SIGEL LITERARY PRESS (previously Ballerini Book Press)Slender. Never Spineless.Sam Rasnake

FALLEN LEAVES

FALLEN LEAVES is a modern day commentary drawn from a selection of online comments and quotes. Original, astute and deeply relevant, Sam Rasnake’s newest poetry collection speaks with alacrity, openness and a sense of awareness that is a lesson to each of us.

EXTRACT

See How They Fly, I’m Crying

“It is a heartbreaking time to love this
wretched world and fellow humans.”
– Alina Stefanescu, Twitter (X), 1 Nov. 2023

[…making me recall WC Williams, his believing how tough it is to
get the news from poems, yet each day we die “miserably,” he said
– because of what we don’t find there, what we miss, what is lost –
because…]

all news is a gaggle a careless fluke
in broken flight / humanity is or has
become or always was a dark cancer
walking staggering the uninvited the
living dead in everything / closed eyes
watching falling / where the heart was:
money / instead of blood: hate / in place
of dreams: yes yes yes / hollow sounding
thuds empty heads bouncing rolling on
asphalt / paper bags blown over broken
fields never stopping going everywhere
going nowhere / what is truth: impossible
to find / who is safe: no one / who is the
enemy: I am you are we are all together

Sam Rasnake’s works, nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best Small Fictions, Best of the Web, Southern Poetry Anthology, Bending Genres Anthology, MiPOesias Companion, and A Cluster of Lights: An Anthology. He’s the author of three chapbooks and four poetry collections—most recently, Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit, 2023) and Fallen Leaves (Ballerini Book Press) 2025. Sam Rasnake’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in Spillway, Wigleaf, The Drunken Boat, Poets/Artists, FRiGG, Necessary Fiction, OCHO, Literal Latté, Pithead Chapel, Switched-on Gutenberg, The Southern Poetry Anthology, MiPOesias Companion 2012, BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2, and Best of the Web 2009. He has served as a judge for the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, University of California, Berkeley, and as an editor for Blue Fifth Review. Rasnake is the author of Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press) and Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press).

World within the World

A Thread to Follow

Inside a Broken Clock

Books

Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit.net, 2023)

Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press, 2013)

Necessary Motions (Sow’s Ear Press, 1998)

Chapbooks

Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press, 2010)

Lessons in Morphology (GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ, 2010)

Religions of the Blood (Pudding House Publications, 1998)

FORTHCOMING TITLES

DECEMBER 2025

“FALLEN LEAVES” poetry collection

DECEMBER – JANUARY 2025 / 2026

Through the Looking Glass. An International Portraiture of Mothers – An Anthology

PUBLICATIONS

Creative Nonfiction

Journals

Memoir Mixtapes / Pithead Chapel, Red Fez

Fiction

Journals

Bending Genres, Connotation Press / Fwriction : Review / Santa Fe Literary Review / Wigleaf

Poetry

Anthologies

The Southern Poetry Review (Texas Review Press, 2013) / BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2 (Boxcar Poetry Review, 2011) / Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books, 2009)

Anti-Heroin Chic / Big Muddy / BigCityLit / Boxcar Poetry Review / Frigg Magazine / Literal Latte /MiPOesias

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature / The Drunken Boat / UCity Review