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Review: Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs by Dan Beachy-Quick

Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs

by Dan Beachy-Quick

Omnidawn Publishing, 2015

I must admit that I couldn’t resist the temptation to read Dan Beachy-Quick’s chapbook, Shield’s & Shards & Stitches & Songs, out of order. The chapbook is organized into four sections, each with seven poems bearing the same title: Shield, then Shard, then Stitch, and, finally, song. The reader quickly discovers that each Shard poem is an erasure of its corresponding Shield, each Stitch erases its corresponding shard still further, and each Song uses pieces of its corresponding Shield, Shard, and Stitch to create a new poem.

Beachy-Quick constructs his Shields on the page the way one might imagine a Classical Greek warrior’s shield on the battlefield; each is a slightly curved oval of text, only a few wide lines, centrally aligned on the page. As the back cover notes, the shields “call out to the violence from which they also protect us” (back cover). Like the battle scenes on Achilles’ shield, Beachy-Quick’s Shields direct their viewers to violence; the second one tells us to “Lash/Deeds to shadows” (10). The Shards are surprising in what they leave behind. Like archeological remains, they provide neither a complete nor a clear picture of the Shields that came before them. They repeat words, stammering, like someone dying in a war movie: “Be marker/be be stone” (17). The stitches, although they are even less complete, seem to be Beachy-Quick’s vision of the raw ingredients of a more modern, hopefully less violent poetry. One of the stitches, for example, contains the words “bee,” “loud,” and “glade” (26) familiar to all of those who know the “bee-loud glade” in William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a totally non-warlike poem about imagining a peaceful place of refuge. The Songs are larger than the original Shields, and emphasize nonviolence, reconstruction, and rebirth: “To put the moon back in a song” (39).

At first I wished each piece of this erasure puzzle was a little bit closer together, so that I didn’t need to flip as many pages. But eventually I realized that flipping back between each of the four sections is necessary to understanding the project of this collection—the reader does the work of an archaeologists, piecing the Stitches and Shards back to their original Shields. The cover image, a white box surrounded by multicolored lines that look a bit like the errors made by a misaligned inkjet printer, further emphasizes the laborious, sometimes frustrating process of piecing together parts to create a whole.

In all, Beachy-Quick’s message is a hopeful one: that studying history really can lead to a less violent present. Certain words remain in all the parts of his erasure and reconstruction process, words which seem to represent concepts held as important across cultures and throughout history. These words include “poet,” and the final word in the chapbook, “home” (39).

--Char

#chapbookreview

The Hairpin Tax - David Appelbaum

The Hairpin Tax

David Appelbaum

Codhill Press, New Paltz, New York, c. 2010

The afterword to The Hairpin Tax notes the “excessively complex meanings” in Appelbaum’s poetry that “necessarily rely on code.” Before even attempting to parse Appelbaum’s cryptic semantics, the reader is confronted with codification in the the choice of font, which is a bit humorous. The chapbook uses only two fonts, a sort of exaggerated, candied, serif-chic for the titles of the poems and typewriter for the body, as well as the title page. The lack of punctuation (I didn’t see a single period, and commas occur perhaps once every two poems) and the poems’ short length give the words an inscribed and prophetic air. The fluffy title font lets you in on a little secret: these poems may present as staid, but secretly they are a bit ridiculous.

Once you get into them, they move faster. Appelbaum beats a meter through his lines that faces the reader readily and with an open posture. It probably exercises in the morning as opposed to the afternoon, and it probably takes its kids to Chuck-E-Cheeses for a birthday party. It probably voted for Reagan the first time, but not the second time. Lines are often kept to two stressed syllables.The meter leads the reader through quickly and decisively and doesn’t encourage lingering, and at times even feels closed off to it, as if it has a job it needs to be doing, or needs you to be doing.

The strangeness of the words is all the more striking for the poems’ insistence that you make it to the end in good time. Traditional poetic tropes (the ‘old master’ artists, time, and of course, ‘poetry’ itself) do strange things within a single line, which you often forget because you read them over so fast--”the old masters / twist the socket,” “Greek shame / reeks of flesh.” These poems interrogate some well-worn themes, and refreshingly, don’t shove any more philosophizing on them that wasn’t there already. These poems are not closed thoughts--they are codified streams of digits that the reader works furiously to decipher in the time given, before inevitably starting over.

