Bisquick: An American Seance

by C. Russell Price

A breathtaking gallop through spectral planes, grief, and ghosts

Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2026

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A HORSE OPERA

I like America and America likes me.
I start in the garden looking for an issue
and why I need to put these ghosts away.
Before this, I was a petal—you were a petal, too.
I ask a stranger to take a photo of me
and Ghost Cowboy and Bisquick.
Ghost Cowboy leans in with, “We’re dancing
like girlfriends, but we’re fucking like boyfriends.
I’m going to take you out then I’m going to take you home.”
We know where our loyalty lies
and to not being thrown to pasture.
“Plain duty” is a term that is harsh
to the men in a country God forgot.
Bisquick says “The first horse, the dawn horse
was probably a total jagoff.”
Ghost Cowboy is shimmering in the Menards parking lot
when I say I don’t want more than you, I want more of you.
Every girl gets her wish in love with a ghost.
Cowboy is brainstorming quatrains in ACAB sharp,
yakking about a graveplot is class
indifferent and that debt is a stand-in
for the slave driver’s slaps and calls.
He’s got a list and he’s feeding me
my own heart, says writing about him is torture
remembering places and names, grief shapes.
In one life, Bisquick modeled for Levi’s jeans
and wore sundresses and married a famous pop star
and didn’t wake up and in one Ghost Cowboy
was the son of a suburban mathematician
and gambled and had a nose ring
and skinny jeans and went into a Portuguese river.
But here we’re together again.
Revenge is a form of desire with savage verbs,
language a veil. In the next life, we’re Portland moss
oblivious to war. A couple down the line, you love me again
because I’m bilingual, ambidextrous, I understand
pass interference in football and I’ve got a body
that’s first memory wasn’t a violence.
I want to be born off frame where someone’s not even thinking.
I’ll have a beautiful smile
like all my dead friends were buried with.
You’ll ask if I was in the movies
and I’ll say, No, I didn’t get the part.
And I’ll be funnier too, with my hands on your arms
saying, You better get your hands off my potential new boyfriend!
I will finish this book in joy, goddamnit.
I won’t be sad, but I’ll go there every day.
And when we fall in love again
you’ll ask what did I do this whole time you weren’t around?
I got up and I got down.

[Philip Kenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Look at the blooms: look ‘em in the face.”

Hilarious, heartbreaking, sexy, sticky — slicked up and ready to go.

[Hausofladybugg · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say that C. Russell Price’s second collection, Bisquick: An American Seance, was among my most anticipated poetry drops of the year would be an understatement. Beginning with their chapbook (Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other), and following their explosive (if you’ll pardon the pun) full-length debut, Oh, You Thought This Was a Date?! Apocalypse Poems, Price’s work has always pushed the boundaries of language and form as well as its relationship to personal identity. Bisquick: An American Seance is no different.

Deeply rooted in queer identity and the struggle to find yourself in a world constantly watching your every move, in a world which makes sport of queer self-expression, this collection grounds itself in the transformative power of grief following the death of that self so many of us project into the world, asking the questions: What happens when we embrace the ghosts that haunt our past, those ghosts inside of us, and choose to allow them to transform us? What happens when we stop fighting? What happens when we allow ourselves to take what we want without apology? To which Price immediately claps-back “...Listen, Judy — / … He had a past that he put me into. One we both had to leave.”

What begins with very clear divisions between speaker, Ghost Cowboy, and Bisquick becomes, by its conclusion, a merging of identities and personas such that Price’s speaker & Bisquick — by virtue of this American seance — join forces against Ghost Cowboy. Indeed, Price has achieved something truly stunning: a transmutation of voices where two become one before moving to possess the reader until we too understand “...the difference between endangered and protected.” They have chosen to embrace what Whitman described as the “multitudes” inside each of us; and they have harnessed that power to reminds us “Nothing hurts more than / being nothing // to someone you made up / out of your own / fucked-up grief.” The result is transformative for both speaker & reader. In participating in this American seance, we are reminded both that “Revenge is a form form of desire with savage verbs,” and to direct that anger at “...that Bitch Ass Maurice / from Collections” because “America, after all, is always doing / the bending of a body.” So why the fuck not?

Bisquick: An American Seance is rife with righteous anger and indignation at the way the way the world, and those who inhabit it, treat queer, trans, and gender nonconforming individuals on the daily: despite how those individuals routinely embrace those most different from themselves (e.g., Ghost Cowboys & midwestern cowboys-at-large). By choosing to “...finish this book in joy, goddamit” Price encourages their reader to remember “... I’ve got a body / that’s first memory wasn’t violence.” It is a glorious mess in the best sense, and I for one am privileged to know them and so grateful for their unwavering commitment to amplifying the voices of the marginalized. Because of this collection, I am now a horse girl who will forever be “...screaming, Bisquick / Bisquick everywhere” while looking over my shoulder for Ghost Cowboys with nefarious intentions.