Chapbook Adventures

I indulged in chapbooks from four different publishers: Foundlings Press, Sarabande Books, Black Lawrence Press, and Dancing Girl Press. Below is my impressions of each and a list of favorites.

Black Lawrence Press:

An Inconsiderate Madness by Helen Marie Casie (2007) (22 pgs of poetry)

Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen this book about the witch trials of the 1600s because they're never a happy story and they're not stories I'm eager to revisit. This book focuses specifically on the case of Mary Dyer. It highlights the complexity of women's lives at that time, the very raw situations in which everyone was trying to survive. Casie includes Mary's husband's plea for lenience, to have her behavior interpreted as "an inconsiderate madness," rather than possession.

The opening poem "New World" is evocative and beautifully written. However, this being a book dealing with historical people and events, most of the poems did not show off the fullness of Casie's poetic talents but rather leaned toward narrative with little embellishment. 

I've always felt that the teaching of history should include poetry and fiction to bring a period to life. I could absolutely see using this book for that purpose. Casie focuses her lens so that the harsh realities which people were trying to navigate at that time are delineated. I would primarily recommend this book to people who have a particular interest in this episode in American History.

Dominant Genes by SJ Sindu (2022) (33 pgs of poetry)

I've never heard anyone mention coming-of-age as a category of poetry but there are definitely poems and books of poems that fall into this category. This book is one of them. The poet is navigating having grown up outside of her parents culture. Her parents and extended family remain quite traditional in their expectations while the poet is embracing edgy openness. These poems follow the speaker navigating the misguided good intentions of those wanting to steer her along a path that she knows isn't right for her. Still, she humors them by meeting suitors for which she's completely unsuited. It's a quirky give and take of individuation and parental adaptation. 

I think a lot of young people, teens through mid-twenties, could relate to this book, especially if they are the children of immigrant parents. For me, an old lady no longer much interested in people's fraught movement into sexual maturity, I found it a mildly interesting and easy read. The last two poems struck me as having more complexity and I wouldn't hesitate to read another book by this poet as she moves on to other experiences and subject matter.

Lupine by Jenny Irish (2023) (30 pgs of poetry)

I was only a few pages into this chapbook before deciding it wasn't for me. It was partly due to negative serendipity. I'd already read two caps featuring violence against women. Lupine seemed to be rounding up all sorts of violence, connecting them all. I just wasn't up for another read of that kind. 

But there was also the issue of whether what I was reading was actually poetry or a set of related mini essays. I've read a lot of prose poetry but haven't yet been able to articulate for myself, or anyone else, what the line between poetry and prose (flash essay or creative nonfiction) is. I'm not interested in coming up with some hard and fast rule but I feel I should be able to explain why when I feel something purporting to be prose poetry doesn't strike me as poetry. Alas, I still haven't hit on it, but this work didn't strike me as poetry.

Sarabande Books:

Lucy by Jean Valentine (2009) (17 pgs of poetry)

This slender collection of poetry is inspired by the skeleton unearthed by paleontologists in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974, which is believed to be approximately 3.2 million years old. At the time of the publication of this chapbook, this skeleton, dubbed Lucy by a member of the original expedition, was still the oldest and most complete hominid skeleton. There's a note to this effect at the beginning of this book and an image of the skeleton graces the cover.

For those of us who have been Lucy admirers for a long time, this book's focus is irresistible. Seeing it made me wonder if there are enough Lucy tributes by poets to assemble an anthology. But until such an anthology is created we have this one poet's response to Lucy. 

To say that the poetry itself is spare would perhaps be unfair; however, the tone is careful, at times verging on reverent. It is not effusive. Valentine contemplates the bones as a type of "secret book" Lucy has left us. I would recommend reading the notes at the back as a form of introduction to the types of associations Valentine is about to embark on: Looking at Lucy as the first to have lived and the first to have died, having been dredged up from the earth but also named after the song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and having shown up now, creating an arc over human history.

The book starts without titles and no indication whether page divisions are separate poems (I suspect they are) or if it's supposed to be one long poem. Perhaps this is like finding the bones. On page 10 we get a title and for the remaining 10 pages I assume we have all titled poems with new stanzas being given a new page if they won't fit on the preceding page without breaking up the stanza.

Perhaps I'm writing so much about this book in hopes of connecting with it. The truth is I was disappointed. Valentine has her own associations and romanticizing regarding Lucy and hers don't quite jibe with mine. To me, Valentine leaves Lucy in the realm of abstraction, even in deifying her as a representation of the great mother. There's nothing warm in this collection.

