It’s here!
Pat Foran’s Songs from the Blimp Ruins released on June 8, 2026!
This is the DEFINITIVE Silverbacked Punk release. I’ve been a fan of Pat’s writing for so many years. I was incredibly fortunate to hear some of these read on our Flash Monsters zoom calls when they were in their early stages. A lot of these words made 2020 bearable.
I could go on and on about this work, but these writers have done it better:
Songs from the Blimp Ruins by Pat Foran is at once a triple album, a love letter, a guidebook, an epic poem. And yes: “These notes are what you, when you and I were together, would call The Truth.”
A gifted writer, Foran knows intuitively that music is our common language. It’s how we connect and celebrate, mourn or fall in love. And so, he incorporates song into nearly every one of these collected works. These stories lend us the words and the melodies we thought we’d forgotten yet instantly recognize. Whether it’s the absurdity of living in these times, or desperate yearning, or incalculable loss, Pat Foran goes there. Perhaps so we don’t have to. To read these stories is to enter into gentle conversation with our own broken and battered hearts. Here, we are gifted with sixty often funny, wildly original, very deep stories from a writer whose heart (whose Lusitania heart), mind and artistry are like none other.
Reading this brilliant debut, one realizes: Separation does not exist, distance is an illusion, and we humans, fragile and flawed and full of longing, are all connected.
— Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
Pat Foran is a maestro.
In his flash collection, Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God get cross-pollinated with Clarice Lispector’s magical realism. Here, Carol Brady might pop in to do a commercial, or Dolly Parton might hop on a Zoom. Here a dog can be named Happenstance, and a canary can operate heavy machinery. Anything goes in these tiny, finely tuned stories of Pat’s, and yet they each beat with vitality as well as inventiveness. Hearts, especially, crop up everywhere in this collection: on trampolines, in thimbles. There are smuggled hearts, clown hearts, pinball hearts. Love positively animates these modern fables, turning the playful into the profound.
It’s no surprise, too, that this book is titled Songs from the Blimp Ruins because the characters throughout this collection feel, above all, like part of a great and universal human chorus. In the pages they sing, they spin records, they scat. They shout from rooftops. It’s as if the stories can’t help but burst from the confines of narrative and into something even bigger, even more melodic, more vital, more honest.
Truly these are heart songs.
— Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, author of Marvelous Freaks
of Nature!
Pat Foran’s stories and nonfiction often make me cry. He gets grief: the vertigo it induces, how it disrupts and shatters time, how loss unmakes the self. What is a parent without a child? But he also understands the lure of mourning, its gravitational pull: “No longer two people drowning, we were searching for a way to get back to the bottom of the sea. To get back to drowning.” Few writers are as attuned to the strangeness of language, as when a bereaved father, unable to fill out a life insurance form, gets stuck on “that word claim. As in mine. And this word: beneficiary.” Few writers are as attuned, also, to language’s suppleness and musicality. Foran writes phrases — casual, sly, brutally literal — that burrow into my brain: “How can you lean on a guy who’s tilting? I mean, he’ll fall.” Melancholy, playful, weird, and wise, Songs from the Blimp Ruins is an astonishing collection by a master of the form.
— Kim Magowan, author of The Last Day
Pat Foran is the kind of writer who creates with the blood and beauty of a well-loved heart. Allowing his words, stories, and characters to pulse on the page. To live in the body of its readers. To last long after the beat dies down to a soft thumping tap.
— Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, author of When It Gets Cold In The South
Spanning three distinct discs, Pat Foran’s Songs from the Blimp Ruins is a tender, heartbreaking, and remarkably inventive collection of hybrid work that invites us into the sweeping emotional record of a speaker gripped by life’s easiest and most difficult task: how to say I love you when the world and the speaker himself have entirely fallen apart. Routing deep feeling through various personae and wildly surreal scenes, such as reading the news to a rescue horse, singing the phone book to a late beloved, live tweeting from a JCPenney Christmas catalog model fantasy camp, and adopting a new laugh, grief continually voices itself obliquely when direct speech fails, what’s painfully real loosened, beautifully and peculiarly, by the imagination. But, as the speaker learns, a longing to communicate across impossible distances yields not wisdom or transformation but more wreckage. Yet, listen to the sound — the music, the quiet hope, and the extraordinary exhale — echo after collapse, at times offering itself so plainly as in “How Cold the Morning, How Heavy the Waltz,” a father looks lovingly upon the body of his departed son, whispering: “… this world was so lucky to have you …”
— Susan L. Leary, author of More Flowers
Songs from the Blimp Ruins is an astonishing collection. Pat Foran takes the familiar, renders it strange, and in the process, conjures whole new worlds. Through some, a laden “nothing” weaves like a refrain; in others, silence echoes, and the impossible haunts. Always, always, the reader senses the missing, the changed, and “the hurt in the heart the heart won’t hold.” But there’s so much love here, too, and such whimsy. In flash after flash, poignancy borders the absurd, and tenderness edges the elusive. That is Foran’s brilliance. He allows for the light.
— Melissa Ostrom, author of The Beloved Wild and Unleaving
Al Kratz 
Ordered. Best wishes to artist and publisher!
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