Codes should be decipherable, but only if you and the writer of the code have matching decoders. It seems as if we readers were not issued a copy, and it sort of begs the question as to what we are supposed to take from these poems. They evidently have directionality-- “mit boos / pretend / to assuage / God / ain’t it / worth / some other / proverb”--these poems are meant to be saying something, as is clear both from their central subject matter (those good, classic, poemly nouns that would have been capitalized in times past) and their grammatical grounding. But though each short burst of poem-code has multiple points of entry, they are all out of reach. Signifiers have no earlier reference in the poem, images come and go at the same measured pace that our tongues inexorably trace out the contours of Appelbaum’s diction. Are we supposed to make our own codebooks? Have we intercepted these messages on their way to an interlocutor? In my reading of the chapbook, I tended toward the latter--these poems make sense as coded messages that we as readers are not necessarily clued into, moving with a pace that belies their evident importance but about which we can only guess.

-Carter

Abraham Burickson’s Charlie

Charlie captured me as soon as I flipped open to the title page. Although at first glance the cover presents as a quilted series of variously colored squares, we learn on the flipside that this cover art was designed by a “synesthetic artist who sees letters as colors,” and that “each square represents a different letter.” The covers, front and back, are transliterations of two of the chapbook’s poems. For those unfortunate non-synesthetes amongst us, these poems are then also spelled out in letters, below that revelatory opening note. Yet even this presentation occurs in a continuous script—perhaps less intractable than colored squares, but hardly a simple reading experience itself (as those of you who have been generous enough to read my own chapbook’s continuous script can attest), and one that prompts a verbal articulation along with visual processing in order to glean the meaning. As a result, before even reaching page one, we’ve been rattled with riddles and translations, and compelled to engage our senses of color and sound as much as those of linguistic meaning. We are primed for the poetic experience to follow, which is often as much wrapped up in puzzles and a straddling of both cognitive and non-cognitive sensory experiences as the cover.

We step off the bus and the speaker invites us to “[f]eel your eyes blur as the driver pulls away. Inevitable / disarticulation of motion—oh—…” (p.12) We’re not often stepping off the bus, however, because that’s usually Charlie—the sparsely identified young man that the series of poems in the collection tracks, through his various experiences with women in New York and eventually heading west. Frequent appearances are also made by Sal—Charlie’s lustful and aggressive doppelganger, whose existence outside of Charlie’s own mind is never concretely established. (“Sal’s a mole-rat on concrete / he’s unrolling roots; they’re / at the end of they anyhow…” (p.32)) The speaker plays fast and loose with perspective—sometimes inviting the reader in to occupy the action, sometimes telling the reader about Charlie, sometimes carrying on a conversation with Charlie directly, with little regard for a third-person audience.

The confusion that simmers below this series is engaging and unsteady, gleefully punctuated with striking imagery and moments of sensory clarity. In “Downtown at His Sister’s House,” Charlie has ascended the stairwell of a high-rise apartment to pay an unexpected and unwelcome afternoon visit to his sister, and proceeds down the rusted, foul-smelling, pipe-lined hallway, but then “She opened the door, / the day, the clouds.” (p.16)

The chapbook is authored by an intriguing artist named Abraham Burickson, who is perhaps best known for founding Odyssey Works—an “interdisciplinary performance collective” based out of San Francisco. The group engages in 24-36 hour performances, individually tailored for a single audience member, whom the group will typically have spent weeks studying, in the lead up to the performance. As the New York Times has characterized the endeavor, in coverage of the group a few years ago, “[t]he idea is a beautiful inefficiency: a tiny but infinitely more affected audience.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/design/odyssey-works-makes-art-for-and-about-one-person.html) That inefficiency is rife in Burickson’s poems. And for that reason, in an age and under the institutional shadow of a University that glorifies efficiency as an intrinsically valuable aim in itself, spending a few minutes with Burickson’s poems is a refreshing protest, and one that I would recommend.

The press that published Burickson’s chapbook is Codhill. They have an ongoing chapbook series, and profess to be “devoted exclusively to the advancement and appreciation of the finest works in poetry and prose which promise to search out important meanings for our lives.” (http://www.codhill.com/)

--Joe

#chapbookreview

How incredible it was for us as poets and thinkers and scholars (and lawyers!) to enter into a space solely dedicated to making books... To enter into the at once modern and yet completely ancient art of bookbinding. Somewhere along the line, the art of making books has slipped past us, with the almost alarming rise of digital text & closing of childhood bookstores marking our literary lives.

It was beautiful because it was nostalgic, but it was wonderful because it was contemporary. The experience was an affirmation that we could pursue our dreams because there was a community of bookmakers, publishers, and visual artists who, in presses like this one, were just as dedicated to the production and dissemination of literary objects as, well, us.

Nicolette in her wisdom and unending patience was so gracious as to walk me step by step through the process of making a hardback cover artist book from scratch. I walked away from my two mornings at Sputnik feeling incredibly happy not because I was carrying my very own book in my hands, but because I was harboring the know-how to make more. And to teach others (even little kids, the loves of my life!) how to do so as well.

