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In this poetic memoir of a rough and tumble life, from her backwoods childhood without boundaries to a California urban adulthood filled with triumphs and disasters, Cassandra Dallett spares no details in a poetry memoir that reads like the love child of Charles Bukowski and Elizabeth Bishop. These are stories of an outsider, a perpetual misfit, offering a ceasefire in the war she wages with herself.
Published by Manic D Press
This is the first in a series of chapbook length releases by the Pedestrian Press which will feature Bay Area poets of note. The Waters Wars was previously published in a limited edition (10 copies only) release, as a collaboration between Pedestrian and Gorilla Press. The text has been revised and expanded, with new poems added, making it more than double the size of the original. These poems are an exciting new part of Dallett's body of work. She writes with eloquence about the drought, her concerns as the mother of a young black man in a country where police violence and the prison industrial complex affect that group disproportionately, among other topics relating to sex, race, class, gentrification, and issues of human identity in general. Dallett's signature poetic voice continues to evolve in unexpected ways.
Published by the Pedestrian Press
"Cassandra Dallett writes like a feminist self-aware Charles Bukowski. Sure there's plenty of sex, drugs, violence, and rock 'n' roll, but there's a lot of quiet 'spots of time,' as Wordsworth would say, where the clearly defined and explained devolves into the philisophical, and the stereotype changes into a nuanced portrait...Dallett never apologizes for or shies away from her own faults, cravings, addictions, and mistakes."—Christine Hamm, author of Echo Park (BlazeVOX, 2011)
Published by Nomadic Press
Full-length collection of contemporary love poetry by Oakland, CA Beast Generation poet Cassandra Dallett, exploring the "Bad Sandy" appeal in love and in relationships. In the words of the poet, "These poems tell the story of a woman who comes to find that it wasn't really a Danny Zuko she needed to love her, but her own sweet-crazy Bad Sandy self."
Rereleased by Pedestrian Press, revised and expanded
"When I was ten we moved to a mountain in Corinth, Vermont. My mother left shortly after the move and I lived with my dad and a revolving cast of his girlfriends their kids and other strange characters he took in, with no toilet or electricity for almost five years. I left for good when I was fifteen with a shaved head, combat boots, a boom box, and a homemade duffel bag. I landed in the Fillmore where I lived with my mother’s youngest sister. I was a punk rock kid, still too big, too sexual, and terribly shy. But I had learned to drink the shyness away and I had gotten tangled up with the skinheads. The alternative high school I ended up going to was run by a black revolutionary principal. It was there that I got deeply into hip-hop and black literature like Toni Morrison and Zora Neal Hurston. I learned to read late, but once I did, reading was my thing. I also found Charles Bukowski around that time and that was a turning point for me. It took twenty years before I started writing but once I read Bukwoski I knew I would write."
Published by Gorilla Press
Pearl Tongue, was published by be about it press in June, 2015. Dallet is a powerhouse of a poet and we are so happy to publish this amazing collection of poems which are at once soft and emotive and raw and you’ll be nodding your head saying yes the whole time reading.
Published by Be About It Press
Mud Pond is a full length collection of poems, starting with a hippy childhood in Vermont, rolling brutally through a punk rock adolescence in San Francisco, and landing as a restless adult fighting her way free from a suffocating relationship in Oakland, CA
Self-published
book of poetry that explores the devastation of breaking up a family and breaking out of shame short narrative poems
Self-published
How does one fall in love, and stay, in love and support of a partner suffering post traumatic stress disorder from a life of incarceration and street violence..
Self-published
"Cassandra Dallett writes from the perspective of someone who is fed up with the United States of America, and she presents us with an oppositional paradise in the wilderness that is a refuge from the chaos. Chaos that has been dividing and conquering us ever since the tactic was first used by white Europeans to massacre the indigenous peoples--enslave Africans--and to keep all marginalized people in the lower classes from rising up and destroying the wealthy, ruling class. She shows us what the barriers and borders set up by brokers have done to us all, as well as, gives us a vision of what we all can become if these walls of separation are burned down. Cassandra presents us with an argument on what capitalism has done to us all, her evidence are her own experiences and the experiences of those whom she wishes had more power, and her reason is what we all can become if we remembered that we can still rise from this chaos--and rise into a wilderness where we can all just start this shit over from the ashes of revolution. This book is a hard reset on a cell phone with no more memory for bullshit."-Vernon Keeve III, author of Southern Migrant Mixtape
Collapse is a doomed love, temporary, free on bond, haunted by rage and regret, fueled by Hip-Hop beats, and clinging like the remains of the Ghost Ship fire—with the world burning around us, it is time and place, politics and anarchy, connection for the broken.
*$1 from every book sale goes into the Nomadic Press Black Writers Fund.