Ahsahta Press

Poetry is art

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“Sometimes there is a book you love so much you become frightened for the world. ] Exclosures [ is that for me. In a language invaded by false choice, infrastructured by ‘behavioral soundtracks,’ and occupied by dementia-inducing ‘privileges,’ Emily Abendroth implicates us in a relentless, marbled argument for her own hyper-communicable liberation. Here, oysters and otters come out of their word-shells and are exposed, alongside us, in a politics unsheltered from the fluids of Life. In bodies’ inchoate clamors, in their tangled historical idioms, there is still, Exclosures claims, the unmistakable pulse of possible justice. Improbable, yes, like much joy. This is writing that comes from many years of poly-barrage at the worst walls of our statesvilles, a decades-long voluntary encumbrance in the ‘best smidgens of radical hope.’ In such a project, all the camp-tools can ally-up—concept, lyric, document, narrative, luminous rhetoric, bureaucratese—no one’s unwelcome, all animals can come in and go out when they choose.”—Chris Nagler

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Four: Quixote in the Bedroom I have never been very good at describing the ways my lover touches me. There seems no act that more exaggerates the insufficiencies of both lyricism and realism. I have tried to narrate her motion her eyes her face, but searching, I find alone snapshots that are alone and by the way and in third person. The gross move that occurs in literature, the desperate default of third person. I finally said it.

from Practice on Mountains by David Bartone

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Author Spotlight: Lucy Ives

"It’s probably better not to admit this sort of thing, but one of my main interests in writing, or the act of writing, has to do with the way writing mimics, retroactively as it were, more precise recording devices we now have, digital and others. I’m curious about how exact written description can be, or what the powers or limits of written description are. Could I write like a tape recorder? Could I write a line that’s photographic? I mean, of course I can’t, but it’s difficult, on an intuitive level, to really know that you can’t do this, since it’s logical to feel that you can describe what is in the frame of a photograph, that you could transcribe your own thoughts. So this question of fidelity is of great concern when it comes to what you might call “being in a poem.” If I write a line, what exactly will I be repeating or saying? Is the content just the referent of the words, if I attempt to relate or reproduce an event? What do I even think I can accurately talk about or show?" - Lucy Ives, author of Orange Roses

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Big fan of After-Cave? Check out what Michelle Detorie is up to on her blog. 

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from “Fur Birds” two dead things when did you become so lonely? one thing could fit inside the other: mouse, bird- wing. glossy black tail to feather because I am afraid of breaking things wick quick to flame everywhere there is water water a body in the hand (seed spread through secret channels) every time someone is kind to me I feel like breaking

from After- Cave by Michelle Detorie

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“Do the beasts feast? Or do we feast on the beasts? To answer either or both questions is to descend into an underworld of decaying, regenerating language, whose prophetic argument about the natural world augurs etymologies of corroded animalia and a bibliomancy of theriophagic power. When Elizabeth Sewell proposed in The Orphic Voice that grammar is ‘an essentially mythological, active field, which still awaits its due inquiry,’ could she have been anticipating Cody-Rose Clevidence’s startling Beast Feast? Here is secret Orphic power, revealed and scrambled, bedecked with joules, singing daggered hymns.” —Peter O’Leary

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Interested in the Ahsahta Press but don't know what to start your collection with? Get a subscription to the entire 2014–2015 season of seven Ahsahta Press books for $90, a more than 30% discount from the list price of $130. Shipping is free. You’ll get our books upon publication in September, January, March, and May.

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Excerpt from Carrie Olivia Adams new collection: Operating Theater. 

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from "Intermission with the Scientist" The heart rises upwards to a point so that as it strikes against the breast the pulse is felt externally. I’ve grown tired of my heart— it knows not its place. My heart being grasped in the hand, is felt to become harder during its action. Shhh. Quiet little heart. The heart, my heart, when it moves, becomes of a paler color, when quiescent it is red. In the pause the heart is soft, exhausted, lying, as it were at rest.

from Forty-One Jane Doe's by Carrie Olivia Adams

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I’ve forgotten all my songs. The garden rows like swamped in ruins. Dust in gates, mesh wire swinging. We’d cling to ours if we’d only known. She thought this to herself before bed every night for a week.

From "Fur Birds" by Michelle Detorie