Welcome Kevin Barger to the SwEP Parade

On April 28, 2015 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors, News

Welcome Kevin!

Swimming with Elephants Publications is proud to introduce you an amazing new poet name, Kevin Barger.

After being a finalist in last June’s chapbook competition, Kevin’s book, Observable Acts, was chosen for publication and was released in late April of 2015 and is available through Amazon.com and other on line book distributors as well as local book stores in the ABQ area.

Kevin Barger is a performance poet, writer, and retired slam organizer based in Asheville, NC. He was instrumental in bringing slam poetry back to popularity in Asheville after its rise, fall, and subsequent misfirings in the area by helping to lay the groundwork for Poetry Slam Asheville from 2008 through 2011. He has also appeared on many other stages in and around the Carolinas including the Lake Eden Arts Festival, Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and Southern Fried in which he was on the first team from Asheville sent to Southern Fried in nearly a decade. Now, semi-retired from the slam scene but itching to get back on stage again, he has compiled old favorites and new material in Observable Acts; his first endeavor onto the published page.

Get a copy of Observable Acts today and stay updated on the Swimming with Elephants Publications web page for further news.

Gina Marselle Bookworks Release This Weekend

On March 25, 2015 By awhitetrashpoetIn Local Events, News

Join us this weekend for the official release of Swimming with Elephants, LLC latest publication: A Fire of Prayer, a collection of poetry and photography from Gina Marselle.

The title will be released at Bookworks ABQ, Sunday March 29, 2015 at 3pm, accompanied with a reading by Ms. Marselle. Other SwEP authors will be on site to support the release of this new title.

Come out and join the fun! Support your local press, your local artists, and your local bookstore all in one swoop.

About the Author:

Gina Marselle, M.A.Ed, resides in New Mexico with her husband and children. She is a high school English teacher, and finds enjoyment in being creative through poetry, painting, and photography. She has been awarded three grants for various philanthropy poetic projects. In addition, she has published poetic work with The Sunday Poem Online Series, in the Alibi, the Rag, SIC3, Adobe Walls: An anthology of New Mexico poetry, Catching Calliope, Fix and Free Poetry Anthology I and II, and La Palabra Anthology I and II.

Gina reads her poetry at local coffee shops, art galleries, and has been a featured poet at the Church of Beethoven (now known as Sunday Chatter). She has one chapbook (self published) titled ‘Round Midnight (2012). Furthermore, she has coordinated the poetry event for the Summer Open Space Series sponsored by The City of Albuquerque since 2009. Currently, she is honored to be part of the collective La Palabra: The Word is a Woman, which is a writer’s collective founded by poet Jessica Helen Lopez.

Beyond poetry, she is an accomplished photographer. Her photos of New Mexico poets have been featured in the Santa Fe magazine Trend (March of 2011).She also photographed the cover of Jessica Helen Lopez’ poetry book, Always Messing With Them Boys (West End Press, 2011), and has her photography featured in September: traces of letting go a poetry book by Katrina K Guarascio (Swimming With Elephants Publications, 2014).

A Fire of Prayer: A Collection of Poetry and Photography is her first full length collection.

Get it before it’s gone

On March 24, 2015 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

Swimming with Elephants will be streamlining our inventory by retiring some of our periodicals. The first book on the chopping block is a fundraising publication for the 2014 Unidos Slam Team. This is an excellent collection by some wonderfully talent youth poets. This book will only be available till the end of March so get it while the getting’s good:

Titles for Retirement

On March 19, 2015 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

A quick note to our follows to inform you that a few of our titles will be retired at the end of March. The reason for the retirement is either due to author choice, out dated anthology, or poor sales.

The following titles will be no longer available as of April 1, 2015:

Cumulus Collections

Take Note

To the Last Word 2014

To Anyone Who Has Ever Loved a Writer

Available Soon: A Fire of Prayer by Gina Marselle

On January 11, 2015January 11, 2015 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors

In addition, she has published poetic work with The Sunday Poem Online Series, in the Alibi, the Rag, SIC3, Adobe Walls: An anthology of New Mexico poetry, Catching Calliope, Fix and Free Poetry Anthology I and II, and La Palabra Anthology I and II.

