Chapbook Roundup, part 1

I was offline this weekend--whadid I miss?



Been reading the wealth of chapbooks I picked up at the Massacre (or received in the mail just prior), and though I am not feeling up to full reviews (which is certainly my lacking, not the poems'), I would like to list and mention these delightful li'l things here with a hearty recommendation to you to procure them for yourselves. Click the links for details or contact info.



Smokers Die Younger, edited by Stephanie Young (Comment Box Press, 2004). [expurgated], Del Ray Cross, Nada Gordon, David Larsen, Cassie Lewis, James Meetze, Catherine Meng, K. Silem Mohammad, Christina Strong, & Alli Warren. Woowee. Stephanie sent flattened cigarette boxes to each contributor, who then sent them back with a poem written on them. The originals are reproduced for a most, and photos of poets' faces included in the back, and the theme of addiction is treated in energetic ways throughout. Nada Gordon's "Rage Glom Pink Sun" is formed of curlicues of anagrams, little puffs of verbal smoke, variations on the phrase "smoking = lung rape." "spurn gingko, spurn!." Del Ray Cross admits the sexy appeal of smokers, even when they're bad for you: "oh I tried to date him to / listen to what he can hear / (clasps ears) / if only he were still here / (ah here he is smoking / an imaginary cigarette)." James Meetze's "Giving it Up" takes a look at need and the escape from responsibility inherent in smoking (and poem-making): "The release need one must find reason not to return. / There is no motto worth its while when just to breathe is enough / to carry one up a flight of stairs in a hurry." And "It's these times that are worst. The motions incessantly / a reminder that one hand or the other could be multitasking." Recovering smokers and the unrepentant alike, inhale this half-a-pack today.



Postcard Poems by Stephanie Young & Cassie Lewis (Poetry Espresso, 2002). With a photocopy of a postcard from Stephanie to Cassie as the cover, this chap, like Smokers Die Younger, provides a glimpse of handwriting to deepen the intimacies of these Personist missive-poems. This faux privacy is something I find attractive about collaborations and collections of correspondence between poets, and combined with the sense of process provided by dates and daily details, what makes poems like these feel lived-in, beyond the page. "Dear Cassie, what day is it? Your poems have been / arriving slightly bent, as if / they have a private life between the time they're sent / & then received." And in "Untitled" from Cassie to Stephanie: "[...]how will I get to where I am going? / Where's that? A big place in the Sunday / frost where magazines fall from the boughs / of trees? Where's that? / Oh, I just want to write / some essays but my mind won't cooperate. / It thinks that we have to be somewhere."



Art in America by Jack Kimball (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2004). Jack has a knack for making a simply stated psuedofact seem factual, even if it's counterintuitive and he sets up interesting relationships between events-- "Manufacturing is showing some strength / I can't sleep[.]" Manufacturing has never kept me up, except when I lived near an ironworks shop in Williamsburg, but I'll buy it here. "Here are the new rules about snoots: / a gingko worksheet: / palliative spire:" or "either //I'm two sadnesses: or / these beyond plants are / not language: / let's go shopping:" And I'm in love with the titles, so daily they're odd: "Obtaining Soy Milk," "My Bitch," "To Ashton Kutcher," and especially "Source Material's Playback," with its ars poetical ring.



Grim Little by Christopher Rizzo & Mark Lamoureux (Anchorite Press, 2004). Firstly, Chris Rizzo's Anchorite press makes absolutely gorgeous books. This one is no exception: illuminated letters on the cover, cream laid paper and translucent tissue--the incarnation of this poem is one most poems should dream of. Mark & Chris read this poem at the Massacre--and I noticed when I sat down with it that I misquoted them in my reports! The poem begins "Xylophone networks / for bruised cacophany, digits, / pickups--say Humbuckers cannot / sate the hunchback now peerless / I's for dignities, mercies, violas / in gravel diaphragms, sickly blues / in this city of Dis, disasters Cambridge-styled / can drag a corpse to water but / can't make it Wallace Stevens's[.]" Since the book contains a single three-part poem, I won't spoil it for you by quoting too much, but Learishly named Grim Little in his cubicle with his cuticles chewed might remind you of someone you know as "the irksome police [skirt] the perimeter of meter swiftly, shouting Breaker of Iambs!" A dark little tale of Grim against the suits.



Coming next (at some point!): The Kickboxer Suite by Erica Kaufman, What Ever Belongs in the Circle & Jaywalking the Is by Noah Eli Gordon, Meme Me Up, Scotty by Chris Murray, Self-Portrait in Fire by Chad Parenteau, March 18, 2003 by Michael Lally, Calamity & Calamity Annex by Maureen Thorson, New Years by David Perry, (Purple) [expurgated], and I think a few more I still have in a bag somewhere!