About this book, Kazim Ali writes: “In her essay A Poetics of Generosity: Strange Female Beasts/Chimeras from Outer Space poet Judith Johnson calls for a poetry of community that has “a total commitment to possibility, for which techniques or methods are simply different forms of lens” to share energy and creativity between the reader and the writer. In The Soft Place Kate Schapira commits herself to a human lyric–tender, fierce, feminist, funny. It is a book with many questions and a grand and kind intelligence with which–in a dozen different ways–to begin to answer them. Generosity is the guiding principle in these poems full of what Johnson calls for: “community, relationship, interactivity, and performance.”

Eleni Sikelianos writes: “In my mind, The Soft Place makes traces around what works to keep us together or keep us going: kindness, stitches (“this inner thing is mine”), seeds, family lines, and the symmetries and asymptotes therein. With intimacy and intelligence, Schapira reminds us of those mirrors (between us and us, us and others or lovers, us and the wound or the world) that sometimes hold together, sometimes shatter: “Nature doesn’t mirror us, but it senses us.” She holds the shards between pictures up to each other in reciprocity, responsiveness; that is to say, she holds it together.”

Want to make your pre-order? We’re just a bit less than $500 shy of our Kickstarter goal. Please help us make this beautiful and smart book, and get yourself a copy while you’re at it!

If you want to submit your chapbook manuscript or full-length manuscript, or want to contribute to our Kickstarter project (only $500 left to go!), you’ve got about two weeks. If you want to send work for Horse Less Review #12, you’ve got a wee bit longer, until the end of May. Onward, y’all!

Richard Froude:

apricot vocals
over costumed shore story
hollowed for spare keys.

Kit Frick:

hypothetical
questions and ghost kingfishers
request late breakfast.

Caketrain:

your miraculous
beastie’s run out of peaches:
holler the roadsides.

Megan Williams:

rabbits with slingshots,
man-sized bubblewands say girl
whose accent is that?

T.A. Noonan:

One ringlet function
out of fire: elongate
sound til I get there.

 
Kimberly Alidio:

Experiment bear
stars up when spring’s too moldy
for the laser show.

 
Nicole Wilson:

Green dress rabbit name
tags tangled in girly earth
worms, chiclet angles.

 
Megan Burns:

O dollbaby: brass
jangle flavors land parcel
between tits tax free.

 
Cori A. Winrock:

Winter stutter sweats
through a hand-made hand-cuff act:
better plant your trick.

Jenn:

Crackling without need:
power men leave tree branches
turned night-time nurse logs.

Rachel Y. King:

That word’s tangled leash
crosses city parks at night
with odd lake in tow.

Cathryn Cofell:

Radio in child
container. Shake like jelly,
trees. We read ahead.

Jason Labbe:

A tree undertone
is leftover from dinner
and other mouth-feels.

Nathan Hauke:

Stitches found the beer
you sent to the familiar
door, the grass hand shakes.

Nate Logan:

Outside telescope
love and anthill vigilance:
what do you call that?

Janet Holmes:

Boots on a high chair
at mountain yard sale asked me
to give you rhinestones.