Video: The All American Poetry Parade features my "Random Rules"

Thanks so much to Scot Young and Rusty Truck for including my poem "Random Rules" in their All American Poetry Parade alongside some mighty fine poets! 

Read my poem at https://rustytruck.wordpress.com/2026/08/28/john-burroughs-2/.

Watch a video of me reading it at https://substack.com/profile/116085178-scot-young/note/c-324606921.

View the entire parade by clicking the image below.

Awash Returns Ashore!

[August UPDATE: These are now all sold out. Thank you so much to everyone who picked up a copy or two! The original post follows.]

My most recent chapbook, AWASH, was published in July 2025 in a very limited edition by Evansville's Pure Sleeze Press (alongside chaps by John Dorsey, Jason Ryberg, Scott Laudati, and Tony Brewer). AWASH has been out of print since that original run almost immediately sold out.

However.... 

I have just found (among things that I never fully unpacked from last year's road trip to the U.S. Southwest) FIFTEEN unread author copies of AWASH. I'm numbering them 1 through 15, signing them, and selling them on a first come, first serve basis to help fund my forthcoming revised and expanded edition of The Wrest of the Worthwhile.

While they last, if you want a copy (shipped to you free), send me $10 US via Venmo (@jesuscrisis), CashApp ($crisischronicles), PayPal (jc@crisischronicles.com), or cash/check to John Burroughs, 535 Parkside Blvd., Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

Reviews of AWASH:

"John's poems make me think and stop for a second and see things in a different way. Good writers do that."

     —Scot Young, author of Brautigan Meets Bukowski, All Around Cowboy, and more

In reading (and rereading) AWASH, I have only found more to admire in Burroughs' concision, precision, dexterity, and vulnerability. These are beautiful, tenderly-rendered poems.

     —Jennifer Browne, author of American Crow, The Salt of the Geologic World, and more

Throughout AWASH (Pure Sleeze Press, 2024), John Burroughs condenses the big stuff of life into fistfuls of resonant words like the strange debris that comes awash upon the shores of everyday consciousness. 

"Each step into abyss leads to

where feet become ungrounded,

hearts astounded."

(stanza 3, "Faithwalking")

"Potential Energy" from this beautifully produced poetry chapbook will be reprinted in the second volume of Stormwash: Environmental Poems (Seaker Press, August 2025).

     —Hiromi Yoshida, author of Umami, Icarus in Crete, Icarus Superstar, and more

Poems in Awash:

Faithwalking
Darshan
Shaktipat
Bilateral Heart Moon Resolution
Aura
Beacon
Hunger
A Wait, A Final Fall
Deluge
Critical Condition
A Superior Stimulant
But for Now
Potential Energy
Selkie

ISBN: 979-8-88596-400-5. 

Finally, deepest thanks to Jonathan S Baker, K Arizona, and Antoine Ball of Pure Sleeze for seeing this work into print in the first place.

Appearing in DEPOSE: An Anthology of Working Class Solidarity

One of my photographs and two written pieces, "Home of the Enslaved" and "Don't Freeze," appear in this new anthology published by Mark Lipman's Vagabond Press. 

254 pages, paperback. 

Buy DEPOSE for $25 here.

May 8th: Burroughs, Jusek and Minney at Mac's Backs Books

I look forward to reading with Jeremy Jusek and Barbara Marie Minney on May 8th, 7 p.m. at Mac's Backs-Books On Coventry in Cleveland Heights.

 

ABOUT BARBARA MARIE MINNEY

Barbara Marie Minney is a transgender woman, award winning poet, writer, speaker, teaching artist, and quiet activist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Politico, The Buckeye Flame, The Gasconade Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Pine Cone Review, Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, Woman Scream: The International Poetry Anthology of Female Voices, and I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. Barbara’s poetry has also been translated into Spanish. She is the author of If There’s No Heaven, the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the "Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge;" "Dance Naked With God;" and "A Woman in Progress." Barbara is a retired attorney and a seventh generation Appalachian and lives in Tallmadge, Ohio, with her wife of over 42 years and a menagerie of stuffed animals. You can follow Barbara at https://www.barbaramarieminneypoetry.com.

