We are excited to announce the release of Unit of Agency, by poet Richard Loranger. Please keep on eye on the Collapse Press FB page and Instagram for details on readings.
Richard will be a featured reader at the special “book release” edition of The Friday Collapse on October 29, virtual on zoom at 6:30 PST, 9:30 EST. Joining Richard will be Mimi Gonzalez-Barillas. Open mic to follow, event on the Collapse Press Facebook page.
There will an in-person reading in Oakland on Saturday November 6 at Mosswood Park in Oakland. On November 13, there will be a virtual launch party with featured poets. Many of the readers have blurbs in the new book or have contributed to the project.
We will be adding the details to this website soon on ordering the book and distribution options. You can also reach out to the author or the press. More to come soon. Here is the page on his website to find out more.
“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
Unit of Agency is a full-length collection of poems by Richard Loranger, one of his generation’s premiere cutting edge performance poets, an artist who writes for both the stage and the page with equal ambition. In this collection, Loranger brings his considerable experience as an activist, organizer, and provocateur to bear on the effects of Late Capitalism on communities and culture; the divisiveness of the American political circus; the dis-ease of finding our attention occupied by nationalism, racism, and hatred; and the value of shifting perspectives as an approach to optimism and action.
Cover photo: “Warden’s House at Alcatraz, 2015” by Richard Loranger
Release Date: October 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7352669-1-6
Paperback. $20
Cover design by E. Lynn Alexander
Unit of Agency
Collapse Press, 2021
Richard Loranger’s poetry embraces the mammalian condition in all its contradictions, dangers, and beauty. Despite the rampant sublimity of his verse, it’s implicitly political. The imploration that “we have to become human” recognizes a moral imperative for resistance, actively confronting a sociopolitical infrastructure explicitly designed to alienate us from our communities and ultimately ourselves, detach us from our responsibilities, become consumerist screens, dissociatively labile.
Loranger prescribes no concrete answers but architects ramshackle systems of thought through which to jostle and unhorse our indolent prejudices, reach out for something more, find the materials to start building.
Late capitalism consumes so much energy but generates no light, only heat. A leader that cares about their nation is a Whitmanesque fantasy. Corporations are both immortal and granted legal rights of personhood. Bureaucratic systems of service provision are suffused in the language of surveillance. Capitalism is “eating itself from the inside” without the awareness that, like a virus, it is destroying its host. Amidst this dangerous circus, the poet is “daggered and sliced” by an absurd reality but remains undefeated. Perhaps these poems find Loranger at his most cynical, yet he can’t surrender the drive for healing.
— excerpts from the introduction by Lonely Christopher
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
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)
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
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.
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