Gina reads her poetry at local coffee shops, art galleries, and has been a featured poet at the Church of Beethoven (now known as Sunday Chatter). She has one chapbook (self published) titled ‘Round Midnight (2012). Furthermore, she has coordinated the poetry event for the Summer Open Space Series sponsored by The City of Albuquerque since 2009. Currently, she is honored to be part of the collective La Palabra: The Word is a Woman, which is a writer’s collective founded by poet Jessica Helen Lopez.

Beyond poetry, she is an accomplished photographer. Her photos of New Mexico poets have been featured in the Santa Fe magazine Trend (March of 2011).She also photographed the cover of Jessica Helen Lopez’ poetry book, Always Messing With Them Boys (West End Press, 2011), and has her photography featured in September: traces of letting go a poetry book by Katrina K Guarascio (Swimming With Elephants Publications, 2014).

Her first collection of work, A Fire of Prayer: A Collection of Poetry and Photography has been published by Swimming With Elephants Publications (2015).

my verse, book review by Bill Nevins

On December 11, 2014December 28, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Reviews

Book Review by Bill Nevins

my verse,

a collection of poetry and photography
poetry by Katrina K Guarascio
photography by Shawna Cory

Swimming With Elephants Publications, 2014
69 pages, paperback
swimmingwithelephants.com

This book cures mental fascism.

Katrina Guarascio, the beloved Ms. G of Rio Rancho Public Schools’ Cleveland High School was let go by that notorious school administration and she made local and now national headlines. The reason: Guarascio encouraged her students to write creatively and freely. After all, she was hired to teach Creative Writing. But the school district decided that when one of the students updated the Biblical tale of The Loaves and Fishes, that was just too much for their Common Core Standardized Testing curriculum to bear.

So, the RRPS administration in their wisdom demanded that Guarascio either apologize on behalf of her students and promise never to encourage them to be creative again . . . or leave their employ.

Gurascio split. What else could any self respecting teacher who cares for the free minds of her students do?

She refused to bow to the fascist demand that there are some thoughts which cannot be expressed even in writing class. There are some thoughts which cannot even be thought.

The thought, as expressed by her student, that Jesus might actually have tried to help the poor, seems to have been one of those thoughts banned by the troglodytes of the the Rio Rancho Public Schools Administration.

No, Guarascio preferred to breathe the free air of America and to leave the stifling, choking atmosphere of this Christian Taliban school administation. And she encouraged her students, her charges, to fly free too.

They have been flying free. They have flown on Facebook, on television, in print, and beyond, praising their teacher and castigating the mind-numbing thugs who pretend to be school administrators in the school district that Intel Corp built and bought.

Read this book. It is the free, sexy, mind-liberating voice of Katrina K Guarascio, perhaps New Mexico’s finest mind and sharpest poet. Turn to page 23 (“I am not one/to sit and wait/for tides to change”) and see what I mean.

Word Up. Don’t Shoot. Let Us, and Our Children Breathe.

–Bill Nevins

Find my verse, on Amazon.com, Bookworks Albuquerque, or local Swimming with Elephants Events.

Call for Submissions

On November 30, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

We are especially looking for fiction and memoir.

A Review of Periscope Heart by Rich Boucher

On October 30, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Reviews

A Review of Periscope Heart

by Rich Boucher

Right off the actual bat, I should quasi-recuse myself and say that personally speaking, poems and books of poems that mostly address the notion of love for another generally don’t do anything for me. It’s just a taste thing. So with that context understood, Periscope Heart, Kai Coggin’s first full-length collection of poems (and the twentieth publication from the marvelous Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC) really had its work cut out for it. No joke; I’m being serious. I have read and heard a lot of poetry that addresses some kind of romance/desire with the big R, and much of that just makes me really tired really fast. Maybe I’m not mature enough – who knows? Hand me another beer, love.

