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(Please Consider These) Alternate Names for the Moon

by Kevin Chesser

“Kevin Chesser writes poems that start as jokes and end as prayers—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.” —Karan Kapoor

In this version of rural American life, Kevin 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.

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.