Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker - by Chansonette Buck (CC#118)

Crisis Chronicles Press is thrilled to announce the publication of our fifth title of the year, Ouroboros by Chansonette Buck (with striking visual art by Jillian Mardin), on April 22nd 2022. Our release date also happens to be the author's birthday!

Ouroboros is c. 130 pages, perfect bound paperback, 11" x 8.5". Cover art also by Jillian Mardin. Available for $20 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA. 

ISBN: 978-1-64092-950-0. First edition, 125 copies.

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In the US $20.00 USD Elsewhere $30.00 USD

Praise for Ouroboros:

Chansonette Buck's Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker takes us on a rich journey through the alchemy of dreams. Buck’s dreams are the kind we wish we remembered—full of significance, of meanings, of important messages. Dreams that reveal the deeper truths and greater understandings. Dreams that nourish our souls.

This is a journey of transfiguration—a word that came to me before I saw it in the book. Transfiguration: changing the forms of difficulty, challenge, and darkness into beauty, illumination, wholeness. Into nourishment for our souls. Like holding a kaleidoscope up to the light, and seeing the patterns form and reform, each more lovely than the last.

Buck is our guide, our priestess, our teacher of transfiguration—holding the lamp to illuminate our way. Singing us through her dreams into our own healing.

 

—Ariana Newcomer, Author; Sound Healer; Spiritual Mentor

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In her newest collection of prose works, Ouroboros, author Chansonette Buck chronicles her life’s journey over a dreamscape that defies expectation and interpretation. What at first seem promising destinations end up as obstruction; while impassible crevices and peaks become pathways to forgiveness and grace, as a movable cast of characters provide aid, conflict and insight to our beleaguered walker. The opening section plays like an overture before descending this landscape into deep trauma, and also, ultimately back into the dreamscape of healing and recovery. Once on this path, the reader will find themselves unable to “leave the trail” until they have gone exactly where Ms. Buck wants them to go…into discovery, the divine, and rebirth. 

 

—Paul Corman-Roberts, author Bone Moon Palace (Nomadic Press, 2021) 

 

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When I first met Chansonette Buck, she was a student of painting at the Museum School in Boston. She doesn’t use paints anymore, but draws the most exquisite word pictures, evocative of far more than could be represented in two dimensions. The partnership here with Jillian Mardin is brilliant, because these visual cues help one take the inner journey I think the poet intended.

There are very few writers whose work I find so rich. I can only read them in small doses. This book is one of those. The words, and word-pictures, have to be savored. As a person who works with both words and pictures, I found Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker to be a rare treat. 

 

—Martha Cotton, FinallyFilms.net

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Chansonette Buck’s Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker depicts multiple dreamscapes through which, in poetic language, she shares her psychological journey. Her luminous descriptions (enhanced with gorgeous collages by Jillian Mardin) take readers on a multi-dimensional voyage of obstacles, shadows, and dangerous precipices, but affirms the wisdom of elders, animals, and priestesses. Although the profound losses of fathers and lovers punctuate the book, she returns always to intentional survival and healing. With Whitmanesque exuberance immersed in female magical powers, she bears witness to loving affiliation with everything from people to galactic beings to nematodes. The many portals—windows, doors, cave entries—enable access to deep interiorities: watery domains and tunnels in caves. Those, in turn, allow access between minds, epistemologies, species, even planets. Spheres and consciousnesses interpenetrate. A beautiful book in every way, Ouroboros is a testament to our vulnerabilities, our interconnectedness, and our ever-shifting possibilities of renewal. 

 

—Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at University of California, Berkeley

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Chansonette Buck shares her dream world in Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker, an expansive landscape that blends the natural world, both familiar and ordinary, with a fantastic territory of the imagination. All told with vivid and descriptive detail. She faces challenges, danger, and her own fear. Animal and human companions inhabit imaginary worlds, ancient and futuristic, realistic and visionary, threatening and comforting. Surely, Chansonette has a method for remembering her dreams. The “dreamwalker” of the title indicates these intense dreams are with her in her waking life, both a link to and a dialogue with her interior self. We all have similar episodic dreams, but this long literary stream of remembered dreams creates a personal world that treads somewhere between everyday reality and the nighttime recesses of the psyche. The writing is richly illustrated with collage images by Jillian Mardin, which reflect this magical adventure of both individual struggle and personal power. 