But the thing is this: I just haven’t got tired yet; in fact, the work found in Periscope Heart is at times stimulating, energizing and enervating, surprising even me. I stroll on the paths in this book and frequently some soft tendril of very, very careful neologism and pun-craft loops around my torso, and I can’t move. I think Kai Coggin knows this. At some points in this book I’ve suspected Coggin of witchcraft. Kai made a believer out of me and believe me, something in me resisted. Love just isn’t in my wheelhouse; on any given day I’d be more given to burying myself in poems about fetishizing panties and hails of gunfire. And many of the poems (not all) in this volume carry the love as their banner into battle. And I found myself right beside Coggin and marching along.

I’m going to take the magnifying lens to a small handful of poems in this review, but I want you to get this book and sit with it on either an early Saturday morning or a late Sunday night. And I’m being serious about that, too. Maybe you don’t like being told what to do. I feel for you; I really do, but I’m telling you what to do anyway. And I’m the one holding the riding crop. My eyes got pulled to the title “Alchemy” right away, as this is a kind of pet favourite subject of mine. Coggin here gifts us with powerful turns of phrase (“…my tongue knew of only churches inside you…”) and takes the notions of fusion and dissolution and mutability and cleverly finds their examples in this examination of attraction and desire (“…only a touch of alchemy in my bones remains/because you have loved me to earthen clay in your hands….”). Any book that contains a poem that closes with the standalone line “I have turned into gold” is worth both the price of admission and its own weight in the precious metal.

“Planting Stars” is just one of those quietly glorious poems that founds itself upon an arresting image (“…I buried a handful/of stars deep into the soil…”) but it’s more than just one of those glorious poems, because where another, lesser poet might dally too long, fascinated by their own scintillating creation, Coggin takes only the amount of time necessary to bring to our line of sight what she sees, leaving us to choose how long and how often we’ll gaze upon such a pretty, miraculous concoction. As it turns out, we keep coming back to it over and over again.

Some poems, only the real good ones, can mimic the soul and feel of music, of a song that’s both sad and up in one measure, and “Siren” satisfies this tall, tall order very nicely. I think of lines like this one from “Siren”: “…wanting nothing but homecoming/nothing but a respite on the open shores of someone’s thighs…” and I know without a doubt that where the casual reader will silently gape, the reader who is also a writer will gasp at the easy, unhurried majesty found in Kai Coggin’s poetry.

And not for nothing, but this poet knows how to top off her poems with titles that pull you and tease from the tableau of contents (“That Day I was Jesus Christ (Total Eclipse of the Heart)”, “This is how to eat your past:”, “Willing My Body Parts”), and in a nice reversal of a coup de grâce, Periscope Heart comes to you wrapped up in a very handsome, deep-blue package featuring some captivating cover art by Arkansas artist Joann Saraydarian. There are fifty-four poems in this first volume; think of yourself as truly getting away with it when you buy this book.

Visit Kai’s website to order a book straight from Kai, or pick one up on Amazon today.

Now Available: …but my friends call me Burque

On October 21, 2014October 29, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Publications

…but my friends call my Burque
Poetry by Manuel Gonzalez
Available at Amazon and Createspace for $10.95.
Available at SwEP events at discount pricing.

About the collection:

The first complete collection from beloved New Mexico poet Manuel Gonzalez contains many of his most popular performance pieces along with poems he has used and shared in classrooms throughout the state.

Manuel states: “I’m proud to be from New Mexico, and to me it’s more than just green chile and desert. It’s seeing the value of famila and respect. It’s the Rio Grande valley and Santuario de Chi-mayo. It is feasts, dance, poetry and prayer.”

This collection honors New Mexico, her traditions and her beauty.

Manuel González

On October 21, 2014October 21, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors, News1 Comment

Manuel González

Manuel González is a performance poet who began his career in the poetry slam. He has represented Albuquerque many times on a national level as a member of the Albuquerque poetry slam team. Manuel has appeared on the PBS show, Colores, in “My Word is My Power.” He was one of the founding members of the poetry troupe The Angry Brown Poets.

