Bücher veröffentlicht von Vegetarian Alcoholic Press

This world is still the only one we have. V.C. Myers understands that humanity's confidence will be its downfall, but that doesn't stop the poems in this book from celebrating all the wonder we've yet to lose. In reverant elegy, these pages exalt a dying planet casting its last coins to the well."Myers' poems are timely in their depiction of Appalachia's environmental devastation, and she writes movingly about hard times, past and present, of the region's inhabitants, but she also shows us beauty too, not only in her evocations of nature but, even more impressively, in the beauty of her language."-Ron Rash, Poet and Author of 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall

"Steven Karl's I HRT the Cult Years critiques and embodies the cult leader at the center of the book who, in turn, critiques and embodies the American society that bred him. The overflowing and excessive ritual and repetition enacted throughout these poems build out a vision of what Svetlana Boym called "restorative nostalgia" - an alluring and fatal vision."-Dan Magers, author of Party Knife

"In Splash Fields, Joseph Cooper picks up where James Tate left off in such books as Memoir of the Hawk and The Government Lake. Like Tate, Cooper creates a memorable wacky ¿rst-person narrator, a ¿aneur of sorts, wandering an imaginary landscape peopled with odd unpredictable characters-a landscape where just about anything can happen. Splash Fields is satire at its best, all delivered in a deadpan voice with pitch perfect dialogue between his characters, so that you never question the reality of this Cooperesque world-one which I am beginning to think may be more sane and entertaining than the supposed real one we currently occupy."-Peter Johnson

Ingenious and original in its execution, Riverine is a collection of short shorts that is richly imagined and compelling. In twenty-five vibrant pieces, ¿ukasz Drobnik shows us a vision of ourselves that remains with us long after they are finished. Whether it is about what Neptunes could hold or the death of a pregnant sperm whale to an endless loop of life and simulations within a heart, the characters in these restrained spaces crackle with light and self-awareness, and about what makes life a murky and joyful ride.Tara Isabel Zambrano, author of Death, Desire, and Other Destinations

The selected writings of Milwaukee's favorite drafting prompt, as read every Thursday at Nessun Dorma by Freddy La Force and chosen by majority rule.

"This book is as good as one of my acting roles. I like my characters like I like my cannoli. Hard exterior but filled with sweet, soft, and sometimes nutty, insides." - the ghost of Gina Lollobrigida

There is a city that hovers above the Lost Continent, and it is called the Floating City. It rests high enough that travel between the two requires the use of airships. The buildings are constructed of an unidentifiable stone, which some speculate was brought there during the rather ambiguous Age of Queens. The roads are cobbled and peppered with whimsically formed steel street lamps. What lights the lamps could be magic. It could be alchemy. Only the residents are sure.

David's work focuses on the decay of America. It's empty buildings, lost loves, and wistful memories conjure images filled with hope, fondness, and empathy. These prose poems and sharp images tell personal stories that go straight to the gut.

Ethereal, ephemeral, and utterly macabre, Denise Jarrott's poetry examines the less illuminated nuances of sexuality and animal instinct, conjuring a nymph who defies the myth of object and acts as a guide.

"Oh (Jane) it's no surprise / but no man ever taught me // to like the world / or to like myself in it" writes Mikey Swanberg on the 26th page of this, his book-length elegy for Jane Gentry Vance, a quiet poet from Kentucky now gone five years, who maybe you knew and maybe you didn't, and it couldn't matter less because Good Grief is also, somehow, an elegy for young love's fantasies, and for the boys we make of our men, for age and also for living itself-how readily we give up on beauty, on full feeling, on delight, how thoughtlessly we forget our mothers, our teachers, and then soon the student still breathing inside each of us, no matter how old we are or accomplished or sad or cowardly, because life is for the living and living means learning and goddamnit we don't have time to worry if that is a cliché. Good Grief is a triumph. Buy a copy for everyone who has ever taught you something and start with yourself." - Rebecca Gayle Howell

the detail collector is a creative practice in the form of a blog where franciszka voeltz posts 1-10 details from the day nearly every day. in celebration of Vegetarian Alcoholic Press's fifth anniversary (which lands on August 8th), this chapbook is a collection of all the detail collector's August 8ths. the detail collector is also a person named franciszka voeltz who writes poems to go on a portable typewriter for magnificent strangers and facilitates community writing events and workshops and serves as a faculty member at Thoreau College in Viroqua, Wisconsin. more at franciszkavoeltz.com

Welcome to my archive of freaky recalls and plaints for the dust age. I wrote this thing--this dossier on the collapse--in ninety movements, building an unreasonable monument to the pleasure of giving up and the fallibility of memory. An instruction manual for an overburdened life, Alms for the Bored is to be held restlessly, read partially, and forgotten in time. Its cover will turn black from the grease of your hands. Its six sections are exercises in total fucking instability, embracing cacophony as a virus and chaos studies in lieu of academia. It's the non-answer to whether or not we need poetry or if it needs us. It's useless questions come undone, all of them.•Sam Pekarske, 2018

213 Days Post Regina. The Collector cannot even find the palace. It has burned. So much of the Floating City has burned. Blood is still being scrubbed off the stone streets. Windows are knocked out of shops. Down an alley, something small. A child, probably, scuttling into the shadows at the sight of the Collector. In the distance, bells. There is a festival in the bazaar. Hundreds of bells are ringing. Large bells. Small bells. Shops have put bells on their doors. The people are wearing bells on their ankles and wrists. There is dancing, shouting, laughing. The people are drinking wine and aged liquor. The women have made an ale flavored with gruit. The Collector makes their way through the crowds. Somebody puts a clay mug filled with the ale in their hands. The Collector drinks. It tastes floral, and a little like oranges. Finally, the Collector stands within view of a stage. On the stage, a wax woman wearing a red dress is carried out by two upright clockworks with heads like bulls. They place her neck on a chopping block. A third bull clockwork raises a gleaming axe and brings it down on her soft neck. Her head rolls. The people cheer, thunderous.The Collector drinks.

