You Thought This Was Just Gonna Be About Cleveland, Didn’t You – 2022
A collection of poems and images recently published as part of Ghost City Press’s annual summer reading series. Get it by clicking this sentence!
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Do Us a Favor – 2021
“Do Us a Favor pulls the reader into spaces that may feel all too familiar. All too unbelievable. And, yet, all too real. Borrowing text from the infamous phone call between Donald Trump and the Ukrainian president, this chapbook explores the world as it was before, during, and after 2020. The narrator trundles down paths, through cafés and portals, onto lawns and into the topmost floors of skyscrapers, and even to outer space — all while confronting the narrow-mindedness and hate of others, the oppressive weight of existence, and a planet spiraling to a place that feels irretrievable.”
Click here to purchase this chapbook!
Five Seconds Could Last Five Years – 2020
Every year since 2009, I have created a summer playlist that I have shared with my friends and my social media accounts. Starting in 2012, I also compiled a shorter collection, an encore, normally right before the last day of the summer. This year, I have merged my poetry with my curative skills. As the title states, it is a collection of poems inspired by this year’s double-LP of a playlist. Twenty-four songs, twenty-four poems. What a treat for this helluva 2020!
When you buy this collection, you’ll get to choose how much you pay (a $5 minimum). I am donating 100% of your purchase amount to a movement or campaign of your choice. Four options are Sunrise Movement, Navajo Water Project, Black Lives Matter, and ACLU. You may share your own movement or campaign in an email to me!
“Zoom Cards Against Humanity,” “The Undiscovered,” & “I have ballooned into something unwieldy” — all in The Second Chance Anthology, Variant Literature, 2020. Edited by Tyler Pufpaff.
“This anthology supports work from authors and artists that were looking to re-home their work from publications whose actions contradicted a #SaferLit community or were simply extinct.”
“When You See The Videos” in The Anatomy of Desire: An Anthology of Distance – The Poetry Annals, 2018. Edited by Shekinah Vera-Cruz.
“From the vicious, to the clinical, to the confessional, The Anatomy of Desire is filled with poems that cut from where the ache is still tender, and rend longing wide open. Pulling knives from the body to call them holy, crushing berries in fists like deliverance, it’s an anthology of words that ask hunger what it’s made of; works that spit blood on the floor every time they try to speak.”
Lucid – The Poetry Annals, 2018
“Blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, Lucid speaks like a dream that follows you into waking. Kevin Risner writes of both connection and disconnection; of distance and intimacy both.
“Using language as vivid and striking as a fever, the poems in this collection work in two directions at once—creating and dismantling dreams in the same breath. With each word, Risner invites you to close your eyes, and take a step into the wild and shaking dark.”
My Ear is a Sieve – Bottlecap Press, 2017
“In My Ear is a Sieve, Kevin explores the more poignant moments during his time living in Istanbul in the late 2000s. This collection also focuses on situations that took place in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey after he had left in 2010. Unified by the larger theme of auditory stimuli, these poems take note of the sounds – sometimes innocent, other times politically fraught – that characterize his impressions of daily life in Istanbul over the past decade. These poems do not just respond to Turkey’s recent political and social tensions; they also capture the more personal and universal feelings we all have as citizens of various cities, as citizens of our planet, as individuals concerned about the future and the unknown.”
Kevin A. Risner 