Poems from the Toaster Series

THE AWARD-WINNING FINE ART POETRY PORTFOLIO BY DAVID KITZMILLER

"Distinguished as a six-time Critic's Choice winner at the Northeastern Poetry Summit across both Long Form and Short Form Free Verse, this ongoing portfolio by David Kitzmiller represents a radical departure from traditional publishing."

Most conventional poetry collections demand that the audience supply their own emotional architecture to flat text. Poems from the Toaster brings the environmental context with it. Recognizing that traditional flat typesetting can strip language of its immediate expression, David Kitzmiller treats every piece as an individual visual asset. This series seamlessly marries his uncompromised typography with stark photography, visceral illustrations, and deliberate graphic layouts—delivering a hard-hitting, immediate reading experience that functions with the high-impact velocity of modern media.

PORTFOLIO MECHANICS: How to Experience the Work

These books were built specifically for the physical object. The rhythm of Kitzmiller's line breaks, the strategic distribution of negative space, and the purposeful weight of the typeface are explicitly engineered to dictate the precise velocity of your reading experience. Reading slowly is not precious advice; it is how the typography was constructed to be experienced. The visual presentation actively shapes how the language lands, opening heavy, deliberate silences between the lines.

Each volume works independently as a complete artistic statement. Together, they form a larger, unblinking portrait of an emotional range that runs without apology from deep tenderness to situational absurdity and genuine humor—proving that the Norman Kitzmiller Publications catalog is a living, breathing ecosystem of survival translated into brilliant art.

THE CORE COLLECTIONS: THE STANDARD EDITIONS 

The Foundational Collection: Where the Toaster Universe's Heartbeat Began

Poems from the Toaster: Volume I is David Kitzmiller's debut fine art poetry portfolio—an unconventional collection built at the intersection of language, visual composition, memory, and lived experience. Originally created as an emotional intermission during the writing of his memoir Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom, the collection became something larger: a body of work in which each poem is treated as an individual visual experience rather than simply a piece of text placed on a page.

Kitzmiller's poetry moves without warning between intimate confession, dark humor, desire, grief, anger, tenderness, memory, and the absurdities of ordinary life. The collection reaches into the lasting effects of childhood trauma, the complications of adult relationships, the consequences of loss, the fear of mortality, and the private thoughts that rarely make their way into conversation. Some poems examine the things people carry for years. Others capture a single moment, a passing thought, an uncomfortable realization, or an observation that refuses to stay quiet.

The result is deliberately difficult to categorize. These are poems about love and resentment, longing and separation, sex and loneliness, devotion and regret. They can be serious without remaining solemn, vulnerable without becoming sentimental, and deeply personal without requiring the reader to have lived the same life. Humor and absurdity frequently appear beside pain—not to diminish it, but because real life rarely separates the two.

The Visual Experience

The poetry is presented as fine art rather than conventional flat typesetting. Typography, photography, illustration, negative space, and page composition are deliberately integrated into each piece to influence how the words are encountered. The placement of a line, the weight of a typeface, or the silence surrounding a passage can become part of the poem itself.

This approach is particularly important to the physical edition. The books are designed to be experienced slowly, allowing the visual architecture of each page to establish rhythm, pause, emphasis, and emotional weight. The result is a collection that asks the reader to experience not only what the words say, but how they arrive.

When a Poem Doesn't End on the Page

The creative life of Poems from the Toaster: Volume I extends beyond the book itself. Several pieces have crossed into David Kitzmiller's music and other works, creating connections throughout the larger Toaster catalog.

“I Need to Pick Up a Gallon of Milk” became “Before I Am in Too Deep” on Country Songs from the Toaster: Volume I—a poem that naturally took on a country character as the words came together.

“Not Again” became “Personal Convictions” on Recorded Songs from the Toaster: Volume II, demonstrating how a poem that says more through a handful of carefully chosen lines can take on an entirely different presence when recorded.

“I Desire You” became a song on She Sings: The Bedroom Sessions, carrying the poem's sensual language into another form while leaving room for the reader to discover what exists between and beneath its lines.

And “Eternal Internal Struggles” became “Eternal Internal Struggle” on Burnt Songs from the Toaster: Volume I—an internal monologue pushed beyond quiet reflection and allowed to come out screaming.

These connections are not simply adaptations. They are evidence of a larger creative process in which an idea can begin as a poem, change form, acquire a new voice, and continue developing somewhere else.

An Unresolved Beginning

Poems from the Toaster: Volume I does not attempt to resolve the experiences it explores. Instead, it offers an honest record of a mind trying to understand love, loss, memory, anger, desire, humor, and survival while still living inside the questions.

This is where the Poems from the Toaster collection begins—but it is also an invitation to go further. Read the poems. Experience the pages. Find the pieces that stay with you. Then follow them beyond the book and discover where they lead.

