We will be hosting an event in the crawl this year on Saturday, July 27, 2024 in Leg 2. Please see our Collapse Press IG posts and event on Facebook (Events, Collapse Press Page) Paul Corman-Roberts will MC, with poets LaMar Mitchell, Heather Flescher, Han Raschka, E. Lynn Alexander, and Lee Foust.
We are excited to be part of the annual Beast Lit Crawl, in Oakland. If you are looking for the latest in fest events, please check out the Beast Lit Crawl website and SM at www.beastcrawl.org. We have a lot of event information shared on our pages as well and you can reach out if needed, Collapse Press IG. We have been a part of this festival in some way since it started, with Paul as a founding organizer. I have been coming out most years since year one, curating events for various small presses including our current- Collapse Press. The festival has changed over the years, with different organizers and curating presses, organizations, and series hosts. Many of the core organizers are still involved and the group have pressed on despite the challenges of covid. This has become an annual gathering and meet up of writers from all over the country, about much more than a festival and celebration- it is a community. (Photos- Previous Beasting in the Bay) This year, we have the “unofficial kickoff” reading on 7/25 at Oakland’s First Edition upstairs stage, a great outdoor space to meet up. There are readings from there, spanning Friday evening until the after party on Saturday night. Collapse Press will be hosting another BEASTS OF THE APOCALYPSE in Leg 2 at The Good Hop at 2421 Telegraph Avenue Oakland from 5:30-6:30. Paul will be the MC, with featured poets Heather Flescher, Han Raschka, E. Lynn Alexander, LaMar Mitchell, and Lee Foust. Our “sibling press” Naked Bulb will be at the same venue, in Leg 3 from 7:00-8:00. Missy Church will be hosting with featured poets G. Macias Gusman, Gary Turchin, Rhea Melina, and Andrew Thomas. We will have bios and more on our Facebook page and Instagram, and of…
Please join us in celebrating the long awaited release of Taneesh Kaur’s first full length poetry collection, “Thawing: A Poetic Memoir”. An in person launch event was held recently in California and a virtual launch will be hosted by Collapse Press on Friday, June 14, 2024. Event information is available on our Facebook and Instagram pages. You can purchase this book directly from the author or from Collapse Press, information here with options. Details: Cover Price: $20.00 ISBN: 978-1-7352669-9-2 About Taneesh Kaur Taneesh Kaur is a US-born Punjabi teaching artist based in San Francisco, a social justice advocate who uses nature to understand and dismantle systems of mental and physical oppression. Her visual art has been shown in galleries in the Bay and SoCal, and has received praise from the international Luxembourg Art Prize 2023. Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies, most recently in Narrative Northeast. Taneesh has a Master’s in linguistics from San Francisco State University with training abroad in Mexico and Chile. She is currently in the MFA program for poetry at University of San Francisco. More of her work can be found in English and Spanish at www.TaneeshCantos.com
Letters for the End Times, Vol. 1 came out in July 2023 from Collapse Press. It is currently available through us or here. This anthology, the first produced by Collapse, assembles the work of a diverse range of poets exploring the challenges of a society under stress. Coming out of a pandemic with environmental, economic, and natural crises and uncertainties about futures and fates these writers contributed poetry that speaks to these concerns in their own ways. Edited by Paul Corman-Roberts and E. Lynn Alexander, this volume features: Rich Ferguson, Juba Kalamka, Han Raschka, K.R. Morrison, Westley Heine, Ed Canavan, Dee Allen, Norm Mattox, and Missy Church. We will be working on volume 2, to be released a year later in July 2024.
The Friday Collapse reading series is back after summer hiatus. We are in the middle of year three of this monthly series, with a break in July for travel and in-person events. We had a special edition of the show with the contributors to the anthology, released in July 2023. (See previous posts for more on that) You can check out that show and all of the others archived on our facebook page at Collapse Press, because we do livestream them to that platform. The next Friday Collapse will be special for us because we will be featuring long time friend of the press Nathan Tompkins and Heather Flescher – who we got to know in Oakland this summer. We also have open mic spots, subject to availability. We usually post an event on Facebook (check events on the Collapse Press page) and have information about signing up for the open mic for those who want to reserve ahead. Hosted by Paul Corman-Roberts and E. Lynn Alexander. Zoom platform/FB live. The Friday Collapse featuring Nathan Tompkins and Heather Flescher will be on Friday, October 27, 2023 at 9:30 PM EST, 6:30 PST.
