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A remarkable florilegium of poetry by underground stalwart Steve Carey, edited by the warmly astute Edmund Berrigan, with introduction, colorful history, and notation. Carey, a devotee of poetry, who died young at age 43, is quick to sound, lift his insight and register “panoramic”, formal too. Antics? He makes me laugh and weep. Such fluidity and confidence of wit, going askew. He peopled his poems. And craft? Steve is crafty, shaping, dallying with dailiness as well. His timing is great. Domesticity as a campfire. Our brash wayward century lost on harsh cusp of a cliff there’s something to it, in that I think he saw these hard times coming, and had propensity to stay “in”. Rescue the poetry inside, save the civilization. Carey came from a cinematic big time actor family. But inhabited a milieu his own, his core in friendships in poetry was quietly blooming, from west coast ways to NYC’s downtown mores. We talk about a special emotion in poetry only poetry hums. Steve Carey had it, has it. A soulful hermit’s gifted sophistication yet alive with mental, sinuous surprise. He noticed and listened, conversed, read books endlessly, loved poetry and heard the call. And in his work you get to get closer to the heart of language. The world will curl up/ The world will curl your remarkable lip/And you will live forever if, quip well, abiding time/ Abides/ And seizing time flies to seasons of will and want. — from “Song” Anne Waldman

Available at Asterism here

How terrific that Steve Carey’s “vast, amazing” poetry has been gathered in this sensational book, thanks to the careful, comprehensive work of Edmund Berrigan. We can now see, for example, how the exuberant capitalization — the “ROLLICKING LETTERS” — of “Fleur-de-Lis” catapult him towards his well-known, festive, and irresistible “Goodbye Forever” and “The Complaint: What Are You, Some Kind of…” Irresistible is the word for Steve’s work, in fact: it’s romantic, alive, and silly, a silliness so large it becomes profound. Elinor Nauen

These are definitely the poems of the wrong guy, a really good writer, writing sketches about movies for tv guide, but then suddenly having sex. Steve’s poems are heavy and whimsical, rambling through a house, in a bathrobe, captivating, classical sort of, yet haunted, and the way his verses keep speaking, spouting quotes, no, dialogue, these might just be the best poems in the world. Eileen Myles

As The Collected Poems of Steve Carey reveal, Carey is a quintessential California poet of incredible sophistication and imagination. He was a lyric genius, master of the parenthetical aside, cinematic discontinuity, and cerebral derring-do nimble mind dance. Although not often recognized as such, Steve Carey was the poetry ambassador from California to the New York School. His was the voice of a truly original American poet. Pat Nolan

Steve Carey’s poetry is an ecstatic grin, a gentle serial fever. I’ve been dreaming of this book, and imagining its sounds in Carey’s booming Western voice, for years. Now, lovingly edited by Edmund Berrigan, “like a fracas of theologies,” “swacked / in honor of what you like,” “our systems touching / melting in the fable,” The Collected Poems of Steve Carey is here. Animated by “The list, and real pain,” Carey’s music of “whole fiestas / great pips ah spizzle” is the torqued sound of a New York School unlike any other. “You name it, spangle,” and these poems have it. Reach for this book—or the sky—pronto. Nick Sturm

Steve Carey’s poetry is a lighted aquarium filled with luminous debris. He leaves just enough space for the reader to swim around comfortably. It’s such a relief to finally have all his work in one place, including the ever-elusive sequence, The Lily of St. Marks. I hear reverb-like strains of Clark Coolidge, Eileen Myles and Jim Brodey. I am always shocked by the circuitry and static within Carey’s line. Its voltage has never let up. Cedar Sigo

Subpress

will launch Elizabeth Marie Young’s An Inventory of Almost Everything 

and Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag at The Lilypad in Cambridge

Craft beer, wine, hard cider, soft drinks, hot tea available.

Mingling, brief readings, socializing, and books for sale.