 

—Harvey Smith, Historian; President, National New Deal Preservation Association; Author, Berkeley and the New Deal

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Reading Chansonette Buck’s latest offering, Ouroboros: Memoir of a Dreamwalker (with Jillian Mardin’s multidimensional artwork accompanying) enabled me to enter a dreamscape occupied by myriad characters, archetypes, shapes, textures, layers, and meanings: light, dark, and in-between. The Carl Jung quote sets the tone from the start, inviting and warning the reader to advance with caution: this will be a journey of initiation and initiates.

It took me many months to travel through this book as part of the unfoldment of circumstances in my life at the time that involved deep incubation, excavation, birth, death, and rebirth many times over. Sometimes it provided a parallel narrative. At other times, it was analogous to entering another world that allowed me to open another way to see.

Always it speaks to defeat, loss, despair, acceptance, redemption, wisdom, and the will to create, and to be.

Such messages are rife throughout, with sentences standing on their own as ends in themselves, or as worlds to get lost in. Senses go on alert as danger makes itself known and must be faced. And yet, despite the danger (or because of it), one travels with kindred spirits all the way as we traverse the dreamtime landscape, pausing to drink in the images. Always we are held and guided, and although we must also collapse, mourn, and endure, it is clear we are always moving towards becoming, letting go, and becoming again. Letting go into life, letting go into death. Light and dark, and the cycles ever-continuing.

Thank you, beloved Chansonette, for sharing yourself so generously with us all. Your work is so necessary. 

 

—Fatima Bacot, Author; Trainer; Personal Development Mentor; Speaker

 

 

Chansonette Buck holds the PhD in English from UC Berkeley. She earned an BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where she won both of two juried prizes for her works on paper at a New England Regional show. Winner of the first Judith Stronach Prize in Poetry at Berkeley and a two-time Pushcart nominee, Dr. Buck has authored four chapbooks of poetry as well as a memoir of her time growing up “on the road” with “the great minds of [that] generation” as stepchild of Black Mountain School poet Edward Dorn. She is an ordained minister and certified spiritual healer and is adept in many energy healing modalities. As Principal Prose Wrangler in her consultancy Appaloosa WordCraft, she helps public policy think tanks and nonfiction authors with research, writing, and editing. A California Bay Area expat, she now lives in Southern Oregon’s magnificent Rogue Valley with her family. This is her first full-length collection. Another will be following from Hand to Mouth Press soon.

 

Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors - by Carolyn Srygley-Moore (CC#112)

Crisis Chronicles Press is pleased to present our long-awaited latest title, Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors, a compelling collection of poetry by Carolyn Srygley-Moore. 

U.S. or Elsewhere?

United States $12.00 USD Elsewhere $16.00 USD

 

Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors is 92 pages, perfect bound, 6x6" and illustrated. ISBN: 978-1-64092-948-7. Front and back cover photos provided by the author. Available now for only $12 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA. A percentage of proceeds from the sale of this book went to support Rescue Dogs Rescue Soldiers, an organization that pairs shelter dogs with veterans and provides pet therapy programs.

"Carolyn Srygley-Moore’s poetry always enhances its relevance through specificity of coordinates in time and place. The poet has been a consistent fighter for animal rights and animal rescue services, tying them to imagery of human atrocities. In this collection, we go back to a specific era in 2012, and a specific friend named Evy, discovering the poems that illuminated the euthanasia of that dear friend. Her afterword essay is sure to bring tears. But that is Carolyn Srygley-Moore’s power."

—Loring Wirbel, writer and social justice activist

"A book of poems that takes you through meeting and instantly connecting with a beautiful pup, a snow white pit bull named Evy, coming to the awareness that this loving dog has issues that will be to its own demise, through no one’s fault. A book of poems on learning what it’s like to have that love and deep connection, yet coming to awareness and understanding that the ultimate choice had to be made — and the realization of actually having no choice, in reality, of having to surrender your animal to euthanasia. Walking down the road of having to come to terms with the fact that this loving dog could be/was a danger, especially towards children. Sweet Evy could be triggered at any moment in time, without warning, without any rhyme or reason, to become aggressive and dangerous and do severe harm to another body. This book is a roller coaster ride of emotions and mental anguish of having to euthanize this beautiful animal who you love so dearly."

