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2026 - October 23 - Found Words - Notes from the Archive
There’s that great quote by Kate “Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.” This effectively captures how I feel after coming across a piece of Kate’s writing I’ve never read before.
For the past few years, I have been editing and prepping two manuscripts. The first is a volume of Kate’s Collected Poems. The second, and much more ambitious project, is her Complete Poems. Somewhere along the way, I began blind-buying vintage issues of Momentum, Bachy, Alley Cat Readings, Invisible Cities—anywhere her early work might have found a home. This excavation has yielded more than twenty-five plus poems that were published in journals but never collected in any of her books.
The process is often maddening, more than it is intoxicating. Kate was a constant rewriter who borrowed from herself, relentlessly reinventing and renaming her pieces, meaning the titles of poems frequently changed over the decades. Once discovered, each piece requires meticulous labor: scanning, transcribing, correcting corrupted line breaks, and formatting the text for Microsoft Word—a digital space these lines have never inhabited until now.
My efforts archiving Kate’s legacy goes back nearly thirty years. I built the first Kate Braverman website in 1997, during my junior year at the University of Rochester. I was enrolled in my second writing workshop with Kate and, simultaneously, taking a computer science course where one assignment was to build a website. Hosted on a free GeoCities server, that early iteration didn't survive. The internet was still young then, and Kate’s online footprint was virtually nonexistent. Nearly seven years later, the internet had evolved, and I built the first formal Kate Braverman Archive. Google had not yet completely monopolized the web, and alternative search engines still flourished, but her digital presence, while growing, remained sparse. Fast-forward to today: a Google search for her name yields over twenty pages of deep, continuous content.
Because I have spent decades combing through this digital landscape, it is always a shock to find something entirely new—something that eluded advanced searches. Recently, while excavating for uncollected poems, I stumbled upon a rare find: an early piece of short fiction published in a 1975 issue of Bachy.
While this early short story only hints at the signature style of later Braverman, it offers a fascinating glimpse into her creative genesis. The dialogue alone makes this excursion into the past entirely worthwhile.
"You have specifically designed ears. They screen out the reality of the age.” (pg. 41)
"The places my people come from have been wiped off the map," she said once, perhaps explaining everything.
He remembered that when they moved to California she had packed only one suitcase. She left no forwarding address and telephoned no goodbyes.
"You burn your bridges behind you," Gordon said when they left the city.
"If I find myself stranded, I'll invent a new way out. That's how we created the modern world." Rachel leaned back in her seat. (pg. 50)
It concludes with the briefest "blue" riff she likely ever attempted. The contributor notes hint at another, now-lost piece of short fiction published in Bob Guccione’s Viva magazine for women. And so, the recovery effort continues. If any reader owns a copy or can identify the specific issue of Viva, please get in touch. -- John Kingston.
You can find it here from the Extremes & Moderations: A historical archive of Los Angeles and Southern California Poetry website.
Also check out Bachy 5 which contains two poems, “Los Angeles 1974” previously published, in a slightly different form, as “This is a Rented City” in Milk Run (1977) and another find “Los Angeles 1975” to add to the uncollected pile of early poems.
Bachy 10 has a reivew of Milk Run.
2026 - September - Special Thanks to Kristian Hammerstad, his illustration appears as our news banner.
Special Thanks to Kristian Hammerstad who has allowed us to use his art in our news banner. This work also appears in print in the June 24th, 2026 Issue of The Believer. Check out Kristian's other illustrations and art work at his linked site!
2026 - August 27 - 50th Anniversary of Kate's First Draft Manifesto (1976)
50 years ago Kate wrote her first draft manifesto
Read it here: Intro in Cameos
Cameos, 12 New Small Press Poets. New York: Crossing Press, 1978
Additional Reading:
2026 - July 14 - Squandering the Blue reprint is released...35 Years Later!
Why Kate Braverman’s ‘Squandering the Blue’ still feels dangerous 35 years later
A new reissue revives one of Los Angeles literature's overlooked writers who challenged others to 'write to the pain.' By Samantha Dunn
Read reviews, author comments and more on our Squandering the Blue page.
Discover the literary legacy, bibliography, and unique history of an icon at KateBravermanArchive.com. Explore rare variations, poems, and deep dives into her legendary body of work.
2026 - July Transmission: Words in July, from 1991.
A recent find in a past issue of On the Bus (Double Issue 6 & 7 from 1991). A poem not featured in Kate's previous poetry collections, nor in the digital archive of collected poems.
Words in July
They are acts of prophecy
and insurrection
or they are nothing.
They are clouds pulled down
by thunder and willows
bending mute along the river
with its nuances and ports.
This is how we murder
our ancestors and scatter
the long bones.
Here are the jungle years
and stalled noons
in the plazas of Los Angeles
in the circular heat
of perpetual August.
This is what grew in the margins
and alleys at dusk
when the nets were dragged in.
This is where the glances went
and the lovers after the cafe
and the sudden weight of jasmine.
This is the bridge you crossed
in afternoon rain,
tossing quarters to a boy
with a guitar.
The moment became definitive.
Your incarnations were visible.
You held an umbrella
in a thousand versions
of your fading self
and said farewell
while your heart broke.
This is where the Santa Ana went
before it grew hoarse
and collapsed in the ocean
like your father
in a repetition of dying.
--Kate Braverman, 1991.
Discover the literary legacy, bibliography, and unique history of an icon at KateBravermanArchive.com. Explore rare variations, poems, and deep dives into her legendary body of work.
2026 - June - WHO LOVES KATE BRAVERMAN? I'm a Believer!
My Whole Life is for Sale - by Leah Mensch
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad
June 24th, 2026 | Issue one hundred fifty-four
The Believer out now!
