Poems from the Toaster: Volume I:The Collector's Edition

Some of these poems became songs. Some appear in a novel. The rest have been waiting for exactly this - full color photography and illustration, David's own notes on nearly every page, and the space to be read the way they were written.

The Collector's Edition brings Poems from the Toaster: Volume I to its fullest form. Every poem is paired with full color photography or illustration chosen not to illustrate the verse but to give it room. Nearly every page carries a note - revealing which poems were recorded and released under Ace of Toaster Records across multiple albums, which appear in the debut novel Nameless Cowfish: The Years Between the Stations, and which the author left annotated in his own words. Those notes are not formal literary commentary. They are David talking - about where the poem came from, what it became, what he cannot explain, and what still makes him laugh.

Dark humor and raw grief share the page without apology - and the humor goes further than you might expect. Love arrives where loss already lives. Mental health, addiction, grief, and recovery move through the collection alongside the mundane, the funny, and the deeply personal. Each poem is brief or sprawling, funny or devastating, but never comfortable and never less than completely honest.

The companion poetry collection to the Dealing with the Toaster memoir series - and a complete work on its own. Come for one poem. Stay for everything behind it.