spoken word



Hear “Disinvitation to the Dance,” commissioned by the City of San Antonio Department of Arts and Culture and published in Querencia Press and Voices de la Luna.

Read “for the Artist who paints with sound” in South Shore Review.

Hear “Sacred Music,” first published in Voices de la Luna.

Hear “No Pass No Play,” first published in Amp Magazine, Vol. 4.

Hear “Walk in My Shoes,” a finalist in the Independent Music Awards.

Read “Food Porn” (previously published in Feathertale) in Porridge magazine.

Read “My Exciting Day” in Funny Pearls.

Read “1964” (first published in Weave Magazine) in Literally Stories.

Read “Sole Sitter I,” a winner in the 2022 Ekphrastic Poetry Contest (page 5).

Read “Dinner at Tierra y Mar” in table//FEAST (page 27).

Mandala Music Production provides music and voiceover for Los Angeles-based experimental writer Janis Butler Holm, whose prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. The following sound poems are selections from Holm’s upcoming book of experimental work Rabelaisian Play Station. While drawing from Dadaist (Hugo Ball) and Surrealist (Kurt Schwitters) traditions, her work differs from earlier sound experiments by using real words instead of non-word phonetic sequences, engaging the reader by the possibilities of interpretation even as the word combinations refuse to transmit meaning in conventional ways.


Hear “Sound Poems” in Amp Magazine.

Hear “Sound Poems” in the Visual Poetry Project.

Hear “Sound Poems in The Journal.

photo by shiranai
Hear “Diner Dialogue” in Permafrost.

Hear “Memo to Barbie: Re the Breakup”
from the anthology Take a Stand, Art Against Hate.

Hear “Army” in Ponder Review.

Hear “Potato Fleet” in Quarterly West.

Hear “Apples and Bananas” in Posit.