October 21, 2023 at 6:00 PM. International Fusionism MUseum, 107 N. 4th Street in Easton. Art, Poetry, and Festival Reception at the International Fusionism Museum. Join the Unbearables Poetry Collective and Collapse Press [East] for an evening of community. Hosted by Ron Kolm, Arthur Kaye, and E. Lynn Alexander. The Unbearables Collective are a confederation of poets and writers who came of age in the 1980’s and 90’s New York, infamous for their high minded aesthetics and low barroom manners. Collapse Press is an independent publisher and producer of events on both the East coast locally and the West coast in the bay area with a focus on writing that speaks to the challenges of our times; the goal of Collapse Press is to create space and amplify voices that refuse to be silenced. The Easton Book Festival has an online program with all of the events and descriptions, at www.eastonbookfestival.com or here.
Collapse Press [East] will have a table and reading slots at the Easton Book Festival Author and Small Press Expo on Sunday, October 22, 2023 at the Easton Public Market. There will be books, authors, zines, performances, and more for a full day of activities. Collapse will feature poets Bryan Franco and Ann Michael joining E. Lynn Alexander at the expo. Bryan and Ann will be reading in the Collapse slots. Copies of some of the Collapse titles will be available, including the new anthology “Letters for the End Times”. Find the full schedule of events at www.eastonbookfestival.com or here.
We finally released the first anthology, “Letters for the End Times” (vol 1) in July 2023. We had a great event in Oakland, and recently hosted a virtual reading for contributors in September. This anthology is available now, either through us directly or here. The recording archive of the reading is on our facebook page from the livestream, at Collapse Press. Edited by Paul Corman-Roberts and E. Lynn Alexander, this anthology is a curated collection of diverse voices and perspectives reflecting the challenging times we are living in and facing together. Climate change, disasters, war, greed, profiteering, exploitation, destruction, depletion… How do we find places of hope, joy, power? Community? Thank you to our contributors: Juba Kalamka, Missy Church, Norm Mattox, Han Raschka, Dee Allen, Westley Heine, K.R. Morrison, Edward Canavan, Youssef Alaoui, and Rich Ferguson.
The first volume of the Letters for The End Times Anthology is here, and we are doing a launch party event on Friday, July 21 in Oakland. You can order this book online here. You can also get it at an upcoming event or from us directly, just reach out. We will try to make it easy! The launch event will be at the Oakland Photo Workshop and we will have information on our FB and Instagram pages.
We are honored to be curating at this year’s Beast Crawl in Oakland, CA on July 22, 2023. We have participated in some form each year since the beginning (Full of Crow, Kiss This Missile, Red Crow, Audrey’s Coffee, etc.) and this is a community building event that is dear to our hearts. Our event this year will be Leg 3 at Oaklandish. We have posted information on Facebook and Instagram and the details are also on the Beast Crawl website here. For this year’s 2023 information, here. Below is our event listing with performers and bios: COLLAPSE PRESS: BEASTS OF THE APOCALYPSE Collapse Press is a small literary publisher specializing in poetry and prose by authors, established and new, whose work addresses the current social atmosphere of a society in turmoil and on the verge of transformation. Hey everyone, let’s shudder together! Armageddon’s a comin’ and Collapse Press has got the writers and poets to make it all go down easier. Or harder. Or whatever you want. Because it doesn’t matter! Join us as Juba Kalamka, Richard Loranger, Missy Church, Taneesh Kaur, The Propaganda Poet and Lynn Alexander ride roughshod over the terrain of the End Times. Performers: Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer and all-around squeaky wheel currently residing in Oakland. His upcoming collection of poetry and flash prose, Mammal, is due out from Roof Books in the fall of 2023. You can find more about his work and scandals at his website. E. Lynn Alexander is a poet, artist, and zine/book maker. She cohosts The Friday Collapse and the Lehigh Valley Poetry Virtual Salon and Open Mic. Her recent books include Find Me In The Iris (Collapse Press) and The Shouldspeak Disease, published by Naked Bulb Press, exploring themes of shame language. Website here. Taneesh Kaur is a teaching artist of East Indian descent based in San Francisco, a social justice advocate who uses nature to…
Collapse Press and Paper Press have teamed up for a live (in person!) poetry event in Oakland on Thursday, July 20, 2023. “Identity Crisis” involves the pairing of poets to read each other’s work, in rapid rounds. Organizers Paul Corman Roberts and Youssef Alaoui have done this format before and have revived it as a collaborative venture. Reading for this event will be Richard Loranger, Missy Church, Youssef Alaoui, K.R. Morrison, William Taylor Jr. Joel Landmine, E. Lynn Alexander, and Paul Corman Roberts. Music by Tuz. This event will be held at First Edition in Oakland, at 1915 Broadway. 7:00 PM. We have an event page on Facebook (Collapse Press–> Events tab) and information is always posted on our Instagram account.
