Tales From The Alley

Hello friends!

So there is a fair bit here you might still want to know about Tales From The Alley, and that's fair, but today I want to spotlight the other books on this project. It's funny that I started out my journey of self-publishing as a writer. While I still write a great deal, I so rarely get the chance to write fiction or poetry for any real profit anymore. So let's see what it looks like when I have the option, shall we?

While Widening the Wound is a black-paged, green-inked gathering of two longform poems I wrote. The first is a slight update to my thesis poem from grad school, where in its earliest form I was calling it (a hole shape). And that's because it's an obsessive poem about holes, their nature, their shape, and their existence.


Worked through in 2014 and released in 2015, this poem has a strange and obsessive rhythm when read. I wrote 5 books of poetry during my grad school years. (Our thesis was meant to be our first, complete poetry collection. This was my 9th.) I picked this poem to be my focus for the thesis because it was sacred to me. Holes are a focus of mine. Down-spaces. In-spaces. Dark-spaces. Non-spaces. Is a hole the space opening in an object or its rim? Do all empty spaces share matter? If I pull one hole, will all holes move?

These are the probably important questions I was asking when this poem came to life, and 3 years later when I wrote the follow-up poem, an Estrangement. About as long as the original, this new one returned to the focus with a similar fervor. I cleaned this one up something fierce for this reprint-- as the two poems have been collected under one cover now, called, as you may imagine, While Widening the Wound.

The incredible cover done by Reid Aster, aka Kollapsar, encapsulates much of the journey.

You can listen the book in its entirety in a new reading done today on Youtube.




Like Warm Plastic is actually my most recent book of poetry, thought I have a little new work related to my recent heart illness I would love to explore in a collection or something sometime soon. It explores my journey with gender transition, the loss of my sister on her 34th birthday, the beginning of some aggressive dating, joining a kink community, and drinking a fair bit more than someone might need. (I'm basically sober now.)

You can hear several of the poems from the book from the stream I did while the project was live, on the anniversary of her death. It's a little heart string pully, so be aware.



And if you think this seems neat, consider grabbing the Poetry Broadside set. These are art prints, but for poetry! Featuring foil text and titling over some of the art Reid did for the book covers. Broadsides are a delightful thing to make, making the words from the work pop and look so 



See you shortly for a peek at the other two collections offered on this project... and then for a reading from the new book, Tales From the Alley!

Thanks all,
7DA

Hello alleyfolk,

Welcome on in. With 127 folks, we're seeing 92 copies of Tales From the Alley claimed already!
This is going well, but I think we can do even better. First off, if you're here because you know some of these stories already, please go check out the attached poll!

If you're new to the stories, welcome! We blew past our first stretch goal to get updated work for the cover of this book, but we're also about to overcome our second stretch goal of adding a tarot card bookmark to the book. Now, because this is an Alley thing, I feel it inevitable that we end up doing tarot cards.

But I'll have to share some info and art of some of the characters that are options so we can pick who this card will be. For now, for those who are familiar with some of these characters already, let me know who you most want to see a card for! : )

Thanks for an awesome first day folks, I have to go hound some of my favorite artists to see who is available to take on the cover work and tarot card designs!

7DA
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