumer debris as natural beauty. And it’s to our benefit that Hauke has the tenacity and integrity not to turn his back on either, allowing him to take us to the numinous edge of perception: ‘There is    must be    a higher origin of.’ Every Living One explores the isn’t as much as the is of that possible higher origin, all while facing directly the sorrows of death and poverty haunting everyday life; yet beneath that layer of sorrow we find at the book’s core a ‘Raw knot of gratitude.’ That gratitude comes through on each page of this compelling book.”

—Paul Naylor

“What if the secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent psalm?  These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living.  In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.”

—G.C. Waldrep

We should be receiving copies of Sara Woods’ Sara or the Existence of Fire in the mail today, and we are SO EXCITED. More pictures of and info on that soon.

Woods’ book is the last full-length of our 2014 catalog, which means it is ALREADY time to begin focusing on our books of 2015, starting with Every Living One by Nathan Hauke in January, and then here you are by Sara Peck and Jared Joseph (March), HOUSES by Nikki Wallschlaeger (May), and The Jitters by Anne Cecelia Holmes (July). Would you like to receive all four of these books as soon as they’re available? And would you like to help out an adjunct-run, poet-powered micro-press in the process? You can subscribe to our 2015 full-length book catalog for $55. There’s also a gift option that includes a mini broadside for $65. Read more from all four authors here, and get yourself a yearly subscription! We are so grateful for you.

It is a BUSY time at Horse Less Press. Kirsten Jorgenson’s Sediment & Veil is now available through our catalog.

Additionally, Sara Woods’ Sara Or the Existence of Fire will be shipping to us from the printers soon, so there are only a few more days to get the discounted pre-order price.

We are also very happy to read this review, by Brenda Sieczkowski, of Nathan Hauke’s first book In the Marble Of Your Animal Eyes. Hauke’s second book, Every Living One, will be released from Horse Less Press in January 2015.