Winner of the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook contest, The Beginners is a stunning collection where poetic intensity meets speculative imagination as Kasa explores what it means to be human when the lines blur between self and machine, love and dependence, memory and ghost. With sharp wit and surprising tenderness, The Beginners demands we examine not just where we're going, but who we're becoming along the way.
When Digging Press started in 2013, here is what they wrote: "Digging Through the Fat is a call for action. What we want from literature is truth, beauty, and humanity, but artists have to dig through the fat to get to these ideals. Our world is bloated with distractions. Meaning has become a malleable commodity. We are Romantics and believe Art, in all its forms, is the exception. We publish innovative prose/poetry pieces." I'm proud and excited to be part of Digging Press's mission and family.
"Here we gain a sassy new voice that’s precise and eerie, creepily comic, and casually catastrophic. The result? Inventive, sometimes surreal stories, compact and compelling. Her feverish imagination leads us like cultists to futures where the human story takes a sharp turn. Each story harbours a lingering sense of peril or unprecedented change. Baudelaire, master of the flash story, famously said, “The beautiful is always bizarre.” Kasa’s The Beginners proves that the bizarre can be beautiful, if not prophetic."
—Barbara Black, author of Music from a Strange Planet and Little Fortified Stories
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"These short stories intrigue and delight from the start. Some are surreal, some are funny, some are disturbing, some are edge-of-the seat thrillers, some have a Black Mirror-type high concept pinning them together, and some take an idea and sustain it throughout the whole story, like a cable of weirdness running throughout that we don’t yet understand. These stories keep you reading, keep you guessing, and keep you engaged. They demonstrate a love for language and above all a love of the reader, taking us on a dazzling, dizzying journey led by an author who has absolute control. Highly recommended."
—David Gaffney, author of Sawn-Off Tales, Whale, and Concrete Fields
"I am struck by Kasa's fabulous (and fabulist) wit and uncanny brilliance. Her stories move like little boats that carry the reader to a place where fantasy merges with revelation, where the surreal is also real. They are portals into the modern-day psyche—into patriarchy, gender issues, our devices, and personal identity. While at times funny and light, her stories are also profoundly moving. Story by story, line by line, Kasa surprises the reader with her miraculous imagination and stunning insights."
—Nin Andrews, Author of Son of a Bird, a memoir in prose poems
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"In The Beginners, Heidi Kasa's characters—lonely, isolated, hurting—reach for connections they may never find. They reach nonetheless, all the while holding up a mirror to our world and demanding that we ask ourselves what it is to be human."
—Jasmine Sawers, Author of The Anchored World
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"A precise and multi-dimensional glimpse into the lives of women and what it means to break outside of our prescribed roles in human affairs to live in a more dimensional and questioning way. This collection has a wonderful, masterful use of voice and diverse perspectives."
—Britta Jensen, award-winning author of the Eloia Born series
The Bullet Takes Forever is a collection of poems facing “America’s culture of mass shootings.” The poems range from processing a mother's personal experiences with active shooter situations to philosophical, psychological, and linguistic explorations of gun violence. At turns yearning, vulnerable, and fierce, this collection resonates with readers who feel the effects of rising gun violence and the need for increased safety measures. Poems from this collection won the Plaza Prose Poetry 2024 Prize and the Poetry Super Highway 2023 Prize, and were also chosen as a finalist for the ESWA Crossroads Contest 2024.
I'm so happy to be included in the group of talented writers at Mouthfeel Press, where part of their mission is to promote social and personal transformation.
"With calculated precision and considered framing, this book examines not only the sources of gun violence, but the weight of the damage, and the emotions required to both mend and heal these too frequent wounds. The Bullet Takes Forever calls its readers to recognize the humanity we risk losing by accepting these events as ordinary."
—S.C. Says, author of Golden Brown Skin
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"There’s an urgency in these poems that could only have been written by a poet and a mother. These poems are powerful and poignant and sadly so damn necessary. This collection shook me to my core."
—Joaquín Zihuatanejo, author of Occupy Whiteness and Arsonist
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"The book showcases the depth of the author’s commitment to a clearer and more human future where love can emerge as our salvation value. One of the most stunning and effective works of art in any medium I’ve experienced that speaks to a social crisis."
—Jeffrey Bryant, author of The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers
"Beauty and horror coexist in Heidi Kasa’s The Bullet Takes Forever, as she juxtaposes luminous imagery with the gloom and stark reality of pervasive gun violence. Kasa's deft command of poetics lures the reader by guiding the eye and heart through the seesaw of loss and hope to persevere."
—Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal, author of Watcha
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"This book seeks to break through silence and taboo, to ask Why can’t we be safe? 'What about the children?' "
—Hollie Hardy, author of Lions Like Us and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems​​​​
Mixed Bag of Tricks
Have you ever gotten a mystery bag of items, in which each one you pulled out surprised and delighted you? Well, now's your chance!
This fiction anthology from Murasaki Press
includes great writers experimenting
with genres and styles.
There's something in here for everyone:
sci-fi, fantasy, surrealism, satire, suspense, and literary fiction.
My story is called "Mechanical Mommy."
For all the mothers and robots out there. :)
And mother robots—can't forget them.
They'll get their own Mother's Day one day.
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I prefer to support small bookstores and communities over Amazon, but I also understand how convenient Amazon is in our current lives.
Split
Split is a story about the constancy of change, the inevitability of disruption, and the roles that humans play as creators and destroyers in each other’s lives. After big changes or major losses, grief can cause numbness. Forces in our lives pull us back into full experience. Through inventive structure and language, Kasa pushes her characters through painful transformations that are told in personal, philosophical, and cosmic dimensions.
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Buy the chapbook here from the Monday Night Press website.
Or, if you prefer to use another payment method, contact me here.