We are happy to announce that “Four Crescents” is now available, by poet Norm Mattox. We hosted an amazing virtual launch in June 2023, and if you missed it you can check out the archived video of the Facebook livestream on our page. You can purchase the book here, or reach out to the author or to us. We will make sure that you can get a copy! Norm Mattox is a poet, returning to New York, after raising a family, and “growing up” in San Francisco for over 30 years. He served as a bilingual educator in the public school system of San Francisco Unified School District. Though retired, Norm is a teacher (‘maestro’ in Spanish) for life. His next journey for teaching and learning is through the voices in his poetry that tell a story of love in a time of struggle and challenge. Norm has shared his poetry as a featured reader and at open mics around the San Francisco Bay Area, select venues in New York City and other parts of the world across the ‘zoom universe’. Norm’s poetry has been published in two chapbooks. his first collection is titled, Get Home Safe, Poems for Crossing the Community Grid. Norm’s second chapbook length collection, Black Calculus, was published in 2021 by Nomadic Press. “In his follow up to Black Calculus, MATHMattox takes readers on a journey of beautifulepiphanies and gruesome truths, painted with masterful wordplay where his pen becomeshis Saber. In these pages, MATH invites readers to step into his vast imagination to seelife, days, nights and words in new and refreshing ways. Tackling issues that rest on tongues of revolutionaries and conspiracy theorists alike,these pages are filled with clarity, honesty and color from the purest palette. From “Heartof Illusions,” filled with a treasure of emotions, to the stunning ekphrastic “CottonBowl,” readers are…
Collapse Press will be joining more than fifteen east coast poets and presses for POETPALOOZA, on April 15th at Barnes and Noble bookstore. This gathering will include readings, signings, and a workshop. This will involve a range of poetry styles and perspectives and provide an opportunity for attendees to purchase books, some are already on the shelves there.
We have had a busy Summer/Fall season for The Friday Collapse, our virtual monthly poetry series that takes place on the last Friday of each month. We usually take a brief break for November and December and come back in January. We will do this again this year, with a few other scheduled events like book launches and readings outside of the Friday Collapse schedule. We will host a virtual book launch reading for Han Raschka this month on November 11. (see previous posts) Collapse Press participated in a book festival this month on the East Coast with author events and book sale opportunities. We have a few other opportunities coming up as well, and will be sharing as usual on social media/pages. @collapsepress #collapsepress #thefridaycollapse We have had a few discussions in our facebook group (Letters for the End Times) about the possibility of an anthology, with proceeds going to a particular cause that is important to the community. We are still thinking about a timeline for that, and what that process will look like. Please look for some more specifics here on our website around February-March 2023. Of course, we are an independent press and in addition to the organizing, events, and table opportunities, we produce books. We are pretty clear on our mission with that effort and the goal has been to seek out authors without the pressure of quantity and catalog building. It is a community effort, and as many of you know it is not the most lucrative work financially and the hours of time don’t translate into a sustainable business model. We do what we can when we are able, and it is important to us that we are able to give our time and energy to the manuscripts that we are committed to….
Splinters, the debut poetry collection by poet Han Raschka, is out now from Collapse Press. A virtual launch event with featured poets will be hosted on Friday, November 11, 2022. You can look under events on the Collapse Press facebook page for details. Joining Han for the virtual launch will be poets K.R. Morrison, Kelliane Parker, Norm Mattox, Richard Loranger, and Paul Corman-Roberts. The book is available on Amazon here. The ISBN is 978-1-7352669-4-7. $20.00 US.
Please join us at Collapse Press for a special virtual poetry event to launch the release of “Splinters”, by Han Raschka. We are scheduled to release this title on September 23, 2022. Please check out the Collapse Press Facebook page for the event to RSVP and share. (Thank you!) Han will be reading from their new book of poetry and will be joined by additional featured poets to celebrate. We will be adding more details about the features and their bios soon.