ABOUT JEREMY JUSEK

Jeremy is the poet laureate of Parma, Ohio. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University and chemistry/theatre degrees from Marietta College. He has authored more than a half-dozen plays and three poetry collections: We Grow Tomatoes in Tiny Towns (Unsolicited Press, 2019), The Less-Traveled Street (Maverick Duck Press, 2022), and The Details Will Be Gone Soon (ELJ Editions, 2023). He hosts the Ohio Poetry Association's podcast Poetry Spotlight, runs the West Side Poetry Workshop, teaches through Literary Cleveland, and founded the Flamingo Writers’ Guild. To learn more, please visit www.jeremyjusek.com.

Mac' Backs
1820 Coventry Road
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
216-321-2665
www.macsbacks.com

Country Fried Panda Poetry Festival Next Weekend in Kentucky

Finally home. I've been on the road pretty much since May 25th. Didn't have my computer or wi-fi for chunks of that time—and when I did, they didn't get much use.

Although I failed to get a ton of productive writing done, I did find an ocean of inspiration.

Now I have tons of things to catch up on (for example, literally hundreds of emails) and a fairly full schedule this week before Shelley and I head to Kentucky on June 9th to read with interesting folk from around the country for the Country Fried Panda festival in Shelbyville.

I've said all this to say that if I owe you a response, a book, or anything else, I will get to it as soon as humanly possible.

Peace, love and poetry to you all!

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Ouroboros by Chansonette Buck!

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.

Select Your Location

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

#####

 

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) 

 

#####

 

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

#####

 

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.

 

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Before the Next Ice Age by Lisa J. Cihlar

Crisis Chronicles Press is thrilled to announce our second new publication of 2022, Before the Next Ice Age by Lisa J. Cihlar. We've been huge fans of Lisa's work for well over a decade and are happy as can be to have had the opportunity to work with her again. 

Before the Next Ice Age features more than twenty prose poems on 34 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5". The front cover painting is also by Lisa J. Cihlar. Published 22 January 2022. ISBN: 978-1-64092-953-1. First edition of 150 copies.

 

U.S. or International?

United States $10.00 USD International $14.00 USD

 

Before the Next Ice Age is available for only $10 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 (plus $3 for shipping in the United States). 

 

Or subscribe to our entire 2022 series (at least ten titles, plus a surprise or two) for $100 with free shipping.

Earlier praise for Cihlar's work:

"When I first encountered Lisa Cihlar's poetry, I sensed an electricity in the air, a subterranean movement that insinuated itself up from the ground into my bones. And then I felt flooded, suddenly, with the wonder only great art inspires. Cihlar's poetry is full of muscle and sinew, power and verve, a voice so undeniable that it wraps itself around your synaptic connections and becomes indelible, essential. This is poetry of the highest order, of the most terrific, breath-stripping power."

—Terri Brown-Davidson, Author, Pulitzer Prize Nominee, The Carrington Monologues

 

Lisa J. Cihlar's poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gargoyle Magazine, South Dakota Review, Crab Creek Review, and Mid-American Review. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net award. Her three previous chapbooks are The Insomniac’s House from Dancing Girl Press, This Is How She Fails from Crisis Chronicles Press, and When I Pick Up My Wings from the Dry Cleaner (winner of the 2013 Blue Light Poetry Prize) from Blue Light Press. Cihlar lives in rural southern Wisconsin.

 

Crisis Chronicles Press offers 2022 subscription: Everything for $100

Crisis Chronicles Press is back at it, hot and heavy, catching up on our pre-pandemic commitments and so forth. We're putting out 10 titles by some of my favorite writers in 2022, including the just released Contempt of Gravity: The Complete Published Poems, 1981–2020, by William Merricle (a $20 value) - soon to be followed by works by Lisa J. Cihlar, Chansonette Buck, Kent Taylor, Victor Adam Clevenger, Alex Gildzen, Christopher Franke, Brandon Johnson, John Dorsey and more.

Subscribe! Donate $100 to receive all ten 2022 titles and an extra surprise or two.