—Judy Lynn Lustgarten Goldstein, activist

"Carolyn Srygley-Moore is a poet of enormous sensibility who combines confessional elements with a capacity to do what Heidegger said poets were for, which is to reveal the Being behind beings. Description of a whole array of things, however “poetic”, does not a poem make. Following a set of rules, merely emulating the constituents of a “canon of taste” will, almost infallibly, make “poets” crashing bores.

"We write, Heidegger reminds us, in “a destitute time” & “in default of God”. As an atheist, I am OK with this. Carolyn, however, does not like that “no god any longer gathers men & things unto himself.” Nothing shines any longer, it is night. The task of the poet is to find the wholesome. & the holy that relates to it, in the unholy that s/he depicts. This book deals with the subject of “euthanasia” of animals, in particular the “euthanasia” of one of the writer's dogs for alleged aggression. “Euthanasia” is far too frequently resorted to as part of the morally dubious treatment of pets in the USA, & it is remarkable that Carolyn deals with the subject with great restraint.

"Wherever Carolyn writes of that which is bad, the fact of her shows us what Hölderlin points out, that wherever there is danger there is also the seed of that which can save us. Because Carolyn is a great poet, the solution is not just hers, it is for Everyman. Although humans, or liars, as they are also known, work to destroy innocence, the poet in his or her poem points to where the future divinity will be found, or the future focus of being. It will not be in people, or anything anthropomorphic.

—David McLean, author of Flesh & Resurrection.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore (C Leigh Moore) is a writer who has encountered a variety of issues in her career. She has been published in Red Fez, I Am Not a Silent Poet, and other venues. Ode to Horatio parallels the plight of humanity with the plight of dogs randomly placed on death row. Carolyn's falling in love with the pit bull was ostensibly the beginning of years advocating for victims of breed specific legislation, including all breeds deemed dangerous by landlords and insurance pitfalls. She found the greatest meaning in her endeavors as transporter from shelter to adopter to foster etc. from winter 2019 to 20. Carolyn has had two emergency craniotomies leaving her with the current inability to drive. As well as caring for her own rescued pets, this elegy is the writer’s current contribution to the cause. Carolyn is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she recalls the night she fell passionately in love with language. Forty years later, that passion has lasted.

Where Never Was Already Is - by Steven B. Smith (CC#98)

I am so very excited to announce the publication of underground art legend Steven B. Smith's magnum opus, Where Never Was Already Is, a collection of decades worth of his best poetry combined with a liberal array of his renowned collage art.

If not for discovering Smith and his work, I might never have attended a live poetry event or become a publisher. I cannot overstate his importance and influence, but not just on me. He is a master of language and rhythm and distilling innumerable harmonious essences from disparate parts. His humor is delightful and biting. His sensitivity and insight are unsurpassed. And no one is better at wordplay. Mix in love, lust, brain dust, the news, the blues and a lifetime of experiences that would make one hell of a series of movies and out comes Where Never Was Already Is, the must-have book of 2018.

Where Do You Want It?

United States $15.00 USD Elsewhere $20.00 USD

Where Never Was Already Is by Steven B. Smith is perfect bound, 6" x 9", featuring 27 collages and roughly 250 poems on 324 pages. Nominated for an Ohioana Book Award. Cover collage and author photo also by Smith. ISBN: 978-1-940996-49-3. Available for $15 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

Meet and hear Smith at these special upcoming events:
4/21 at 7pm during the Kleft Crisis 2018 poetry festival at Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights.
4/22 at 6pm during the Tongue-in-Groove Poetry Jam at the Millard Fillmore in Cleveland.
6/13 at 7pm at Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights.
7/7 at 7:30pm at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland.

