Spartan Press, Kansas City, MO (2025)

01/13/2025

2024 was a busy year (watch this page as we share more achievements).

THANK YOU to writers and musicians, to visual artists, and new media artisans who continue to capture OUR place and OUR times!. THANK YOU to each of you who donated to ClubMed in 2024. Your support of Middle American arts and artists is invaluable.

One of our most significant 2024 projects was the retool of the Spartan Press website. Since its founding in 1998, Spartan Press has published over 400 books of poetry, memoir, fiction, visual art and essay by literally hundreds of middle-American writers and visual artists.

Visit the new site. Check out the authors and books. Hell, follow a link and purchase a book (or 3). We would LUV it if you re-share the link to your socials and help spread the word.

CONGRATULATIONS Spartan Press — long live the written word!!

FINALLY -- we invite you to join in the work ahead by making a donation to Club Medici at: https://club-medici.org/donate/

Thank You,

W.E. Leathem
Chander Jayaraman
John Caswell

https://spartanpresskc.com

Spartan Press authors John Dorsey, Justin Hamm, & Jason Ryberg give a free reading at Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 6pm in the Hetzel-Hoellein Room.

01/13/2025

2024 was a busy year (watch this page as we share more achievements).

THANK YOU to writers and musicians, to visual artists, and new media artisans who continue to capture OUR place and OUR times!. THANK YOU to each of you who donated to ClubMed in 2024. Your support of Middle American arts and artists is invaluable.

One of our most significant 2024 projects was the retool of the Spartan Press website. Since its founding in 1998, Spartan Press has published over 400 books of poetry, memoir, fiction, visual art and essay by literally hundreds of middle-American writers and visual artists.

Visit the new site. Check out the authors and books. Hell, follow a link and purchase a book (or 3). We would LUV it if you re-share the link to your socials and help spread the word.

CONGRATULATIONS Spartan Press — long live the written word!!

https://spartanpresskc.com

FINALLY -- we invite you to join in the work ahead by making a donation to Club Medici at: https://club-medici.org/donate/

Thank You,

W. E. Leathem
Chander Jayaraman
John Caswell

https://www.facebook.com/share/159qFmnMuZ/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Spartan Press authors John Dorsey, Justin Hamm, & Jason Ryberg give a free reading at Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 6pm in the Hetzel-Hoellein Room.

01/12/2025

"It takes little imagination to understand the moral bankruptcy of Putin and the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine. But it requires empathy and insight, discipline and the poet’s eye and imagination to present such a tragic subject and raise it to the level of language art. In Orwell at the Kremlin Walter Bargen pays attention to the facts and at the same time to the essentials of language to support the world and its people. Bargen makes and presents a fierce and exceptional witnessing in poetry that is true and resonant; he brings home the specifics of suffering and the light of the human will that chooses to survive with a deep humanity from which we can all learn. This is what poetry at its best can do in the face of totalitarian inhumanity. This book is an amazing achievement and an important response."

—Christopher Buckley, author of "One Sky to the Next"

"The depth of tragedy is keenly felt in Bargen's poem marking the day of the Russian invasion: "February 24th, 2022. The Cost of a Flower." In this early piece, we meet an old woman questioning a Russian soldier, "Why are you here? Why are you here?" The soldier's only response is...

01/11/2025

Gasconade Review #9, "No One Sees the Irony," featuring:

Walter Bargen, DeAni Blake-Britton, Maria Vasquez Boyd, Tony Brewer, Steve Bridgens, Steve Brisendine, Marcus Cafagña, Beverly Cartwright, Lesley Day, Chase Dimock, L. Dopa, Alison Erazmus, José Faus, Linzi Garcia, Ken Gierke, Alex Gildzen, Pilar Graham, Beth Gulley, Justin Hamm, Caitlin Johnson, Melissa Fite Johnson, Mike Jurkovic, J. Khan, Julianne King, Nancy Krieg, Lynne Jensen Lampe, Kyle Laws, Gary Lechliter, Dawne Leiker, Linda M. Lewis,
R. Nikolas Macioci, Huascar Medina, Al Ortolani, Michael Poage, Matthew Porubsky, Kevin Rabas, Gabriel Ricard, Kevin Ridgeway, Andrés Rodríguez, Alexej Savreux, Tyler Robert Sheldon, William Sheldon, Scott Silsbe, Mary Silwance, Sharon SingingMoon, Richard Stimac, Timothy Tarkelly, William Trowbridge, JD Vail, Maryfrances Wagner, Jeff Weddle, Clarence Wolfshohl, Nettie Zan