 

Folks keep asking when we will be taking submissions again, and I've been responding with some variation of "hopefully in the near future when I'm caught up." Well, it looks like we will finally be caught up later this year. But whether we can eventually take on new books and keep going beyond 2022 is gonna depend on whether we can make the press sustainable (which has been a larger challenge than usual during the pandemic with so many events unable to happen). 

 

So please consider treating yourself by picking up a subscription to Crisis Chronicles Press - and thereby also help us to get through 2022 and possibly continue beyond that. Many thanks to the very kind indie lit lovers who have been supportive of this work so far (for nearly 14 years). May the universe smile upon you.

 

PayPal to jc@crisischronicles.com

CashApp us at $crisischronicles

paypal.me/crisischronicles

Now Curating Poetry+ in Lakewood

I am happy to announce that I am now curating the monthly Poetry+ reading series at Art on Madison in Lakewood, Ohio. I'd like to thank previous longtime curator Timothy Gaewsky for the marvelous job he has done creating and maintaining the series and consistently bringing in excellent writers, and I wish him all the best as moves forward. I'm also grateful to Ivan Kende, Vanessza Wright and Art on Madison for being supportive of the local literary community and affording me this opportunity to take the baton and run with it.

Poetry+ has traditionally aimed to shine "the spotlight on a single writer, providing that writer with the platform and time necessary to present a body of their work and to connect with their audience." I plan to maintain that spirit, but expand a bit to feature two writers each month, ideally one great out-of-town writer paired with one great local/Ohio writer. I want to experiment with including a tight but inclusive open mic as well.

Usually Poetry+ takes place on the 3rd Tuesday of each month, though for September 2019 ONLY we will hold it on the 2nd Tuesday. We have some fantastic featured poets coming up, and I hope you'll come out and show your support! 

July 16: Poetry Plus Presents Jeremy Jusek

August 20: Poetry+ featuring Philip Terman & Sandra Feen

September 10: Poetry+ featuring Jeanette Powers & Dianne Borsenik

October 15: Poetry+ featuring Matt Hart & Nicole Hennessy

November 19: Poetry+ featuring Steve Abbott & Leonard Kress







For more information, please visit our website: https://poetrypluscleveland.weebly.com.

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Awaiting Time by Helen Shepard

Crisis Chronicles Press is very pleased to celebrate the December holidays by publishing Awaiting Time, a duende-infused poetry collection by the inimitable Helen Shepard. 

Where are you?

United States $10.00 USD Elsewhere $13.00 USD

Awaiting Time is 48 pages, perfect bound, 5.5x8.5" and features 37 of Shepard's most engaging works, some in Spanish but mostly in English, including "Listening to Flamenco," "Ilusiones," "Más Ilusiones," "Blood Stains," "Garden of Delights," "I Need to Take Apart My Thoughts," "Circular Reincarnation," "Living with Eternity" and "When Blue Was Green." ISBN: 978-1-64092-974-6. Cover art: Ya tienen asiento by Goya. 

Available for $10 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA.

Helen Shepard of Oberlin, Ohio, taught for decades at Lorain County Community College and retired as an Associate Professor of Spanish. For many years after, she continued giving courses for their Center for Lifelong Learning. Helen has lived all over, from American Samoa to Spain, and traveled extensively. Her previous publications include "Camilo Castelo Branco and the Portuguese Inquisition" in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies. She has presented poetry at Snoetry: A Winter Wordfest, the Cleveland Museum of Art and countless other noteworthy locations. To find out more about Helen, please visit www.helenshepard.com or contact her on Facebook.

New LCCC Radio Interview Tuesday 11/13

I look forward to talking with Ryan Sagert about poetry Tuesday 11/13 at 10 a.m. on Lorain County Community College radio. You can listen in at https://www.lcccradio.com/.

Sock it to me, Alex!

Got part of a poem and part of a sock (in one) from renowned poet and mail artist and friend Alex Gildzen in yesterday's mail, "& when" I tried to put it on my foot it fit like so.

Read his whole poem here.
Then read more about his project here.

11th Annual Western Maryland Independent Literature Festival