Horse Less Press

Our chapbook editors have finished selecting chapbooks for 2016! Our final chapbook of the year will be Anna Gurton-Wachter’s Blank Blank Blues. Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. She has written the chapbooks Blank Blank Blues (forthcoming, Horse Less Press, 2016) and CYRUS (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014). Her writing has also appeared in Elderly, No, Dear, The Organism for Poetic Research, Publication Studio, The Boog City Reader and more. She is the co-editor of DoubleCross Press with MC Hyland and works full time as the archivist for The Keith Haring Foundation. She currently lives in Sunset Park where she parks her sunset.

Today at O P E N: A Re-Inter-View of Hiromi Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Abby Hagler. 

We are so excited to say we’ve added three chapbooks to our 2016 line-up: GIRL TRAMP by Cynthia Spencer, ALUMINUM NECROPOLIS by Nichole Goff, and MISSING SLIDES by Stephen Danos.

Cynthia Spencer lives in Olympia, WA where she is studying text and media arts at The Evergreen State College. She has written three other chapbooks as well as the hypertext &c&c&c&c&c&c&c&c&c with Zoe Addison and the collection of math poems There Exists… with Chelsea Tadeyeske. She was a founding organizer of the Midwest Small Press Festival and the Cloudburst Reading Series in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has appeared mostly hand-stitched and stapled.

Nichole Riggs is an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame where she studies poetry and teaches creative writing. She currently holds an editorial position with Action Books, and periodically works with Spork Press. She has poetry published most recently in Quaint Magazine, on entropymag.com, and has poetry forthcoming in THE FEM Online Literary Magazine and Witch Craft Magazine. Nichole grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Some of her other interests include pie-making, book-making, dance, and performance.

Stephen Danos ​is author of DO NOT WANT (alice blue books, 2015) and Playhouse State (H_NGM_N Books, 2012). His poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, NOÖ Journal, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, and other places. He is Editor in Chief of Pinwheel, an online journal of poetry and art. He co-curates The Monorail Reading Series and lives in Seattle.

New to our catalog this week: Kate Schapira’s full-length book HANDBOOK FOR HANDS THAT ALTER AS WE HOLD THEM OUT and Cassandra de Alba’s chapbook habitats. 

Cassandra de Alba’s work has appeared in Tinderbox, Illuminati Girl Gang, Ilk, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and Best Indie Lit New England, among other publications. She graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in poetry and history and holds a dual masters in history and archival science from Simmons College. A three-time National Poetry Slam competitor and associated editor for Pizza Pi Press, she lives in Medford, MA.

Kate Schapira  is the author of four other books of poetry: The Soft Place (also with Horse Less Press), How We Saved the City (Stockport Flats), The Bounty: Four Addresses (Noemi Press) and TOWN (Factory School/Heretical Texts). Her 11th chapbook, Someone Is Here, appeared in 2015 from Projective Industries. She lives in Providence, RI, where she teaches at Brown University and for Frequency Writers, runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series, and sometimes offers Climate Anxiety Counseling.

Of Schapira’s Handbook for Hands…, Lo Kwa Mei-En writes, “What have I given in the service of systemic denial? And what strange growth might I undergo if I choose to maintain, instead, an awareness of reality, with its fractured, fractal manifestations like spores in every mouthful of breath, of food, of outcry? “Have we seen us?” These are some of the questions Kate Schapira asks with Handbook for Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out, a collection of poems whose speakers alternately call us towards the dream witch city (a poetic system of grief and resistance) and instruct us to confront and name the plastic-woven roots amassed beneath the throbbing spread of human civilization. Schapira’s poems insistently reflect the terms of power back to the sky, back to the dead—who demand of us, “While you have them, adjust your eyes”—back to the reader, with angular, physical verse that builds up a cerebral, critical mass of conflict and feeling. This book situated me as a reader in the nexus of “feeling like something living off light and death, not life” and “growing the moment.” I am grateful for how these poems inhabit strange, new ways of being in a painfully familiar world.”

You can order Kate Schapira’s Handbook for Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out for $15,

and you can order Cassandra de Alba’s chapbook habitats for $8.

OR, order them both for $20! 

New today at HLR: “Early Symptoms” by Momina Mela! 

my mother’s inflamed tailbone is not a metaphor for a bird stuck

in the convex of a sailing blueshift a sacral curvature I diffuse with my

menthol hands but rather a prodding quirk in the homes I house

(read more) 

Horse Less Press is so excited to have press tables at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair on April 9-10 and the New Orleans Poetry Festival April 15-17. The NOPF will also feature a reading by Horse Less authors Kristi Maxwell, Phil Estes, and Lisa Cattrone. Hooray!

New today at Horse Less Review: two poems by Juliet Cook and j/j hastain! 

New today at O P E N, Cheryl Hopson reviews Jane Olmsted’s Seeking the Other Side. 

Today at Horse Less Review, “Without You I Am” by Natasha Kochicheril Moni!

New today at HLR: “Ghost & Thief” by Emily Paige Wilson!

Rising for work, the ghost placed his breakfast dish in the sink. “Tuesdays,” said the ghost, “are the best days for confession.” The ghost said this to the thief but stared past the window, past his pollen-coated car. (read more)