Self-portrait by Smith

Smith: poet 55 years, artist 54 years. His books include Zen Over Zero - Selected Poems 1964-2008 on City Poetry Press; Unruly on Crisis Chronicles Press; Hip Cat Femur Whack Give a Doc a Bone on NightBallet Press; and his memoir Stations of the Lost & Found, a True Tale of Armed Robbery, Stolen Cars, Outsider Art, Mutant Poetry, Underground Publishing, Robbing the Cradle, and Leaving the Country by Smith & Lady on City Poetry Press.

See his art and poetry on agentofchaos.com, Smith & Lady's blogs on walkingthinice.com, and his songs on reverbnation.com/mutantsmith where he sort of sings his words with music by Peter Ball and Billy Clarksville.

Smith says his greatest achievement is finding and marrying Lady K. 13 years ago and their selling his place to live for 31 months in 10 countries on 3 continents.

Matilda's Battle Waltz - by Tracie Morell (CC#70) - Free E-Book

Matilda's Battle Waltz is a powerful new collection of poems by Tracie Morell, illustrated by Kris Risto, featuring wraparound cover art by Ken Paul Johnson. Perfect bound, 5.5" x 8.5", 89 pages, ISBN 978-1-940996-22-6.  $10. The paperback is currently out of print.

 

UPDATE: As of August 2021, we have reissued this collection as a free e-book. It is now available at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/matildas-battle-waltz-final-2021-ebook. 

 
“Tracie Morell’s work exhibits a lyrical acuity which illuminates and devastates. She leads us on a harrowing and electrifying journey through the life of Matilda, a being who dances on the brink of existence between what is marginalized and what has risen above to live in rarified air. Morell has no fear; our eyes blaze and dilate with Matilda, as we bear witness to our collective ruin. Morell’s poems celebrate the connections between the interior and exterior world and in doing so, take us closer to both.”

     —Kelly Boyker, Poetry Editor at Menacing Hedge 

“Tracie Morell is the patron saint of every woman that is tough, beautiful...and pissed off. The thing I admire about her the most is, she doesn't bitch about life's short comings, she resolves conflict with a love that is bulletproof. Matilda's Battle is her recent attempt at reminding the world that if you want to be happy...you better ask questions.”
     —Danny Klecko, author of Houdini in St. Paul

These are not to be read with eyes — it takes but a few lines before you feel her words writing themselves into you, burning the beauty and the pain on the insides of your eyelids and the long bones of your ribcage. Tracie's poems are scrimshaw and snowflakes: permanent, yet glittering."
     —Amanda Gowin, author of Radium Girls 

"Reading Matilda’s Battle Waltz is succumbing to a mesmerizing liturgy of literary moves that includes Matilda’s pontifications, navigations, poetic landscapes, work woes, and foreign loves. The reader travels the path of a most beautiful way of living that does not deny or distinguish between the glorious and the seedy, but sees each poem as a song, a part of the poetic whole. Indeed, the roots of Matilda’s experience grow with you upon every read and you find yourself tapping your foot to her poetic rhythms as the highs and lows pull you into her life’s dance."

     —Kathleen D. Gallagher, author of I See Things are Falling

Click here to read Ron Hayes' review of Matilda's Battle Waltz at Five Writers.
Click here to read Juliet Cook's review of Matilda's Battle Waltz at Menacing Hedge.
Click here to see ratings and reviews at Goodreads.

Tracie Morell — by Kris Risto

Tracie Morell was raised on the savannah by a pack of feral gazelles. At a young age, she learned to bend iron bars with naught but her teeth and sheer determination. During her school years, she consistently wowed her teachers and mentors with her ability to dodge skepticism while performing feats of whimsical magic. In adulthood, she has birthed miniscule acrobats who assist her in her day-to-day tasks of smashing the banality of various poverties. In her spare time, she enjoys semaphore, scrimshaw, collecting rejection letters, and working on cars for the love of artistry and craftsmanship, despite her loathing of vehicular landscapes and the smell of ethanol. She resides in a land beyond your reach. Only Ben Frasier knows how to find her.  

Join us for the official book launch for Matilda's Battle Waltz on Friday June 12th 2015 at 5:30 p.m. during Poets and Painters at PACA, 1505 State Street in Erie, Pennsylvania.  