Discover the literary legacy, bibliography, and unique history of an icon at KateBravermanArchive.com. Explore rare variations, poems, and deep dives into her legendary body of work.
2026 - June - Fitch on Braverman - And So Starts the Summer of Bravermania!
My Mentor, My Muse from Alta - by Janet Fitch
Remembering Kate Braverman on the occasion of Squandering the Blue being reissued in July.
Squandering the Blue, Kate's first short story collection, will be released as part of Doubleday's new reissue series, Outsider Editions, devoted to bringing renewed attention to overlooked works in the literary canon.
2026 - Excuse me while I... merge with this geometric square of April.
SPRING MONOLOGUE
I want to tell you everything.
I drank poison.
I deserted my son.
I did it for love.
I tried to drink god.
I opened my heart and found
only the knife and cold communion
of the mystery in passage.
O, the myriad clutter of my mistakes.
My contrived ruin and greed
for the ineffable, as if that equilibrium
of crystal and flower petals were bankable,
were a flame I could eat.
And this is a spell to control madness.
Breathe deep.
Repeat this.
I will survive.
I must.
To hear voices is not enough.
They must be orchestrated, taught technique.
It was not men or women I loved
but the manic pulse of insanity.
I trusted it, thought it permanent
like a congenital defect
or a chemical reaction
of moonlight and a certain type of skin.
But it betrayed me, found someone
younger who died better
and with more style.
Hang on.
I am absolutely certain.
I lived to tell you this and only this.
Let your womanhood emerge.
Feel it beating, breathing.
It could rise from your shoulders
like feathers or straw.
Trust it.
Listen.
Save yourself.
The bruised dissolves as it should,
used up, exposed as obsolete,
a subspecies, inarticulate.
You shed it easily.
This is the moment of divinity
and grace of which you have dreamed.
This is the cradle, intact
in corridors without fraudulence
or the deliberately deformed.
Not blood words but something else,
more a flute than a drum
but equal in power,
still able to haunt, kill and transform.
Surrender.
Merge with this geometric square of April.
Make sacred what you touch.
Not history or events but the details.
Yellow canna beside a lawn.
Dusk light across a redwood porch.
Your integrity is defined solely
by what you can hold,
can press with your lips.
There is more immortality in one kiss
than in the stones of pyramids.
Defend no borders but those of sensibility.
Be one woman truly, wholly and you
will be all women.
Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.
2026 - March Sadness - Dylan, Braverman and Mensch
2026 - Cool Merch Alert from Diagram!
2026 - February 5th - Happy Birthday Kate
A new upload features a Valentines' Day reading from 2005 on the Frantic Transmissions book tour in New York City.
2025 - Happy Fall with a poem from Lullaby for Sinners
FALL RAIN, FALL WIND AND LEAF
Fall rain, fall wind and leaf.
Wash the parched emaciated flesh
and heaps of ash in the gutters.
Make new trout brooks and green.
Bring the mysterious illness west,
the chill, the fever swells
and necessary deaths.
Let them at the edge tumble
and bury their small miseries.
We bent too long to the summer,
that deranged widow howling
all August through the morphine,
cursing the nurses and daughter
who crossed the country to comb
the old woman's hair at midnight
and hold the discolored claw
of a hand, touching the erratic
pulse with her tongue knowing
forgiveness would be denied.
Fall rain, fall wind and leaf.
Bring the sudden cold and abandonment, the loss
of trust, the rush of a shapeless
hungry black space drunk on itself.
Let us camp on the banks of fat
rivers and forget our thirst
and walking sores and the tangled
cities perched in the lap
of dying seas where we have
too long tended the graves
of those we love.
2025 - A Grand Hope...A Grand Help..
Help with Photos from Grand Hope
The Braverman Archive is seeking help with photos of the poetry pergola in Grand Hope Park which features a quote by Kate Braverman. We do not have any images of this and would like to include here.
Grand Hope Park is in Downtown LA. If anyone can share photos, credit will be give and we will be forever grateful. See the About page for contact. Thanks!
2025 Milk Run's 50th Anniversary year!
Milk Run turns 50!
Kate's first book of poems Milk Run published January 1, 1977 by Momentum Press turned 50 this year.
Read: A Poet Recalls Her Youth
"I was writing my first poetry, my first of what would be the Milk Run poems. I read “Cobalt Blue” and everybody stood up and cheered. They didn’t just applaud enthusiastically. It was utterly kinetic. I could feel the room change temperature and I could feel trees in forests on other planets catch on fire.....That night at Beyond Baroque was my christening. Every one was clapping, they were cheering, and I felt my whole life was just beginning." - Kate Braverman 2008
Coming in 2026! Exclusive Archival Insights: Explore rare variations, poems, and deep dives into her legendary body of work.
Good News: Reprint in 2026...
Squandering the Blue back in print from Penguin Random House.
From the publisher:
The debut story collection from Los Angeles writer Kate Braverman assembles a vivid patchwork of interconnected narratives set in Southern California. Through brief, often haunting snapshots of women’s lives, Braverman presents portraits of individuals and communities entangled in cycles of longing and substance dependency—with affection and addiction often being destructively braided together.
“Falling in October” is a spoof of the art communities as well as a feminist post-nuclear story; in “Points of Decision,” a troubled woman tries to free herself of an abusive relationship; and in the highly-anthologized “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a recovering alcoholic navigates the challenges of motherhood and new sobriety while developing a risky relationship with an enigmatic stranger.
Squandering the Blue sees Braverman explore an underlying concern with articulation—how individuals interpret, label, or suppress experience while caught in the shadow of the potential for a better life.
The Digital Archive: Dive deep into the literary legacy, bibliography, and unique history of an icon at KateBravermanArchive.com.
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad
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