Horse Less Press

Hey folks! We’re reading submissions for Horse Less Review #12 until the end of June. Send us something good.

New at O P E N: Michael Sikkema writes about ghosting, touching, and type-setting in HR Hegnauer’s SIR and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene.

Thank you so much to everyone who’s sent us work! One last reminder that Horse Less is accepting full-length and chapbook manuscripts through today (Sunday) EST only. You can get all the details at submittable. 

Today’s also the last day for our kickstarter project. We’ve more-than-met our goal, so thank you thank you! Thank-you haikus will resume shortly! If you want to get one of our reward packages, you still have until midnight EST to make that happen.

Don’t forget: Horse Less is only accepting chapbook and full-length manuscripts through Sunday, May 20. When I wake up Monday, May 21, sometime-in-the-morning EST, I’ll close the submissions box. Get your great work to us!

Thanks to HR Hegnauer for her amazing work on this!

Now up at O P E N: Megan Burns & Jen Tynes write to Loren Erdrich & Sierra Nelson about I Take Back the Sponge Cake. 

Kate Schapira’s The Soft Place is about to head off to the printers! This is what its cover looks like, thanks to HR Hegnauer and Agata Michalowska.

About this book, Kazim Ali writes: “In her essay A Poetics of Generosity: Strange Female Beasts/Chimeras from Outer Space poet Judith Johnson calls for a poetry of community that has “a total commitment to possibility, for which techniques or methods are simply different forms of lens” to share energy and creativity between the reader and the writer. In The Soft Place Kate Schapira commits herself to a human lyric–tender, fierce, feminist, funny. It is a book with many questions and a grand and kind intelligence with which–in a dozen different ways–to begin to answer them. Generosity is the guiding principle in these poems full of what Johnson calls for: “community, relationship, interactivity, and performance.”

Eleni Sikelianos writes: “In my mind, The Soft Place makes traces around what works to keep us together or keep us going: kindness, stitches (“this inner thing is mine”), seeds, family lines, and the symmetries and asymptotes therein. With intimacy and intelligence, Schapira reminds us of those mirrors (between us and us, us and others or lovers, us and the wound or the world) that sometimes hold together, sometimes shatter: “Nature doesn’t mirror us, but it senses us.” She holds the shards between pictures up to each other in reciprocity, responsiveness; that is to say, she holds it together.”

Want to make your pre-order? We’re just a bit less than $500 shy of our Kickstarter goal. Please help us make this beautiful and smart book, and get yourself a copy while you’re at it!

Oh, everybody! Guess what else we’re making for you this summer?! Forthcoming near summer’s end, an amazing chapbook called TRISM by amazing Rebecca Loudon. It is the best fairytale-but-not-a-fairytale you haven’t yet read. This, in addition to new chapbooks by Norma Cole and our own Michael Sikkema. And full-length books by Kate Schapira and Daniela Olszewska, the beautiful covers of which I hope to share with you soon.

If you want to submit your chapbook manuscript or full-length manuscript, or want to contribute to our Kickstarter project (only $500 left to go!), you’ve got about two weeks. If you want to send work for Horse Less Review #12, you’ve got a wee bit longer, until the end of May. Onward, y’all!

Thank you for contributing to our Kickstarter project! Here is your thank you haiku.

Richard Froude:

apricot vocals
over costumed shore story
hollowed for spare keys.

Kit Frick:

hypothetical
questions and ghost kingfishers
request late breakfast.

Caketrain:

your miraculous
beastie’s run out of peaches:
holler the roadsides.

Megan Williams:

rabbits with slingshots,
man-sized bubblewands say girl
whose accent is that?