The launch event will feature poetry readings by Marisa Moks-Unger (whose chapbook, Mud and Stars, will be released that night by NightBallet Press), Tracie Morell, Shawn King, Veronica Hopkins, Juliet Cook, Dianne Borsenik and John Burroughs - plus music by Rodger Montgomery and an exhibition of work by Kris Risto and Ken Paul Johnson.  Not to be missed!

Poems for Explosion - by John G. Hall (CC#58)

We are thrilled to announce the long-awaited publication of John G. Hall's Poems for Explosion in February 2015.  This book features 60 pages of Hall's best poems, illlustrated by Becky Mackay, and is available for a mere $10 US from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

Choose US or International

US orders $10.00 USD International $14.00 USD

Jack Hirschman says of Poems for Explosion, "These are 'letter rip' poems by a very conscious British poet who is forever breaking the chokehold that Willie Shakespeare has bent around the neck of that island. Hall really wants to include everything and everybody - he unloads personal and political contradictions with an organized spontaneity that is refreshing and millennial, and his urgencies are upbeat and rooted in a totalizing expressivity."

Gerry Potter says, "Powerhouse tenderness and lyrical agility bind together John's remarkable use of language to give work of lasting worth and historical accuracy. John G. Hall is poet first and foremost and a 20th-21st century documenter second to none. In a world of increasing unfairness we need work of this richness and colour to keep us sane."

Foreword by Sue Fox. Cover image by Charlotte Henson. 6x9" paperback.  Edited by John Burroughs.  ISBN: 9781940996141.

To read "Poetry of protest: why Manchester's John G. Hall strikes a chord across the Atlantic" by Judy Gordon, click here.

To order Poems for Explosion from CreateSpace, click here.
To rate on Goodreads, click here.

You may also buy from Amazon.com and Amazon UK.

John G. Hall is a Manchester (UK) poet who has served as the editor of Citizen32 and the host of Beatification. His previous books include The Drowning Fish, Bang! and Spleen. 

Attend the official book release of Poems for Explosion and meet John G. Hall on 8 April 2015 at the Sandbar, 120 Grovenor Street, Manchester, United Kingdom.

Fever Dreams - by Yahia Lababidi (CC#10)

Fever Dreams by Yahia Lababidi is Crisis Chronicles Press' tenth poetry publication and (at the time of its release) our largest yet. Published 27 June 2011, it features over 70 pages of the poet's best and most popular works.  Perfect bound and brilliantly illustrated by John Tillson, Fever Dreams is available in a 6" x 9" paperback at the discounted price of $9.99.

If you prefer to order using cash, personal check or money order, Fever Dreams by Yahia Lababidi is available by mail for $12 US (includes shipping and handling) from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA. This chapbook is currently sold out.

213 paperback copies in print. Fever Dreams is no longer available in e-book format.  Paperback is out of print as of June 2015.

Sample Poems:

Click here to read "Cairo" from Fever Dreams in berfrois.
Click here to read "I Saw My Face" from Fever Dreams in Serving House Journal.
Click here to watch a short film by Swoon featuring "What do animals dream?" from Fever Dreams in Moving Poems.

Reviews:

Click here to read a review of Fever Dreams by Alex Sharp.
Click here to read Mary Clara White's review of Fever Dreams in Zouch magazine.
Click here to read an interview with the author in Tuck magazine.
Click here to read Yahia Lababidi's self interview about the book at The Nervous Breakdown.
Click here to read a review of Fever Dreams by Annalisa King (and her interview with the author) in Fluster.
 

Poet's biography (as of 2011, from the back of the book):

Yahia Lababidi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, aphorist and essayist with work appearing in such publications as AGNI, Harper's, Rain Taxi, New Internationalist and Philosophy Now. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, such as Geary’s Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, where he is the only contemporary Arab poet featured, and the best-selling US college textbook, Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. To date, Lababidi’s writing has been translated into Arabic, Slovak, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Turkish.  He was recently chosen as a juror for the 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Lababidi’s first book Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press) was selected as a 2008 Book of the Year by The Independent, UK.  His latest book is a critically-acclaimed collection of twenty-one literary and cultural essays, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly-dancing (Common Ground Publishing).

Click here to find out more about the author at Poets & Writers.
Click here to visit his YouTube channel.