Bonfires & Other Vigils

Red Rook Press

April 18, 2024

My second full-length collection is available now!

“Colleen’s poems live close to the morning. They come alive the third moment after dawn and they follow you around all day, tap you on the shoulder, remind you to pay attention: to the seasonal road, to the polka dot bathing suit, to the scurry of squirrels. And like any good mother, Colleen’s poems take care of you. They tuck you in at night, hold you against the faithless hours, tell you they’re glad you’re safe, how grateful they are that you’re still here. I can say that I’m grateful, too, for these beautiful poems.”

- Garrett Stack, author of Yeoman’s Work

AFTER THE 8-BALL

CORNERSTONE PRESS

MARCH 16, 2022

I am so honored to have my first full-length collection available through the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point’s Portage Poetry Series, which highlights Midwest authors.

“After the 8-Ball is a beautiful, big-hearted, restless book of poems that linger on motherhood and marriage, the moon and Lake Michigan, walking and running, gratitude and hunger. Colleen Alles has given readers a true gift: language that adroitly captures what it’s like to be alive in this world, a singular human in a human body, awash in memories, mourning, and the wistful, wondrous loneliness of everyday life. I love this book, and you will too.”

 —Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy

“In After the 8-Ball, desire lives alongside grief, love alongside memory, family alongside solitude. Colleen Alles plays with unlikely miracles here: a house that becomes a woman, the moon’s reluctance to shine, the memories of tadpoles, the tantalizing answers of the Magic 8-Ball. Her poems remind us how difficult it can be to live in the worlds we have made for ourselves and “just how wondrous it is to be us.” Should everyone read this beautiful book?

As I see it, yes.

 —W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings