Erik Hofstatter's Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I'll Hear You

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I'll Hear You by Erik Hofstatter from Aqueduct Press as volume 101 in the Conversation Pieces series. This work of dark poetry is now available in both print and e-book editions at www.aqueductpress.com. 

You can read a sample from the book here:  https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-290-9.pdf 

 

 

I stand in a place where sin fell. Where typed-up humanity got rewritten. A machete-draft you only read once. Because paper ideology doesn't protect anyone.

I won’t tell you my name but it ended with—WAR. I always had a conflict in me. Maybe that’s why they picked me. I was a shape-shifter. Not the kind you think. Morals shift in all of us. They change when money hits your palm.

Some were too smart for blood. We used words to shake them up. Then break them. Like a piggy bank. Death became a business partner. The world’s biggest capitalist. There’s a killing to be made.

But there is something in me that even death is afraid of.

Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You is a lyrical exploration of ghost autopsy. 

 

Advance Praise

“Odd. Dark. Disturbing. Hofstatter’s Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You bleeds and haunts quickly. Once you’re in it, you’re in it to the dastardly end.”
 —Christina M. Rau, author of the Elgin Award-winning Liberating the Astronauts

“Hofstatter is a prose poet of brutality and elegance. He explores the darkest depths of what we’re capable of without flinching.”
 —Priya Sharma, author of Ormeshadow, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award

“Hofstatter confidently steps onto the field, hands twitching and full of wires and grue. Not since I encountered Thom Metzger’s This Is Your Final Warning have I been so enraptured by the stitching of words and image story. This, my friends, is absolutely astounding!!”
 —John Boden, author of Thrift Store Puzzles and Etiquette of Booby Traps

Reviews

"There’s a dream world aspect to his poetry that draws to mind the increasingly wide-eyed, deranged Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now as the mundane and the fantastical, the atavistic rising through the tools of modernity, the violently deranged and the softly sensual blurs into a hair-trigger flickering of flashed moments....There is no natural justice beyond what Hofstatter characterises as the chains tying those who killed to those they killed for the rest of their term on Earth."  (Read the whole review)
  —Exquisite Terror, Nick Soulsby, July 14, 2026

Bankrupting Skybanks by Erik Hofstatter

 

 

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Erik Hofstatter's Bankrupting Skybanks, in both print and e-book editions, from Aqueduct Press. Bankrupting Skybanks, a novella in dark poetic prose, is the ninety-seventh volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series. You can purchase it now at www.aqueductpress.com.

  

 

The disquiet in our heads has started fires again. God tries to smoke us out. We have red hair because our heads are alight. But we resist His interpretation. Red also shows our willingness to bleed.

Everyday more flesh leaves our bones. They all leave. The people we love—only out of habit, for contentment. The people we love—only out of respect, for blood shared. Even our own flesh leaves us when we stress. God leaves us when his sky path goes dark. And he waits for us to die so he can peck away. But we don’t know if there’s holy flavor left in us anymore.

Bankrupting Sky Banks is an introspective work inspired by the infamous Borgia family. A half-burned invitation written to God.

We are the prey that prays.

Advance Praise

“A shocking, scandalous, searing story, made all the more visceral by the fact that it has its roots in true history, Hofstatter’s Bankrupting Sky Banks is an extraordinary foray into the dark and deceptive world of the Borgias.”   —Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning & Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island

 

Stone Martyrs by Erik Hofstatter

 

 

 I'm pleased to announce the release, in both print and e-book editions, Stone Martyrs by Erik Hofstatter. Hofstatter tells the dark, dark story of the legendary Mother Shipton and the Rollright Stones through poetic prose. It's available now at www.aqueductpress.com, and you can read a sample from the story at http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-272-5.pdf. 

 

Have you ever written to ether? When pain was the only ink available to you? When envelopes were made of flesh?

Inspired by the folklore of Mother Shipton & The Rollright Stones, Stone Martyrs presents their unheard confessions, their thoughts addressed, but never answered, when only trees listened, when stones had feelings--a collection of words their hearts never had the courage to say. Until now. 

 If stones could speak, what stories would they tell? We learn the horrific answer to that question in Erik Hofstatter’s intriguing collection of dark prose poetry. Profundity mixes with vulgarity, the sacred with the profane, as the once-human Rollright Stones near the British village of Long Compton come alive to contemplate past conquests and atrocities. Sex and violence, passion and obsession, witchcraft and loss of innocence combine in this powerful, disturbing, yet strangely moving dialogue of forever-earthbound souls.—Anna Taborska, award-winning author of For Those Who Dream Monsters and Bloody Britain

 

“Hofstatter’s Stone Martyrs has the intriguing drama of ancient myth. Poetry and prose marry perfectly to create a dichotomy of dark and light, base coarseness and ephemerality. It’s not to be missed.”–Mercedes M. Yardley, author of The Rack: Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks

 

“The stories and visuals that are conjured up as you read each passage are intense, disturbing, and actually quite moving. It reads like a play, almost, and there is great use of language to really please any lover of wordplay.”—Brendan Fisher, review in Games, Brrraaains and a Head-Banging Life