Manuel teaches workshops on self-expression and poetry in high schools and youth detention centers. He also works with an art therapist to help incarcerated young men express them-selves. He was also one of the coaches and mentors for the Santa Fe High Poetry Slam team from 2006-2010. Manuel is from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

His mother’s family is from Barelas. His father’s family is from a small town in Northern New Mexico called Anton Chico, and his father was the lead singer of the band Manny and the Casanovas. He identifies himself as being Chicano. The history, culture, and spirituality of his people are among his inspirations.

His connection to his culture helps him connect to his students. Manuel teaches poetry as a means for self-expression. Looking within oneself and examining ones roots is the essence of the type of poetry he works with emotions, feelings, experiences, and prose in an historical and cultural context is the goal of his workshops. Self esteem, finding something to say, figuring out how to say it eloquently, and letting your voice be heard are just some of the benchmarks in Manuel’s workshop. Manuel resides in Albuquerque, NM with his wife and children.

For information on booking a workshop and/or performance, please send inquiries to: xicanopoet@yahoo.com.

Manuel’s publication: …but my friends call me Burque, is now available from Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC.

“I’m proud to be from New Mexico, and to me it’s more than just green chile and desert. It’s seeing the value of famila and respect. It’s the Rio Grande valley and Santuario de Chi-mayo. It is feasts, dance, poetry and prayer.”

Now Available: Of Small Children / And Other Poor Swimmers by Brian Hendrickson

On October 20, 2014October 23, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

Of Small Children / And Other Poor Swimmers

Poetry by Brian Hendrickson

Available on Amazon and Createspace for $12.95

Of Small Children / And Other Poor Swimmers is centered in the push-pull of place. Hendrickson wants to leave behind his Florida childhood, where every memory is still moist, but he continues “calling on the voices” and crossing back, wading into love, loss and danger with vivid imagery.

— Lauren Camp, author of three collections of poetry, including One Hundred Hungers, and winner of The Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press)

Brian Hendrickson demands the inclusion of the real press of the discursive and meditative into his poems, by juxtaposing multiple levels of diction, and by frequently shifting between the anecdotal, the essayistic, and the lyrical. Through his careful use of these techniques, Hendrickson is able to achieve James Sculley’s ideal of “audacious speaking”: he refuses to capitulate either to the lyrical moment or the abstraction, and so his poetry exists and persists as an urgent place for utterance of consciousness.

— Don Winter, author of seven collections of poetry, including Saturday Night Desperate

Brian Hendrickson

Brian Hendrickson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a range of publications, including Indiana Review,North Carolina Literary Review, and New York Quarterly.

For his poetry Brian has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award, recognized as a 2013 finalist forSmartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and awarded a 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for appearing in Beatlick Press’ La Llarona anthology.

Since earning an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage, Brian has taught and tutored writing at colleges and correctional facilities in Alaska, Florida, North Carolina, and now New Mexico, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing. Brian’s scholarship focuses on the role of writing in social movements and student activism.

Brian Henrickson’s collection of poetry, entitled Of Children / And Other Poor Swimmers, will be available from Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC in September 2014 and will be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other on line distributors, as well as local bookstores.

Now Available: Periscope Heart by Kai Coggin

On September 22, 2014September 21, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News1 Comment

Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC is very excited to release Periscope Heart, a collection by Kai Coggin. Kai was one of submitters to our Open Call this past July and many of our staff were and continue to be very impressed by her work. We enourage our followers to order a signed copy directly from Kai at her website: www.kaicoggin.com.

Welcome to SwEP parade Kai! Don’t be scared, the water’s fine!

Periscope Heart
Poetry by Kai Coggin
Available at Amazon and CreateSpace for $15.00.
Available at Bookworks ABQ and Cafe Bella Coffee for $15.00

About the collection:
In Coggin’s debut collection of poetry, the Heart is the lens through which she leads us in words. Every line is infused with beauty and light and a yearning that is inescapable, palpable. Her voice is precise and piercing, like a song you hum without knowing, because it is already inside you. Her poems carry the fluttering soul, with vivid imagery that is tangible and evocative. PERISCOPE HEART is the sound of wings opening.

“I first met Kai Coggin as a blazing fire of energy, a supernova educator in the Houston high schools. Now she is on her light path teaching through her own poetry. Her words are spells, chants, prayers, invocations. Thank you, Kai, for work of the spirit, for illuminations like desert thunder and a night sky of benedictions.”

