Spartan Press

rE iNTRo-dUCing - returning this Sunday (12/13) Prospero's Books, we have 3 ladies and their splendid handiwork, and KC independent press... NOTE: due to the ...Chiefs we will extend the market til 6pm Not your average pot (Leslie Johns) pottery from the Mad Potter remains some of our most sought-after offerings. One-of-a-kind ceramics, locally sourced clay, uniquely glazed and thrown. All are food, microwave & dishwasher safe. Studeo_b Books (Jessica McGann) handmade sketchbooks, journals, boxes and custom book repairs. For over a decade, Jessica has provided the coolest journals and sketchbooks (including our Prospero’s branded daybooks). This year, she’s expanded her offerings to include book-themed ornaments and earrings as well as cards and buttons. It is bespoke artisanship at its finest. In addition, Jessica offers a range of custom book repair for your antiquarian and heirloom books. Rattlebone Design (Teri Quinn) Intuitively channeled jewelry from nature’s curiosities. Many of you know Teri from her music (most recently with Monta at Odds), but we are bewitched by her earth-centric craft work. Spartan Press (Jason Ryberg & Will Leathem) -- since 1998, Spartan Press has published regional local poetry, memoire, short fiction and essays til today, with over 240 titles (including 3 poet Laureates) Spartan is one of the most vibrant and active boutique publishers in America. COVID GUIDELINES: Masks & appropriate social distancing is required. In addition we will be frequently ventilating and sanitizing. NOTE: those wanting to make distance purchases, PM me for venmo & picku-up/delivery details

Coming soon from Spartan Press: "Dead Ends, Detours, Blind Curves and a Roundabout Road Home" by Ed Tato!

Hey, hey, hey, Spartan Press has a special deal running until the end of the year! As some of you may know, John Dorsey decided to covertly compile a collection of poems from facebook posts by our good friend Jacob Johanson and publish it through Spartan. In the words of Jacob himself upon receiving his copies of a book he had no idea was in the works, "Only Dorsey could have pulled off something like this." It was a hell of a lot of fun to edit and put together and it's a great collection from a surly old road warrior we are hoping to hear more from. $20 will get you a copy of Jacob's book plus the latest Gasconade Review and shipping. If you're interested contact us [email protected] (if you're real nice we might tell you the poetry slam story).

The latest from Spartan Press, and a long time coming... Weary from 24 hours of poetry, bar fights, barns and dark highways, a handful of us are smoking on the front stoop of an art gallery in hartford. There we find jacob, just arrived from Kansas City, having driven all night and day to read poetry in a room full of art and uncomfortable chairs. that night he broke my heart singing songs of ghosts and collarbones. --Jim D. Deuchars... I'll never forget the first time I met Jacob at the CT Beat Festival in 08. I had been a fan of his writing from the time I first read him but seeing his performance that night transformed, for me, the idea of what a poem could be. There was this slight, black-haired, seemingly soft spoken guy standing in front of the small crowd taking a flame-thrower to the night. Poetry has never been quite the same since. --J. Lester Allen There’s something in the waters of the Kansas / Missouri borders these days, and Jacob Johanson is drinking freely of it, which is to our benefit. He is the man of early middle age, realizing regrets, well entrenched in daily routine, with lots of time ahead to contemplate. His poems can be read as, old constellations on old stars, familiar territory explored with new eyes. There are the women, just out of understanding, to tango with in minefields. There are the Shawnee sages, as well as an exchange with our friend the Moon, no sage at all in these pages. Johanson, writing in, an era of forgotten atrocities, expresses the fears, hopes, and memories of those often without a voice. In Billboards, the signs are there for all to see, and to find a kindred spirit. -Cheryl A. Rice, author of Love’s Compass

Now available from Spartan Press: "One Breath: Haiku and Senryu" by Ben Gaa!

Now available from Spartan Press and OAC Books: "The Gasconade Review Presents: Strange Days, Stranger Nights!"

The latest from Spartan Press!

