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…