Sunday, March 22, 2026

1:30 pm — 4  pm

The Lilypad

1353 Cambridge Street

Cambridge, MA, 02139 (map)

Elizabeth Marie Young’s An Inventory of Almost Everything 

Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag

In Kyla Houbolt’s rendering of the world, the goings-on of frogs, goats and chickens weigh just as heavily and with as much import as asking ourselves “Does a civilized nation exist?” Becoming Altar weaves themes of fire, dreams, magic, and the need for shelter in poems where there is widespread confusion, in which even the Ancients are unable to recognize and understand the bigger picture. In turns existential and surreal, Houbolt reminds us that “maps are optional […] aren’t we all lost?” while also reminding us that we are “in the direct company/of everything alive.” —David Harrison Horton, author of Model Answers and editor of Saginaw

Available from Asterism here

New review! from The Seaboard Review, Pearl Pirie writes: “Reviewing her book is like being in a painted canyons landscape at sunrise. I could set the camera on delayed shutter and throw it up and whenever wherever it releases, when it lands, it will have captured something beautiful. I don’t have to study the text and try to find an admirable line.”

“All lives, all dances, and all is loud” from the Gabon Pygmy, is quoted by Jerome Rothenberg in the anthology Technicians of the Sacred. I was pulled to poetry because I wanted to participate in that, in the ways humans create. I grew up with poetry in the household, read aloud, on bookshelves, and immersed myself in it seriously at times, though I never sought a career. That kind of immersion into creation is also why I began gardening. I wanted to participate in the way the earth makes beauty. In this way for me poetry and gardening have shared roots. It has to do with life force and how it manifests all things. My five (so far) chapbooks are children of the internet, when it became relatively easy to find venues and connect with other poets and with publishers of poetry. But my very first published poem appeared in a little newsprint quarterly called Cedar Rock, out of West Texas, sometime in the early 1970s. (Neither it nor its editor is with us anymore.) —Kyla Houbolt

Appropriate Drowning Outfit

I’m not sure how to turn this life into a resume.
I don’t write that kind of poetry.
I do notice that the cloud
has a bone missing and
I can relate to that. I’ll be honest
and say I have learned only one word
of heron language and it may be
that I made it up. It’s easy for me to do that
and I hear people lie a lot in resumes
but I can’t, not without vomiting the truth
later on. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Meanwhile is a word I use too often.
It’s because so much else is also happening
all the time, and I keep noticing it.
For example, the way I continue to, impossibly,
live. Paying close attention
to the wrong things. The boneless cloud.
The inscrutable heron. The abuse of sound.

The first full collection by a poet who in the words of poet and critic Susan M. Schultz, “asks how anyone can be a poet, then answers with another question: ‘How can we not?’”

Kyla Houbolt’s poems are just so fresh and generous it’s delightful. They want to give the reader real things, but not as a burden… something to look at on the window sill that gets the sun. They go around ‘putting a knot in the universe’ with their quick images, alive to the ‘glancing unfelt / blow’ of line breaks, the wise surprise of scattered rhyme. Go on, try one. Take a few if you like. —Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry

Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.

Learn more about Kyla Houbolt at her webpage here

The list of chapbooks from CCCP + Subpress is growing!

You can see them, and order them, here: https://cccpchapbooks.bigcartel.com/

Chapbook authors include

Adam DeGraff 

Kyla Houbolt

Dougas Piccinnini

Bob Rosenthal 

Elinor Nauen 

David Harrison Horton 

Marc Vincenz

Jeanl-Paul Pecqueur

Mark Statman 

From Publishers Weekly
If “our dear librarian is a devious machine” then “by force of needle not need but able/ do i explain myself,” in Jen Hofer’s debut Slide Rule. Hofer, who has edited an anthology of poetry by Mexican women due next year from the University of Pittsburgh, splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, which may explain how parts of this “vivacious mismatch enclave missive” came to be. Divided into five parts, including two titled “The Denotative Sky” and one titled “Holocaust” (“There is an art museum./ There is a water pipe./ There is no weathervane.”), the book takes readers on a lexically intensive tour of “strategies to make the skeletal stick still.”
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Jen Hofer’s books include Lip Wolf, a translation of lobo de labio by Laura Solorzano (Action Books, 2007), Sexopurosexoveloz and Septiembre, a translation of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2007), The Route, an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008), and a book-length series of anti-war-poem-manifestos, titled One (Palm Press, 2008). She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a member of the Little Fakers collective which creates and produces Sunset Chronicles, a neighborhood-based serial episodic drama populated entirely by hand-made marionettes inhabiting lost, abandoned and ghost spaces in Los Angeles.