The Gasconade Review is a literary and arts publication based out of the Osage Arts Community (http: //osageac.org/), located on the Gasconade River, just outside of Belle, Missouri. It appears twice annually, focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on...

01/10/2025

The latest from Spartan Press: "Rough-Cut Elegies" featuring Aurora Athelyn, T. James Chapman, Ben Kuzemka, Nancy Jo Allen, Walter Bargen, Terry Allen, Barbara Harris Leonhard, Lynne Jensen Lampe, Elijah Burrell, Anand Prahlad!

Thomas Gray said, "Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn." Others may say that poets are Dreamers and Drifters living among their imaginings that Jitter and Shimmer. Some consider poetry to be the Helium of human Creation, allowing us to rise like the voices...

01/09/2025

"Rick Christiansen is a poetic archeologist pealing back the layers of his life with no anesthetic. Each transgressive event is dug up and laid out on the white earth of the page for the reader to see. Each poem in this amazing book is a bit of bone from the broken skeleton of his life. Bone Fragments opens the poet's life to what must be confronted, must be negotiated, must be accepted, and what must be surrendered, then finally to believe it all and laugh. Christiansen conducts a brilliant, heartfelt and painful excavation of his life. If readers only read one book of poetry this year it should be Bone Fragments"

-Walter Bargen, First Poet Laureate of Missouri, author of "Radiation Diary"

"Whitman wrote "who touches this book touches a man." When we pick up Rick Christiansen's powerful and elegant Bone Fragments, we also touch a man's history and character. The poems are shaped by Christiansen's life, his alcoholic, abusive mother, the younger brother he stole groceries...

01/09/2025

Now available from Sartan Press: "The American Enigma is You" by Joe Dimino!

"I found that we may have some similarities in our backgrounds and why we write poetry. It's cathartic and therapeutic for you and your writings offers the reader the same opportunity for catharsis and therapy. I love the format of highlighting the first line and the syncopated style. The...

01/07/2025

Now available from Spartan Press: "O Death" by Justin Hamm!

"With undeniable intelligence, wit, and plenty of dark humor, Justin Hamm wrestles with mortality in his latest chapbook, O Death. Eschewing easy answers, these poems take a decidedly individualistic approach: "I'm only going where I want to go," proclaims the speaker. Ultimately,...

01/06/2025

The latest from Spartan Press: "About Those Losses" by James Benger, Sarah Worrel and Lindsey Martin-Bowen!

James Benger has written a bunch of stuff. Some of it has even been published in print and on the interwebs. He is the resident slacker on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and is the most truant member of the Riverfront Readings Committee. He is also the admin of...

01/05/2025

Now available from Spartan Press: "Heart: Collected Poems 1975-2024" by Michael Poage!

When you open any book of Michael Poage's poems from the last ten years, you encounter geological layers of history-layers of suffering and bloodshed, of war but also of insight and grace. And you encounter the voice of the poet--but is it his own persona or of someone he has known in Croatia,...

01/04/2025

The latest from Spartan Press: "Every Angel in Heaven is a Hopscotch Champion, Selected Poems 2016-2020" by Victor Clevenger!

"Victor Clevenger is a writer whose work I genuinely get excited to read. He has a unique voice that he seamlessly reinvents time and time again, that always remains Clevenger. Every Angel in Heaven is a Hopscotch Champion is collection of over 300 selected poems from...

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