Growing up & puberty & body image & sexuality & definitive adolescent moments create a vivid, evocavotive narrative concerning how we come to know and be ourselves. Deglane's unapologetic poetic memoir unfolds a story of feminist triumph that fodder empathy and inspiration.

Kristin plays with words in a way that suggest she might be playing with life. Sometimes dark, always strange, and often funny, somniee stands out as a comprehensive collection by a fascinating wit.

The Mother Wart is a book of prose poems loosely based around the tenets of the Church of Euthanasia, whose only commandment--for both ethical and practical reasons--is "thou shalt not breed." Looking beyond the movement's environmental and social goals, The Mother Wart delves into an autobiographical meditation on early memories and associations with motherhood, childbirth, infancy, and female sexuality, emphasizing the importance of early childhood trauma in the decision to abstain from having children of one's own. In its thick fog of sound play, close-set cycles of internal rhyme evoke a nursery rhyme starting to spin off-kilter, a grade-school chant turned violent and unpredictable. This is the version of the fairy tale in which the witch wins. But here, the witch is also mother, the origins of life transformed into a sign of virus (the wart). The grotesque, therefore, figures heavily throughout these poems, especially in the sense of Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque, which points out the pregnant female body constitutes the epitome of the human form as a site of volatile and irrepressible change--traversing that rare region between revulsion and attraction, in which the two at last appear not so opposed after all, but rather the respective poles of a dividing line that in fact comes full circle if followed far and fearlessly enough.

Al Russell is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. She is a poetry editor at Outlook Springs literary journal. She is also an ordained minister of the Church of the Subgenius. She lives in North Carolina.

"Carly Inghram's 'Sometimes the Blue Trees' unflinchingly describes the violence people commit against each other and against themselves. This violence may be literal or symbolic, and race is frequently its motivator: "The role of a poet is to represent some truth. / When I forget the truth, I might refer to any number / of dangling bodies I've encountered to my left or right." Self-aware, conflicted, funny, and always imaginative, Sometimes the Blue Trees speaks Inghram's unique experience as well as a larger, shared history that can't continue to shed so much blood. These poems are part of a healing." -Alan Gilbert, editor at BOMB

Nuclear annihilation, chemical longing, human pollination, city banter, and fast food fuse to create glimpses of friendship, love lost and found, and the unraveling of american pre-dispositions. Qualles finds the ether lingering above life and pulls herself into it to draw us a map.

"Your Person Doesn't Belong To You is a transformative work, immersed in the intermittence, light, and expansion of character as embodied and voiced by Jeanne d'Arc - who here is a composite of historical figure, main character from Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and manifestation of Isabel Sobral Campos' skillful and compassionate handle on poetic material. Campos uses a poly-vocal mode of address, a fluid array of changing forms, and an attentiveness to the overlaps and contrasts between relative time and absolute time in order to read and explore the inward movements of consciousness in states of visionary duress. Alchemical in its commitment to giving sonic shape to the near imperceptible, Your Person Doesn't Belong To You is mesmerizing, moving, and strange." - Anselm Berrigan

Chloe N. Clark's Your Strange Fortune is our good fortune. This debut volume of rare sympathy and imagination leaps easily from myths to monsters, ghosts to zombies, fairy tales to the Apocalypse that, for this poet and so many today, is "just/the fact of life." Clark's inventive, unforgettable voice ranges widely- from up-to-the-moment poems like "Googolplex," in which curiosity becomes dark compulsion, to the far future when museums feature the relics of our own time: "the things we could not bear/to leave behind us:/ pieces of highways, signs/ …one single spike from Lady/ Liberty's crown." Clark understands that time speeds forward and that myth and popular culture are close kin that offer the songs of ghosts who once were us, "the ones who/ had such beautiful voices but only when/ they thought no one was listening." Like the poet's "clockwork nightingale" whose song is both dystopian and beautiful, Chloe Clark's voice rises above the usual din to bring us a debut volume that is rich with unsettling questions but always unflinchingly alive.--Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots and 3 Nights of the Perseids

This is a collection of poetry about change, and the passage of time and how no matter how hard you try, there is just no way to stop it. For me, writing has been a way to try to briefly stop time, to capture as much of what's going on around me and what's happening to me as possible. While I've never been much for photography, I have always been one for writing, and this collection is a book of snapshots of things I don't want to forget.

"A clever, postmodern take on logic exploring love. This collection of poems is experimental yet cohesive in nature. A read-before-you-die series of words that undulates on the page."-Kelly Sexton

Jianna believes in gaining collective insights through pain and wishes to promote active conversations on depression. This work is both a study of loss and a celebration of life, finding inspiration beneath expansive adversity.

Orooj-e-Zafar is heavily in love with life, though it's clear that often times life is a bad lover. Their depictions of nature, relationships, family, and survival will leave you believing any of us can make it despite the odds.