The first review of Jacob Johanson's book BILLBOARDS in the WASTELAND is now up on Rusty Truck, and I just want to thank Scot, for supporting Jacob, for support...ing me, for supporting Jason, for supporting this book, this was truly a labor of love, we really just wanted to get the work out there, so check out the review and please consider picking up the book if you haven't. With Taylor Johanson, Mala Johanson, and Abigail Beaudelle. See more

This is a collection that calls for ceremony. I’d like to gather my beloved band of misfits, go out in search of a wrecked old building, build a small fire, gather around, and read Beggar’s Songbook aloud together inside the crumbling walls. The poems in Beggar’s Songbook are elegies, turnkeys, reckonings with un-birth, pipe bombs, hexes, correspondences with the poltergeists of memory, and invitations: to claw open the petroleum-stained soil with our faulty human hands, t...Continue reading

The latest from Spartan Press: "Creature Way" by Harley Elliott! Laconic, ironic, wry, as if listening to an older wiser self that's shadowed every footfall and misstep, our aspirations and urges laid bare without judgement or forgiveness, though perhaps with a wince and weary sigh. Much to savor in Harley Elliot's Creature Way, from courtship advice on when to call the preacher to a circus beauty astride an elephant, her creamy thighs beckoning to the ten-year-old eye like... candy. Oh yeah, and much more, perspectives at once immense and minute, nuggets sifted from the dust of a long life, among my favorites -- "Between your nose and the stars one long breath goes by: that secret roar we call the wind..." -Melvin Litton, Son of Eve (Spartan Press, 2020) Knowing him as a poet of note, pick up Harley Elliott’s Creature Way and turn to Hold Tight because people need that today. There, find this thesis, My friend in life / you were the spark / and I was the ember, to discover you have found a companion who will reveal the extraordinary in the land, sky, and surprising lives of people. Harley has a way of working deeper discovery into his observations to create surprising depth in ordinary life events, bringing out wonders hidden in the human condition, as in Dream Canoe when he reminds a friend, its all a dream caught / in the rush of stars. Become that friend to feel glad you did. Poet Harley Elliott will surprise from first to the last. His offerings in Creature Way reveal more surprises if read aloud in a comfortable chair with a favorite drink. -Dan Pohl "Harley Elliott is the poet who made me want to be a poet. His new book of revelations, Creature Way, continues to interrogate the relationship between humans and other living beings--including stones. The poem "Turquoise" asserts, Some say it looks like sky. / Some say it is sky." Artifice collapses. This is an essential book about the cosmos from the poet who changed my life. -Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate Here we are, as Harley Elliott says in the final poem of Creature Way, in the Kansas landscape with its wind, ground, and deep rhythms of place. Elliott’s poems are spare, elegant, and deceptive in their simplicity. They are full of only the most important things- rainbows, potatoes, barbwire, dates, pears, watermelon, dogs, so many birds, and always river, river, river. He goes straight to the core while looking slantwise at his subjects - Beauty, Love, and How to Live. Just when you think you get the idea, his sense of humor catches you looking the other way, and here we are, reminded of what matters. Lori Brack, author of A Case for the Dead Letter Detective (forthcoming) and Museum Made of Breath (Spartan Press)

Jacob Johanson's book, Billboards in the Wasteland, which Jason Ryberg and I co-edited, is currently Spartan Press' bestseller, pick up a copy and read some awesome poetry by one my best friends.

"Like the Ginsberg he quotes as an epigraph, the energy here is loose, long-limbed and anachronistic. The poems move like dreams and myths, their recurring themes and actions subtly linking them into a satisfying whole. And then just when you think you know where you are, the poems veer L'Ecuyer has a facility with any and all styles, and a love of chance, and something else that almost always gets forgotten these days: a love of fun. Reading these poems is a pleasure. Imagine that!" --Matthew Rohrer

"Patricia Traxler is an award-winning poet, essayist, and fiction writer. A two-time Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe, she also served as Hugo Poet at the University of Montana, Thurber Poet at Ohio State, and as visiting writer at many other universities around the U.S. Her novel, Blood (St. Martin's/Macmillan) was also published in Spanish, German, and Swedish translations, as well as in a UK/Ireland edition. Her poetry collection, Naming the Fires, received the 2019 Kans...as Book Award in Poetry." "Traxler's short stories have won several awards, including The Writer's Voice of New York City Award for Short Fiction, the Cecil Hackney National Short Story Award, the Georgia State University Short Story Award, and in Ireland, The Moth Magazine's 2019 Short Story Prize: "...brings the reader right up close to passion and its loss, loneliness and despair. A very unusual take on a subject we all think we know, but this is fresh and exciting...you want to read it again as soon as it's over." --novelist Kit de Waal, Judge of The Moth's 2019 Short Story Prize"