Conversation Pieces

Vol. 101 — Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You

by Erik Hofstatter

$12 $10.00 (paperback)
$5.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI (unavailable)

Read a sample from the book.

I stand in a place where sin fell. Where typed-up humanity got rewritten. A machete-draft you only read once. Because paper ideology doesn't protect anyone.

I won’t tell you my name but it ended with—WAR. I always had a conflict in me. Maybe that’s why they picked me. I was a shape-shifter. Not the kind you think. Morals shift in all of us. They change when money hits your palm.

Some were too smart for blood. We used words to shake them up. Then break them. Like a piggy bank. Death became a business partner. The world’s biggest capitalist. There’s a killing to be made.

But there is something in me that even death is afraid of.

Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You is a lyrical exploration of ghost autopsy.

Advance Praise

“Odd. Dark. Disturbing. Hofstatter’s Pain Is a Chain, Move and I’ll Hear You bleeds and haunts quickly. Once you’re in it, you’re in it to the dastardly end.”
 —Christina M. Rau, author of the Elgin Award-winning Liberating the Astronauts

“Hofstatter is a prose poet of brutality and elegance. He explores the darkest depths of what we’re capable of without flinching.”
 —Priya Sharma, author of Ormeshadow, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award

“Hofstatter confidently steps onto the field, hands twitching and full of wires and grue. Not since I encountered Thom Metzger’s This Is Your Final Warning have I been so enraptured by the stitching of words and image story. This, my friends, is absolutely astounding!!”
 —John Boden, author of Thrift Store Puzzles and Etiquette of Booby Traps

Reviews

"There’s a dream world aspect to his poetry that draws to mind the increasingly wide-eyed, deranged Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now as the mundane and the fantastical, the atavistic rising through the tools of modernity, the violently deranged and the softly sensual blurs into a hair-trigger flickering of flashed moments....There is no natural justice beyond what Hofstatter characterises as the chains tying those who killed to those they killed for the rest of their term on Earth."  (Read the whole review)
  —Exquisite Terror, Nick Soulsby, July 14, 2026

"Erik Hofstatter has created a unique document of horror. In a series of over ninety untitled prose poems, he places readers in the midst of one of history’s most ignored and horrifying atrocities....Part of the horror that Hofstatter is exploring is the way war, and the financiers of war, create mindless killing machines from ordinary human beings. We see that literal mindlessness in these poems, the distance the speaker stands from the deaths."  (Read the whole review)
  —Cemetery Dance, Joshua Gage, 08/27/2026

"[This book] bites its way out of the gate on the very first page. As this sort of poetry, often short and musing, goes, one piece might speak to me and the next one not. In this volume, the dark tone that pervades the entire thing carried me through the ones that didn't, because it's palpable and dangerous.... [It's] an inherently mobile volume because the narrator's is the only voice in play and he's roaming around the landscape killing "echoes of you" in human form. It also makes it, rather surprisingly, a book I'd like to see adapted. And yes, I never thought I'd say that about a volume of free poetry, but it's something that could, in the hands of an avant-garde genius, like a Bill Sienkiewicz, become a blistering freeform comic book, an even more chaotic 'Stray Toasters'. I look forward to whatever Hofstatter comes up with next."  (Read the whole review)
  —The Nameless Zine, Joshua Gage, Aug 2026

ISBN: 978-1-61976-290-9 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Jul 2026
paperback 98 pages