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While publishing online can mean that a text is more easily widely circulated, the dedication that goes into presenting a chapbook online often goes unsung. For July, I read three e-chapbooks, and each of them had stunningly beautiful covers and design that enhanced the reading experience.
Poets don’t expect to be famous. We may fantasize about it of course—what if Terrance Hayes were to appear on Jimmy Fallon or Ada Limón had her own reality show? What if NBC televised the Poetry Society of America award ceremonies?
In the collaborative poetry collection Ghost/Landscape (Blazevox, 2016) by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher there is no beginning or end. The first poem is “Chapter Two.” So begins traversing a time loop of poems where the reader can really “begin” anywhere. What is a beginning and what is an ending? Is moving forward and looking behind you the same thing? A circle never ends. “Chapter Two,” begins like a bed time story:
“We must have known there was no going back…that morning, before our windows had been broken, you asked about the lock on the door. I realized it was only a matter of time before the alarm sounded, which always seemed out of place in the dead of winter.”
The poems in Monica Wendel’s chapbook are marked by quick dissolves, scenes suddenly opening onto new scenes. The prose poem “Blue” flickers back and forth between “a diner where the waitresses wear their hair swooped up” and a dream of rowing through New York Harbor at night.
At a poetry workshop recently I heard the word metaphysical used to describe several contemporary American poets of disparate temperaments. At times metaphysical sounded erudite, at times dismissive, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it near poems and poets I loved.
It is not often that poetry goes viral on the internet, but that’s what happened last month with a poetry project in Boston, Massachusetts. MassPoetry.Org and the City of Boston have teamed up to introduce poetry into the streets of the city via a water-repellant spray that reveals poems.
I found Aracelis Girmay’s the black maria in a month filled with keen grief, the kind that follows a tragedy like Orlando or the loss of a loved one so paramount to your life that afterward people just going about their lives seem like a perverse mystery.
It might be considered anathema to our neighbors south of the Rio Grande but Phoneme Media is having a veritable publishing celebration of indigenous Mexican poetry. This small, indie publisher with one of the coolest catalogues of world lit understands what Anthony Seidman wrote recently in World Literature Today.
In these three queries, Jefferson attempts to distill the complex meteorological, demographic, and military features of Virginia into a series of data points. His prose—supplemented by graphical tables tracking everything from rainfall to carriage wheels—draws a fine grid over the natural and human activities of the Commonwealth.
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