The City of Poetry by Gregory Orr (2012) (32 pgs of poetry)

I would never have thought I'd be describing Gregory Orr's poetry as charming but I'm doing just that here. This chapbook is for people who love poetry. In it each poet has a house and each poem is a house and the city that's created is life-sustaining. He lights on important encounters with poets and poetry from his own life so the mood is also nostalgic. Orr takes us on a sort of tour of the city and some of its residents in short interludes, a stanza or short poem. Of all the chaps I've read from this set, this is the one I want to keep. It makes me want to write about my own city of poetry. After all, each inhabitant of a city sees it differently, meets different people, appreciates different architecture, uses different avenues or alley to get from here to there. Each poetry lover has their own City of Poetry. I'm charmed that Orr has shared his with me through this book.

Foundlings Press:

My Radar Data Knows Its Thing by Lytton Smith (25 pgs of poetry)

This is an interesting chapbook with a couple of up front motifs. The first is that of radar. The table of contents is created in the bulls-eye configuration of a radar screen and the marking of a thing as near or far as on radar occurs in the poems. The second is the phrase from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (note the last name is the first name of the poet) "It was a dark and stormy night." This sentence is incorporated into the beginning of almost every poem in the book. In addition, a portrait of E. Bulwer-Lytton is reproduced throughout the book with various distortions made to it that relate obliquely to the poems. There's a section where there are 4 poems that are simply the scrambling of the lines in the first poem of the set and the lines simply don't have enough interest to bare that much remixing and repeating. The poetry is prose poetry and poetry of longer lines. So it's a very conceptual book. It was an interesting read but I'm afraid my main takeaway is that it's a series of poems that started with the sentence "It was a dark and stormy night" and since that line isn't original to the poet, it rather obscures the reputation of the poet behind an iconic popular sentence rather than leaving his own mark.

The following came together as the Spring 2021 Pack of Strays:

Mary Ruefle (Strays) (15 pgs of poetry)

Ruefle has a note in the back of this little booklet telling us that this is in fact a book of strays. They're poems of hers from years unmarked that have never made it into any collection of her poetry. Stray though they are, they lean toward the surreal and toward Asian influences. I've only read bits of her work in anthologies and journals so I don't know if those two things are characteristic of her work in general. 

The format of this booklet is too big for many purses but the poems therein are curious enough to suit re-reading and mulling while waiting at the doctor's office. I could see removing pages and keeping them folded up in some purse pocket or wallet for future contemplation and when done with them inserting them surreptitiously into library books to baffle the next unsuspecting readers.

Julianne Neely (Stray Selfies) (33 pgs of poetry)

If you like cheeky modernism, you may enjoy this book of poems, the titles of which all have the word selfie in them somewhere. As one would expect in poetry harkening to the moderns, there's a lot of disruption of meaning and throwing convention to the wind. One of the poems uses morse code as the beginning of every line (no, I didn't decode it nor are we provided with a decoded version). There's a poem that's a simple geometric shape with a comment on it. There's a poem with footnotes. There are blocks of repeating text. Backslashes are used for different purposes in different poems. And there's one long block of prose poem that I didn't feel the need to finish. There was another four and a half page poem that I didn't finish (my interest didn't see me through the disruption) and another one that I almost didn't finish because the metaphor (taxidermy) was distasteful to me. However, again, if you like cheeky modernism, and I do, this is worth a read. I'm sure there are subtleties I missed (because there always are). It's good to see a poet using conceptual freedom of the modernists to probe today's ubiquitous technologies and the new cultural phenomenon they engender.

Rachelle Toarmino (Comeback: A Crown of Sonnets in Prose) (10 pgs of poetry)

This is a powerful set of poems contemplating being a survivor. The poems approach the subject generally and then move toward the speakers personal survival after an assault. 

It's good to keep in mind that "Comeback" has at least two meanings: a retort, especially to an insult; to recover from a setback. I think both apply to these poems. This is a set of poems I'm tempted to slip into a domestic violence shelter. It's a combination of abstraction of something very personal, truth-telling, and empowerment.

Though I see how these prose poems are sonnets (little songs) and all follow a theme, I did not see how they formed a crown, which normally would involve repetition of lines or phrases from one sonnet to the next. Does this invalidate it being a crown? No. Not in a world where almost any 14 line poem can be called a sonnet regardless of whether it follows any of the conventions. Toarmino does directly address the notion of a "turn" in more than one of these poems so she clearly has the history of the form in mind and I'm sure if playing off of it in more ways than I'm likely to catch on a first reading.

Of these three strays, this is the one that impresses me the most.