Pulley Press Releases (Please Consider These) Alternate Names for the Moon by Kevin Chesser
Today, on October 5th, 2026, Pulley Press is proud to announce the release of (Please Consider These) Alternate Names for the Moon by Kevin Chesser.
In this version of rural American life, Chesser’s poems wrangle with sobriety and take joy in old films. They seek alternative names for love and hope.
Where else would you find pigs strutting in low-waisted jeans, dammed rivers shaping the setting for a late-night encounter, or a man called Smoke who dissolves as quickly as his namesake?
In this second collection by Chesser, wildly slanted truths assemble into heartbreaking and funny poems, and the journey pops like a lucid dream that startles and awakens readers. His is a new and vivid American voice.
Karan Kapoor says, “Kevin Chesser writes poems that start as jokes and end as prayers. Even as their speaker is stranded in an absurd rural American dreamscape, somehow it all adds up to a tender account of loneliness, addiction, and trying to stay alive — I was laughing out loud as they gutted me. Chesser knows that ‘the poem will save us, the poem / will not save us,’ and he writes from the dead center of that contradiction with rare comic precision and even rarer heart.”
Claire Hopple, author of CHANGE THE SUBJECT, writes of the collection, “I once saw Kevin climb into a coffin. Perhaps he is still there, reporting live in the shape of poems, watching SportsCenter with Bigfoot, and curing our 'cancer of guilt' by ladling us with pools of moonlight.”
Kevin describes his second collection as “a ‘memoir’ of the last 4 years of my life, a period where I lost my job, met my fiancee, (finally) got serious about my writing, and quit drinking after years of badly needing to dry up. And when I say memoir, I mean memoir inasmuch as I will probably ever write one. What it really is is a kind of tonal retrospective, a poetry mixtape, cataloguing a moment in time when it seemed like everything was possible, and nothing would ever happen again.”
“The most important ritual I adopted during this period of spiritual readjustment,” he says, “was the late evening walk, which was not only a tonic for my troubled mind, but also the root of the book’s nocturnal theme. I am an ardent fan of well-worn paths, both physical and metaphorical, and these poems were born out of that inclination. You could argue that (Please Consider) is about wanting to disappear into liminal spaces, and the karmic repercussions of doing so.
“Mostly, I hope it’s a voice people enjoy spending time with, which remains to be seen. But I do know that writing this book made it a little easier for me to be around myself.”
Links to purchase (Please Consider These) Alternate Names for the Moon online can be found here, or find it at your favorite local bookstore.
About the Poet:
Kevin Chesser lives in Thomas, West Virginia, in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. Home to roughly 600 people, the town is known around the region for its vibrant local arts community. His poems can be found or are forthcoming in Passages North, Annulet, DIAGRAM, Spectra Poets, Only Poems, Empty House Press, elsewhere, Pithead Chapel, BRUISER, and others. His previous collection of poems, Relief of My Symptoms, was published in 2023 by Ghost Palace Press. He is also a musician, with an album, Wizard Clipp, released in 2021. He earned his MFA in creative writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College, and from 2017-2019 was a member of the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue, an artist collective and mobile festival celebrating Appalachia’s literary, punk, and experimental music scenes.