We are thrilled to share that we are on track to release our next title- “Splinters” by poet Han Raschka. If you have not encountered them before, please check out the book launch in September 2022 and see what some in our community had to say after some background on Han: Han Raschka (they/them), is a bipolar, bicoastal, non-binary poet currently residing in Boston, MA. Born in the Midwest and forged by both the arts and an unhealthy dose of Catholic fear, Han spends their time drinking coffee at an unacceptable time, begging their mother for pictures of their three dogs, and writing poetry like it hasn’t gone out of fashion. You can find Han on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. Their work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, Brooklyn Poets and the Lake County Bloom. Splinters is Han’s first collection of poetry. “writing poetry is a lifesaving, life affirming ‘super power’ that acknowledges trauma, sees the multiple deaths that are in store with the clearest vision, and the voice of love that heals the broken heart and the broken mind.” “in han raschka’s collection of poems, splinters, the voices that have the most volume, in the front of our minds, fill the silence with horrorful words and things that should never be spoken as truth. raschka writes poetry in the voices of their tormentors. they are a captive audience to the replay and echo of trauma in memorized detail.” “describing the inner battles to breathe one more breath, we are granted light and peace when their voice speaks a whisper of a lover’s glance, and the promise of love they will live for.” -norm mattox, author of Black Calculus (Nomadic) and the forthcoming Get Home Safe: poems for crossing the community grid “A poem, a prayer,…
Richard Loranger, author of multiple books including “Unit of Agency” available here at Collapse Press, wrote a thoughtful piece on “Find Me in the Iris” (Collapse Press) this month. Please visit www.richardloranger.com when you can and check back often. Richard comments on all kinds of topics over there, from books he is reading, books he has written, art, and more. Check out Non-Norm Part 1 and hear about Richard and others in Maintenant. His posts makes us want to buy even more books! From Richard Loranger, poet: Find Me in the Iris, E. Lynn Alexander (Collapse Press, Alameda, CA), 2022 Bottles. Corked. And Closed.Women. Mothers.SuspendedIn their AgesSelves, the slurry sedimentTheir labels going brown. E. Lynn Alexander’s work performs an interesting dichotomy by pushing you almost clinically away from its topic while stabbing you in the heart. The topic, as parsed above: women, enacted alternately as specimens in jars and as “Honey. Wheat. And Figs.” Alexander takes on the essential and difficult task of examining the lives and strife of women past, including her mother’s and, we gather, her own. In doing so, she and the work strive to understand the past in a way tangible enough to be used as a springboard to a future undetermined and a place not yet seen. We are spurred on by the line repeated throughout, “What will the grief of me teach you?” As the title suggests, Find Me in the Iris is in part a quest—to break through grief, to let the dead rest, to break out of precedent, to let the honey be the honey. There’s a lot going on here in compelling language that wavers between rant and chant, but one of the things that struck me most was the book’s “form”. Posed as a series of poems that are a series of…
We have added book shelves on Bookshop, which is a website that provides an online platform for purchasing books while also supporting local, independent book stores who get a portion of sales. We have a shelf set up to help you find Collapse Press books as they come out and can be added, and a growing list of books by writers in our community so it is easy to find books mentioned on our shows, events, etc. If you have ever listened to a poet read at an event and looked for their book, you know that it isn’t always as easy to find titles as it should be. Maybe you forgot the name of the book, but would know it if you saw it. Maybe you didn’t know the writer had a book but might stumble upon it in the list… This might be a helpful place to browse. It is a new platform for us, so we figured it can’t hurt to set up a few lists while supporting independent local stores with the ease of online shopping and shipping. When possible, we always encourage people to support writers, presses, and independent book sellers directly. If you can’t, this might be an alternative. It goes without saying that no matter how you obtain a book, it is hopefully supporting that writer and press in some way. Here is the link to check it out: here ( https://bookshop.org/shop/collapsepress ) We also recommend the Bookshop page of Karen’s Book Row, which has great curated shelves with books connected to particular topics. If you are looking to browse, definitely check out her lists. Karen’s Book Row on Bookshop here.
Please join us for a virtual launch reading on Friday, July 1, 2022 for Find Me in the Iris, by E. Lynn Alexander. This event will be hosted on zoom and streamed/archived on the Collapse Press Facebook page. This reading will feature poets K.R. Morrison, Taneesh Kaur, Chansonette Buck, Karen Lillis, and E. Lynn Alexander. Please see the Facebook/Instagram posts for more details and links. This is the second book of poetry by E. Lynn Alexander, from Collapse Press. In Find Me in the Iris, she continues to explore the themes of The Shouldspeak Disease on the language of shame and internalized expectations, conditioning, regulating norms and binaries as effacing and modern measurements that are increasingly toxic to both individual and nature. The destructive relationships between reduction and disrespect vs honoring and co-validity have modern consequences. Increasingly disconnected from a silenced but ancient maternal psyche, the modern contrasts of hierarchy and individualism pull us away from our roots and exploring the natural, mystical, and spiritual can be restorative acts of reclaiming. “Mother” in this case is origin, generational and collective, where a consciousness of legacies tapped affirms the past and honors the future. The state of the world is in front of us. Why are we destroying everything at such an alarming rate, turning the corner on so much that is irreversible? Our path is one that rewards extremes: self centered, immediate and empty gratification, consumption, competition, exhibitionism, self interest. To commune and cooperate is to be “weak”, to share knowledge is to lose “advantage”. Where shame is the tool, coerced participation is the result. The desire to diminish and destroy pushes us to channel our energies defensively and we are depleted. We feel hopeless and powerless because we are surrounded by that message. But it was not the message of our mothers. “In…
