POEMS FROM THE TOASTER

Poems from the Toaster

Most poetry collections ask you to bring your own emotional context to the words on the page. Poems from the Toaster brings the context with it. Each poem in these collections is a fully designed page, built around a photograph, illustration, or graphic chosen to meet that poem where it lives. The visual element is not decoration. It is part of the poem.

A six-time Critic's Choice winner at the Northeastern Poetry Summit across both Long Form and Short Form Free Verse, these collections represent Kitzmiller's most awarded work. They are also, by design, his most immediate.

Poems from the Toaster is an ongoing series. New volumes are in development and will be added here as they are released.

The Collections

Poems from the Toaster: Volume I

The debut volume establishes the series: free verse poetry spanning love, loss, grief, lust, survival, dark humor, and the specific absurdity of being alive when you were not always certain you would be. Volume I sets the emotional range and the visual approach that defines everything that follows. Each poem is its own complete experience. Nothing carries over from the previous page except the voice.

Poems from the Toaster: Volume II

The second volume continues the series with new poems and new visual treatments. Where Volume I establishes the voice, Volume II expands it, moving into new emotional territory while holding to the same formal commitment: every poem paired with an image, every page designed to land with intention.

Amazon Exclusive Special Edition: Volumes I and II

For readers who want the complete collection in a single volume, the Special Edition brings Volumes I and II together and is available exclusively through Amazon. It is the most complete entry point into the series and the natural starting place for readers new to the collections.

What These Poems Do

A poem about heartbreak sits alongside one about warm beer, cheap whiskey, and the specific irritation of eight-track tapes. A handwritten poem about the quiet of being with someone who makes the voices stop faces a black and white photograph of two hands reaching toward each other. A single sentence hits harder than a page of prose would.

The range is deliberate and it is wide. Kitzmiller writes the way he has always listened to music: without loyalty to a single emotional register, drawn to whatever the moment demands. Some of these poems will stop you mid-breath. Some will make you laugh out loud. Some will do both in the span of four lines.

A Taste

Should I Kiss You: This poem was later adapted as a song on Recorded Songs from the Toaster, Vol. I.

Suicidal Vampire: This poem was adapted as a song on She Sings Songs from the Toaster: The Bedroom Session and is currently in development as a full rock and dream pop opera under Ace of Toaster Records.

How to Read These Collections

These books were designed for the physical object. Page turns, white space, and the rhythm of line breaks matter here in a way they do not in most poetry collections. Reading slowly, even aloud, is not precious advice. It is how the books were built to be experienced. The visual presentation shapes the way the poems land and the silences they open between them.

Each volume works independently. Together they form a larger portrait of an emotional range that runs without apology from raw to tender to genuinely funny, sometimes within the same page turn.

Related Works

The Poems from the Toaster collections serve as companions to the Dealing with the Toaster memoir series, holding in poetry what the memoirs hold in prose. Readers of Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom will recognize early versions of this voice. Readers new to Kitzmiller's work will find the poetry a direct and immediate entry point.

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