– Sandra Cisneros author of House on Mango Street

“Kai Coggin’s first full-length collection, Periscope Heart – as the title may suggest – overflows with intimate reflections on life and love that offer the reader heartfelt observations into places ordinarily beyond our range of vision. Through sensual chronicles that beautifully illuminate taboo subjects, Coggin’s poetry draws from nature and personal narratives to intimate us with her passion for justice, social change and spirituality, in dynamic, seductive strokes.”

– Catherine Ghosh Editor of Journey of the Heart: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry by Women

“Kai Coggin’s Periscope Heart is beauty mapping the dark, a canyon of becoming and letting go. It is a compass to a place where desire is no different than already-full. It beckons and peels open what is fierce in our softness. This book unleashes possibility, celebrates the wild and untethered, while slowing everything down to the heart’s pace.”

– Andrea Gibson Spoken Word Artist and Author of The Madness Vase, Winner of 2008 Women of the World Poetry Slam

Periscope Heart is the first full length collection of poetry from Kai Coggin published by Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC.

Coming Soon: Order Books from Our On-Line Store

On September 16, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Local Events, News

Beginning in just a few short months, you will be able to place orders for Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC through our website.

This is a wonderful alternative for those who want to avoid the “big box” distributors and continue to support our emerging press.

The store is not currently open, as inventory needs to be completed and supplied, however, take a moment to check out the link by clicking here.

Stay tuned and until the store opens, please continue to search our inventory on our list of titles and order from our various distributors.

Now Available: Trigger Warning: Poetry Saved My Life

On September 7, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Publications, Shameless Self Promotion1 Comment

Trigger Warning: Poetry Saved My Life

Compiled and Edited by Zachary Kluckman
Available at Amazon and CreateSpace for $14.95.

For decades, the coffee houses, darkly shadowed bar stools, inner city apartments, and subway stations have sounded the echo of this phrase – poetry saved my life. Poets worldwide have uttered these words to one another like a scared truth, a shared secret. Not all of them certainly, but enough. Enough to make this little tome more than a mere collection of voices, but a vital, celebratory reminder that poetry still opens the door for those whose screams are strangled by pillows. Here are the sounds of pleasure heralded against shoulders, the uplifted voices and stark tremolos of those who have survived the turmoil and trembling because they found something so deceptively simple – so heart-wrenchingly real.

Kai Coggin

On September 7, 2014September 11, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors

Kai Coggin is a full-time poet and freelance writer born in Bangkok, Thailand, raised in Southwest Houston, and currently a blip in the 3-million acre Ouachita National Forest in Hot Springs, AR.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Poetry and Creative Writing from Texas A&M University. She writes poems of feminism, love, spirituality, injustice, metaphysics, and beauty. Kai has been published in Elephant Journal, Cliterature, The Manila Envelope, [empath], Catching Calliope and an anthology to be released summer 2014 called Journey of the Heart. She released her first chapbook, In Other Words, in August 2013. PERISCOPE HEART is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Kai knows that words hold the potential to create monumental and global change, and she uses her words like a sword of Beauty. She can be found most Wednesdays at a local venue, reading her poems into an open mic, hoping the wind carries her words out to the world.

If you would like to contact Kai to arrange a poetry reading or book signing, please e-mail her at periscopeheart@gmail.com.

Order Catching Calliope Winter 2014 Today!

On September 7, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

Brian Hendrickson

On August 31, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors, News

Brian Hendrickson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a range of publications, including Indiana Review, North Carolina Literary Review, and New York Quarterly.

For his poetry Brian has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award, recognized as a 2013 finalist for Smartish Pace’s Erskine J. Poetry Prize, and awarded a 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for appearing in Beatlick Press’ La Llarona anthology.

Brian Henrickson’s collection of poetry, entitled Of Children / And Other Poor Swimmers, will be available from Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC in September 2014 and will be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other on line distributors, as well as local bookstores.