“Because sometimes a poem is only the beginning of the story. Other times, it is the full ending.”
—David Kitzmiller

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The Unmasked Crucible: The Archaeology of a Scar 

Poems from the Toaster: Volume II moves deeper into the places where love, memory, loneliness, and identity become difficult to separate. Emerging from the writing process of Playing with a Toaster by the Bathtub, the collection brings together poems recovered from years of personal archives with new work written during an extended period of therapy, self-examination, and active recovery.

What begins as an excavation of the past becomes an examination of what remains.

The collection confronts the contradictions of attachment: the exhilaration of connection, the vulnerability of allowing another person close, the damage left when that connection breaks, and the strange persistence of longing after the relationship itself has ended. Kitzmiller writes about love when it is intoxicating and consuming, but also when it becomes complicated, destructive, or impossible to reconcile with the person he is trying to become.

The poems move through loneliness, desire, mistrust, regret, forgiveness, resentment, identity, and self-worth. Some look directly at the aftermath of broken relationships. Others examine the stories people construct to explain what happened—and what happens when those stories begin to fall apart. The collection is equally interested in the things that are said and the things that remain unsaid, including the private arguments, unanswered questions, and unfinished conversations that can continue long after someone is gone.

But this is not a collection built entirely from darkness.

Sharp observations, irreverence, humor, defiance, and unexpected tenderness repeatedly interrupt the heavier material. A poem can move from vulnerability to confrontation, from grief to absurdity, or from an intimate confession to something deliberately provocative. That instability is part of the experience. The emotional landscape does not remain in one place because neither does the human mind.

The Architecture of the Aftermath

The visual presentation of Volume II reflects that volatility. Shifting typography, imagery, negative space, and disruptive page designs create an environment that changes with the emotional character of the writing. The pages can feel exposed, crowded, restrained, or deliberately fractured, giving the physical book a visual rhythm that works alongside the language.

Rather than smoothing away the contradictions within the collection, the design reinforces them. The physical page becomes another way of experiencing the movement between memory and the present, intimacy and isolation, control and disruption.

When the Words Become Something Else

The creative life of Volume II extends beyond its pages. Poems from the collection have crossed into Kitzmiller's music and continued into other works, creating connections that allow the reader to encounter the same creative material from entirely different directions.

“86 Reasons Not to Love” became “86 Reasons Not to Love” on Recorded Songs from the Toaster: Volume I. One of Kitzmiller's longest short poems, it takes the complicated proposition of love and turns it into an extended examination of exactly why something so powerful can also be so difficult to survive.

“Open” became “Open Buttons” on Burnt Songs from the Toaster: Volume II, carrying its examination of recovering from a broken love into a new musical form—and introducing the realization that the other person may have an entirely different idea of what happens next.

“King's Island” began with an unlikely setting: the back of a van during Kitzmiller's trip home from King's Island. That moment became a poem in Volume II and ultimately “The King's Island” on Country Songs from the Toaster: Volume I. The connection is a reminder that inspiration does not always arrive under dramatic circumstances; sometimes an ordinary moment becomes something that refuses to disappear.

And “To Live Again” follows an even longer path. Originally appearing as “Flowers for an Afterthought” in Volume II and later appearing in Volume III, the piece became “To Live Again” on She Sings: The Bedroom Sessions. Kitzmiller has yet to determine exactly why the poem continues to return, but its persistence has become part of its story.

These connections are not simply adaptations. They are creative threads that continue to change form, move between works, and acquire new meaning along the way. A reader can discover a poem here, encounter its musical counterpart elsewhere, and then find another piece of the same creative thread in a different volume or work.

The Scar Is Part of the Story

Poems from the Toaster: Volume II is ultimately concerned with what remains after experience changes us.

It does not offer the comfort of a clean conclusion. Instead, it examines the difficult territory between what happened and what comes next—where love can leave both scars and wisdom, where memories can remain vivid long after circumstances have changed, and where moving forward does not necessarily mean leaving the past behind.

This is a collection for readers willing to look directly at the contradictions of attachment and the uncomfortable truths that emerge when the stories we have told ourselves can no longer hold.

“Sometimes the hardest part of losing someone is discovering what remains of yourself without them.”
—David Kitzmiller

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The Limbo Book: The Disruption of the Muse

Poems from the Toaster: Volume III turns the examination inward. Where earlier volumes explore the forces of love, loss, memory, and attachment, this collection asks a more difficult question: what happens when the person left to examine is yourself?

The romantic relationship that occupied much of the earlier work is no longer the central subject. Instead, Kitzmiller confronts the person who remains—the memories he carries, the patterns he repeats, the defenses he has built, and the parts of himself he would rather explain than examine. The collection emerges from an ongoing process of self-examination in which understanding the past becomes only the beginning of determining what to do with it.

