[10/05/26] Lee, Casper: No Ranch

Spiral Editions, paperback

Publication Date: October 5, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

"The wood stove pops The oil pops Electric heater The sound in the speakers Pops. Nothing sadder Than two people"

Across the solitude of a state with more cattle than humans, Casper Lee’s No Ranch is alive with an appetite for contact—with friends, lovers, and the innumerable beings and organisms that share the field of perception. The poems can at first seem surreal, but I’m convinced Lee is describing what is most real: a world in which turning a donkey’s head matters to the universe, horses ask us to reconsider the terms of our approach, and intimacy with other animals opens deeper questions about care, labor, violence, estrangement, and awe. Folkloric, erotic, and radically receptive, No Ranch is a patchwork lyric that sews together and rips apart “coherence of calamity.” A ranch suggests a place with a name and a brand, inheritance, identity. It carries the mythology of the American West. Lee’s ranch is no ranch. Their poetry is no poetry. A form of anti-poetry (think Nicanor Parra), undoing the sentimentality of the West (and poetry itself) with a language inseparable from the life being lived there. Sorry folks, this is everyday speech when you’re a poet on no ranch, in some bar—and the truth is that it’s deeply funny, dirty, and weird. —Stacy Szymaszek

What true lyric is chorused in the frottage of brome grasses! Casper Lee’s multi-vocal poems of No Ranch speak a new voice of the American West, from the bisexual gossip of cowboy bars to the prairie’s animals who “Anoint you with the absence / Of language…” There is a deft and brilliant husbandry of the poem in these pages, Lee foraging for an image of the landscape itself, where all it contains “is more alive / Because the place is.” —Ted Dodson