Bill Nevins

On August 17, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Authors, News1 Comment

Bill Nevins grew up Irish Catholic near and in New York City in the 1950’s and 60’s. He moved to northern New England and raised his three children, one of whom, Special Forces SFC Liam Nevins, died in combat in Afghanistan in 2013. Bill has lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico since 1996.

His poetry has been published in Malpaís Review, Green Left Weekly, The Rag, Central Avenue, Sage Trail, Adobe Walls, Más Tequila Review, Special Forces Charitable Trust online, Maple Leaf Rag II, The Cornelian, KUMISS, and other publications. His journalism is found in The Guardian, Forward Motion, Z Magazine, RootsWorld, Hyper Active, Trend of Santa Fe, EcoSource, LOGOS, Thirsty Ear, ABQ ARTS, Local iQ, TM Transmission, The Celtic Connection, Irish American News, An Scathan/Celtic Mirror and other journals.

Bill Nevins hosts second-Wednesday monthly poetry readings at The Range Cafe in Bernalillo, New Mexico. He can be contacted at bill_nevins@yahoo.com and at Bill Nevins on Facebook.

Bill Nevins’ collection of poetry, Heartbreak Ridge, is now available from Swimming with Elephants Publications.

author photo credit: Mark Fischer

Now Available: Heartbreak Ridge by Bill Nevins

On August 17, 2014November 3, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Publications2 Comments

Heartbreak Ridge

Poems by Bill Nevins
Edited by Pia Gallegos
Available at Amazon and CreateSpace for $10.95.
Also available at Bookworks ABQ and Cafe Bella Coffee and other Swimming with Elephants events.

“Heartbreak Ridge is a campfire of the resistance, a place where all kinds of poems-from jeremiads, scourgings, and passionate rants to absolutely beautiful works of love and loss-gather between its covers. Bill Nevins is a truth-teller,and what he has to tell us about the last half century of American life and politics is a matter of highly charged poetic urgency.”

~Terence Winch, author of Boy Drinkers,

“When New York Was Irish” and many other works of poetry, music and fiction.

Now Available: Mothers & Daughters

On August 5, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News

Mothers & Daughters

A La Palabra: The Word is a Woman Anthology

Compiled and Edited by Jessica Helen Lopez & Katrina K Guarascio
Photography by Mariah Bottomly
Available at Amazon and CreateSpace for $14.95.
Available at Bookworks ABQ and Cafe Bella Coffee for $10.00

Mothers & Daughters is the second book published as an anthology produced by La Palabra – The Word is a Woman. It is a collection of poetry and some non-fiction prose. Similar to our first self-titled book, it is an effort of workshop participants (in conjunction with the annual Women & Creativity month-long series), as well as a call for national submissions. In this collection you will surely find stories like your own, and some not at all. By way of black and white photography, you will be invited into the home and hearth of women, the familial ties that bind mothers to their daughters and vice versa. It is an intergenerational journey of unconditional love, compassion, faith and sometimes loss, heartbreak and even disappointment. Here are poems and stories of humor, exasperation, healing, and protectiveness. Here are stories about you and yours. La Palabra is a humble collective, a steady heartbeat, a clanging gong. Our publications are modest, but steeped with fierce pride and joy in the Word. An everlasting fidelity in the name of Woman.

Now Available: Catching Calliope Summer 2014

On July 13, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Publications

I am very excited for this edition. We have an eclectic array of poets, including several new voices and alongside some of my favorites from the local community. I am hoping all who contributed and are included in the pages of this anthology will be pleased with the outcome and their representation.

Catching Calliope Summer Edition 2014 is now available for order on Amazon and Createspace.

We will have copies available for all contributors at The Second Saturday Slam on August 9th at Café Bella Coffee in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. If you are unable to attend the release, please send us an applicable mailing address at your convenience and you will receive your copy in late August.

Thank you for your submissions and for your support of the Rio Rancho Youth Poetry Community. If you would like to learn more about our organization, please visit our blogsite and continue your support by picking up a copy of one of our previous published editions of Catching Calliope (available in the ABQ/Rio Rancho area and on Amazon.com).

