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Thawing, by Taneesh Kaur, Book Release

Thawing: A Poetic Memoir by Taneesh Kaur

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

cover of the anthology Letters for the End Times, edited by Paul Corman-roberts and E. Lynn Alexander. Collapse Press.

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.

Collapse Press Anthology: Letters for the End Times Vol 1

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.

LFTET Vol 1 Anthology Launch Event! Oakland

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.

Release of “Four Crescents” by Norm Mattox

Cover of the poetry book "Four Crescents", by Norm Mattox

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…

“Splinters”, by Han Raschka, Release

Purchase Splinters Poetry by Han Raschka

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.

Coming Soon: “Splinters” from Collapse

Cover of the poetry book Splinters, by Han Raschka

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 on “Find Me in the Iris”

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…

Collapse Press on Bookshop

Collapse Press Books and More on Bookshop

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.

“Deathaiku” by Missy Church- Out Now!

Collapse Press is pleased to announce the release of “Deathaiku”, by poet Missy Church.
“It takes the spirit of a death doula and the soulfulness of her carefully enlisted imagery to capture the dichotomous dance that is life and death, shadow and light. In DEATHAIKU, Missy Church divulges the seasons of the departed, the “eyes of death’s final cold sigh” while syllables later, she signals a sun that “rises soft,” breath of a baby and an ancestor within the Law of Three – so appropriately held in haiku structure.
In an era where more than ever, death seems to have the last word, Church bears a lantern for every reader wandering the veil, with eloquent yet humble diction that respects grief and loss while making room for new life, for the living who harbor light in the memory. DEATHAIKU is a necessary read for anyone who values a cycle we cannot escape.”
– K.R. Morrison, poet and educator, author of Cauldrons

Category: Collapse Press Books