Volume III reaches into the lasting effects of childhood trauma, the difficulty of forming and maintaining meaningful relationships, loneliness, anger, regret, faith, mortality, self-worth, and the destructive behaviors that can become survival mechanisms. It examines the uncomfortable space between recognizing a pattern and actually changing it. Knowing why something happened does not necessarily make it easier to stop repeating.

The poems move through confession, confrontation, reflection, profanity, absurdity, tenderness, and dark humor. Some pieces are quiet examinations of memory and identity. Others are deliberately uncomfortable, irreverent, or raw. The collection allows contradictory thoughts to exist beside one another because self-examination rarely produces a clean narrative. Progress can coexist with failure. Clarity can produce more questions. A person can understand the source of a wound and still struggle with what that wound has taught them to do.

This is not a portrait of a finished transformation.

It is a portrait of someone still in the process of becoming.

The Visual Language of Self-Examination

The physical presentation of Volume III continues the fine-art approach established throughout the Poems from the Toaster portfolio, but its visual language is particularly suited to the collection's inward focus. Typography, imagery, negative space, and page composition shift with the emotional character of each piece, allowing the page itself to become part of the internal conversation.

A line can stand alone. A thought can be interrupted. A page can feel crowded with noise or deliberately stripped down to almost nothing. The visual treatment reinforces the instability of looking inward, where memories, questions, anger, humor, and self-criticism do not arrive in a convenient order.

The result is a physical book designed not simply to present the poems, but to give their internal movement somewhere to exist.

When the Poetry Crosses the Boundary

The creative threads of Volume III extend well beyond the poetry collection itself. Pieces move between poetry, memoir, fiction, and music, sometimes changing names or context along the way while retaining the experience that first produced them.

“A Graphic Moment” appears in both A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster and Volume III before becoming “A Graphic Moment (feat. Some Guy Named Tim)” on Burnt Songs from the Toaster: Volume I. One of Kitzmiller's personal favorites, the piece demonstrates how an idea can move from the page into another work and then take on an entirely different life as a recording.

“The Cow Didn't Mooove” became “One Lifetime Ago” on Country Songs from the Toaster: Volume I. Beneath its deliberately unexpected presentation is the kind of dark humor that appears throughout Kitzmiller's work—humor that can surface in the least expected places, sometimes only after the reader has already entered something much heavier.

“And Protect” became “and Protect” on She Sings: The Bedroom Sessions. The poem considers the possibility of a different life and the unsettling realization that discovering what might have happened does not necessarily mean that alternate life was the one worth having.

And “Take Me to Your Leader”, also appearing as “I Am but an Alien (Take Me to Your Leader)” in Volume III and A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster, became “Take Me to Your Leader” on Recorded Songs from the Toaster: Volume II. Beneath its unusual premise is a much more recognizable desire: wanting to find a place to belong, only to discover that home may be closer than expected.

These connections demonstrate the larger creative ecosystem surrounding the Toaster works. A poem does not necessarily remain a poem. It can become a song, reappear in another book, change its title, acquire another voice, or reveal something different when encountered in another form.

The Work Is Not Finished

Poems from the Toaster: Volume III does not present self-discovery as a destination. It documents the uncomfortable middle ground between recognizing who you have been and deciding who you are going to become.

The collection asks what responsibility looks like after the explanations run out. It confronts the memories that continue to shape us, the patterns we promise ourselves we will break, and the possibility that becoming whole does not mean erasing the past. Sometimes it means finally looking at it without turning away.

For readers who have ever wondered why they repeat what they promised themselves they would never repeat, why understanding does not always produce change, or what happens when there is no one else left to blame, Volume III offers an unfiltered place to begin.

“The hardest version of me to understand may be the one staring back from the blank page.”
—David Kitzmiller

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To meet the demands of collectors and deep archivists, Norman Kitzmiller Publications maintains exclusive distributions tailored for specific retail platforms.

The Amazon Exclusive Special Edition (Vols. I & II Combined)

Engineered as a comprehensive omnibus, this single-volume release binds the complete contents of Volumes I and II together. Available exclusively through Amazon, it serves as the definitive, high-value entry point for readers new to the poetry catalog.

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The Barnes & Noble Exclusive Collector’s Editions (Full Color & Annotated)

Volume I: The Collector’s Edition – Printed in premium full color with all original photography and illustrations intact. This edition features exhaustive author annotations on nearly every page—identifying which specific pieces were tracked into music via Ace of Toaster Records and which items materialize inside the debut novel.

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Volume II: The Collector’s Edition – A visually inventive artifact fully color-mapped and annotated, tracking the exact timeline of the author's inpatient recovery and marking the absolute birthplace of the Songs from the Toaster audio discography.