Richard Loranger is the author of five books of poetry and short prose, including Unit of Agency, Be A Bough Tit, Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth,and The Orange Book, along with ten chapbooks in various genres. Since the early 1980’s, he has been running around the United States doing readings and performance art, as well as making visual art and music. He has lived in over a dozen cities and towns, and currently resides in Oakland, CA, where he is the founder of Poetea, a monthly literary conversation group, curates various readings and events, and clamors for community. Perhaps he’ll stop by your town soon.
Collapse Press is honored to release Richard Loranger’s latest collection of poetry, Unit of Agency, in October 2021.
The cover features a photo taken by Loranger of the Warden’s House on Alcatraz, with the East Bay in the distance and plants in the foreground- having pushed their way through the crumbling remains. These contrasts of new and old, growth and deterioration, life and death… past and present… are the first suggestions of the themes within. Loranger has combined both new and old pieces of poetry and prose, so the writer of each page has been a different writer, at different points. Like all writers who have been at this for many years, we see a changing world through changing eyes.
Loranger describes the project this way: “Unit of Agency is a collection of human struggles/protest culture/social justice/pissed off leftie poems and short prose pieces from the last few years along with some classics.”
The significance of the house in historical context should not be lost on the reader, we see the heart and hearth of the house where the Warden knew sanctuary in a place designed to contain the detached imprisoned without respite. The sea beyond the walls, the bay, constitutes a realm of possibilities that a Warden could take for granted surrounded by people who could not. One wonders how many inmates at Alcatraz viewed that same sea through the windows, the sea as barrier.
“I imagine that the sea, stretching away from the island, and the constant presence of the sea sounds would have been an inescapable reminder of the separation. Prison cuts ties with one’s life and loved ones, often the most important relationships are lost. The barriers, by design and intended to punish, can be a source of spiritual torture without reprieve from that anguish. Every night, the sea reminded them of their apartness. “
‘I think about the warden, the “master of the house” and island, in that house. Was it beautiful then? The flowers and vines persist, they have pushed to be in a place where they don’t belong. ” E. Lynn Alexander
About Unit of Agency:
RICH FERGUSON
I adore Richard Loranger’s poetry. His work travels deep within and out into the world,
spotlighting our connection/disconnection with the earth and our highest selves. Be it celebrating
nature or exposing the malice of MAGA America, Loranger places the human condition under
the poetic microscope and grapples with how to make peace with our alternately magic and
savage selves. He not only reveals a world where we are stuck between home and hard
places—such as sorrow, jealousy, and racism—but also shows us how poetry can transform
strife and oppression into a healing lyrical medicine.
- Rich Ferguson, State of CA Beat Poet Laureate (as selected by the
National Beat Poetry Foundation, 2020-2022)
HILARY BROWN
Unit of Agency is a gift of the tenderest rage, rage at its most righteous–against injustice, against
inequality, against homophobia, against colonization and gentrification, against the dying of the
light of humanity and human kindness. Through his poetry, Loranger reminds us that none of us
escapes this life innocent or unscathed. We are bruised and broken with blood on our hands, but
we are also together. It is not a bleak view. The riches that capitalism and greed have stolen from
us, Loranger gives back with poetry that is rich visually, auditorily, and, most of all, emotionally.
These works are both ammunition and imperative. This is poetry that matters.
- Hilary Brown, author of When She Woke She Was an Open Field
JAMES CAGNEY
Richard Loranger is a wry and inventive poet with a deft touch. His collection Unit of Agency
proves him a language alchemist revitalizing words and infusing them with blistering new
energy. “I don’t know what any of this means,” he writes. “Because this isn’t about meaning. It’s
about being. It’s about doing. It’s about living.”
- James Cagney, author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos
Theory, winner of the PEN Oakland 2019 Josephine Miles Award.
Blurbs for Unit of Agency 2
JUBA KALAMKA
Richard Loranger’s poetry is an exhilarating and dizzying bouillabaisse of seminal psychosexual
seriousness and silliness. He is optimally prime in his moment to moment transformation,
construction and deconstruction of what we might be, what we could and what we is. Unit of
Agency is a new pocket universe on every read and I look forward to every trip back.
- Juba Kalamka, author of Son Of Byford, member of “homohop” group Rainbow
Flava, co-founder/producer of Deep Dickollective (D/DC), and developer of the
micro-label Sugartruck Recordings
DENA ROD
Sharp and incisive, Unit of Agency cuts to the bone, echoing what’s always been present but
shifted to the shadows. Balancing irreverence with an unflinching eye, Loranger pens anthems
for the rebel hearted everyman and declarations against MAGA’s with bloody knuckles. Here is
where we find what guts are made of; grit and determination.
- Dena Rod, author Scattered Arils and swallow a beginning