Cover Art: Adrienne Smith

The Moon’s Gravity
~Reed Bobroff

Reflection
~Manuel Gonzalez

Skin Tags
~Levi J. Mericle

Alchemy
~Kai Coggin

Mothers
~ Sarita Sol

Through Their Eyes
~Josephine Barela

They Call It a Crush Because It Is Orange and Carbonated
~Rob Sturma

I wanna
~Gabriella Reyes

The Lost Boy who cried at the Moon
~ Alicia Borillo

Wind
~Jude Marx

Minerals
~Danielle Smith

Watermelon

~Josephine Barela

Second First Dates
~ John Parker

Despedida para Breaking Bad
~Reed Bobroff

Albuquerque, a Woman
~ Gangadharan Esakki

Willing My Body Parts
~Kai Coggin

Doublets
~Rob Sturma

Cigarette
~Lissa Baca

La Curendera
~Manuel Gonzalez

Louder Than the Color Red
~Megan Young

A Convenience Store Revisited
~Amoja Sumler

Deep Sea Ghost Divers
~John Parker

I dreamt you
~Katrina K Guarascio

It Should Have Been Me
~Tapestry

Remember
~Wil Gibson

Now Available: the fall of a sparrow

On June 11, 2014October 27, 2021 By awhitetrashpoetIn Publications1 Comment

A new collection of poetry by Katrina K Guarascio, entitled the fall of a sparrow, has been released from Swimming with Elephants Publications.

Find this new collection on Amazon .

Learn more about this unique collaboration of art and verse by reading an except from the foreword, penned by Swimming with Elephants Publication author Zachary Kluckman.

An except from the forward:

Here is a collection of poetic wonderment, musings on the ineffable universal experience of beauty as it is. Real, at times veiled by the uncertain consequence of letting go or giving in, yet always an experience on the lip of the chasm, preparing for wild success or the wailing dismay of failure. Guarascio’s poems are filled with beautiful creatures, metaphoric animals crawling amongst the words, haunting the reader with their subtle, but necessary presence. In these poems are love, loss, resignation, breathlessness, intimacy and touch; the edge of the blade pressing against the plump flesh of the fruit or the slight swell of hipbone under a lover’s hand.

Acknowledging the Elephant!

On June 1, 2014June 17, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn Local Events, News, Shameless Self Promotion

t’s time this elephant officially came out to play!Save the evening of June 14th to hear poetry from some of our wonderful authors and save your dimes to buy their books. Hosted by the Artbar on Gold and Second Street in Albuquerque, NM, this event is basically an open-house for our authors to share and talk about the works they have published or been a part of and the future of this emerging publishing company.

Founded by Katrina K Guarascio, SwEP is an independent publishing agency that publishes/promotes the community-minded, working artist/writer, and raises funds and awareness for youth writers in the community. Blue-collar artistic elephants!

On hand will be current (and near future) published SwEP authors and contributors like Zachary Kluckman, Jessica Helen Lopez, Katrina K Guarascio, Gina Marselle, Benjamin Bormann, and more!

Also, musician extraordinaire Keith Sanchez will open and close the show with his awesome musica!

Special Pricing: All books are $10.95 credit/check or $10 cash.

Swimming with Elephants Publications Available for Purchase at Event:

Anthologies:
Catching Calliope Winter 2014
Catching Calliope Spring 2014
Cumulus Collections
Light as a Feather
To The Last Word 2014

Nika Ann’s To Anyone Who Has Ever Loved a Writer
Emily Bjustrom’s Loved Always Tomorrow
Matthew Brown’s Verbrennen
Katrina K Guarascio & Gina Marselle’s September
Katrina K Guarascio & Shawna Cory’s my verse,
Zachary Kluckman’s Some of it is Muscle
Jessica Helen Lopez’s Cunt.Bomb.

First Review of Light as a Feather

On May 16, 2014May 16, 2014 By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Reviews

First Review of the new anthology Light as a Feather.

After reading the first few pages, I realized what they were writing was exactly what I went through. I do not think that people have any idea how many girls are afflicted with this disease. This book needs to read by every middle school and high school student. Teens need to know that this disease will affect every aspect of your life, sometimes for the rest of your life! Thank you so much for compiling this book.

Order you copy today!