Up until this class, publishing always seemed to me a daunting, elusive process far removed from the small confines of my dorm/class world. Now I know that’s not the case. Words can be gifts, but so can book objects, and journals, and sketchbooks--all handmade and presented to others within days.

I am grateful to UCSC for this opportunity to learn and the future opportunities I will have to share with those I love.

--MeeSoh

#spudnikpress

Horse Less Press Q&A

Featuring your questions!: How do you think that operating in a smaller city has affected your process (finding authors, distribution, community, etc). When I started Horse Less, I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and then I continued editing the press while in Denver, Colorado. I’ve been editing the press from Grand Rapids, Michigan for the last five years. In both Providence and Denver, I was a graduate student and pretty involved in the local poetry community, so I relied much more on IRL communication with writers: I’d solicit work after hearing someone read, and I was more likely to publish the work of writers in my physical community, with readings and events in that community. Both because I’m no longer a student and because Grand Rapids doesn’t have the same kind of literary community, I definitely feel like the press’s online presence has been more important, and I’ve been less involved in the readings and even the direct distribution of books we publish. When you think about distribution, do you focus on expanding your business or supporting friends/a smaller community? At one time or another, we’ve felt more motivated by each approach. Most recently I’ve been trying to expand our reach, and there’s a lot of good that’s come of that, but it’s left me feeling spread a bit too thin, and I think “business” is a real key word here – I don’t really want to think of the press as a business, but at some point, expansion seems to make that inevitable. Part of the reason that Horse Less Press is taking a publishing break next year is so that we (I) can reflect on our ultimate intentions and think about what a good balance between maintaining intimacy and joy of the work and reaching outside our familiar zone might look like. Do you prefer when poets want to be very involved in the materiality of their chapbooks, or do you find that more separate roles work best in the layout and design process? I look for some kind of balance that feels like a collaboration. I really love it when authors have ideas about the look and layout of their work; it’s especially great when authors have artists friends they want to involve in the process. Occasionally we receive submissions from writers who’ve already planned the entire layout and design of their books, which always makes me wonder why they don’t just make the object themselves! I’m not really interested in being a printing service. When I lived closer to the writers I was publishing, we’d sometimes get together to fold or bind their chapbooks, which was nice; I miss that. How does being a small press editor affect your being a reader of poetry and a consumer of books? I am a major patron of libraries, but because I realize how difficult it is to support a small press financially and energetically, I make a point to use all my book dollars to support the small presses I love, especially via pre-orders and subscriptions. Though I rarely have the time to write real book reviews, I try to use social media to help boost awareness of those presses and books as well. I also find I have a bias—which I know is sometimes problematic—in favor of writers I know are involved in their literary communities in other ways: as event curators or publishers or reviewers or writing teachers and mentors. I have a tendency to listen to those voices more carefully. I feel I’m also aware of how much good pr—the kind of pr that most small presses can’t afford—can determine the success of a book; I know there are great books out there not getting the attention they deserve, so I try not to only read the books that everyone is talking about. I try to remember to browse and hunt and work a little to find the good work that doesn’t have the budget to yell about its goodness. What do you do when you realize you've made a printing error? Any coping mechanisms to suggest? I curse and promise not to waste paper and time and money and ink next time around and get on with it. We’ve gotten pretty creative with our recycling, finding new uses for the errata.

#horse less press #publisher interview

Did you know how the pros get those nice, creased folds in their books? Would you believe it if I told you they used an actual bone?

Did you know that most gray inks have the tiniest bit of red in them?

Did you know that some old printing presses can be steered like ships?

All this and more I learned when my fellow chapbook makers and I headed down to Spudnik Press on the west side of Chicago to print and sew together our books. Spudnik is a small press accessible to the general public, so next time you’re in Chicago, check it out!

--Char

#spudnikpress

Spudnik had printed samples of our cover images before we arrived--our first time seeing them on paper (!) Getting the polymer plates and cover paper adjusted to print in the right spot (and all straight & even) was the hardest part of using the letter press. After that, the process was quick & clean. I was surprised by how little ink it took to print thirty pages, also by how small the little presses are. But they print such beautiful, delicate images!

--Hannah

#spudnikpress

CRWR 13014 arrives at Spudnik

#spudnikpress

The coveted Vandercook-4 letterpress!

#spudnikpress

Overheard on our printing trip to the Spudnik Press studio

-“I enjoy watching Natalie at the helm of the Pearl.*”

*An old-school letter press

-“I haven’t been the problem child since, like, middle school.” - Sarah, on having to fine-tune her letter press layout

-“Joe looks like a printer’s apprentice in that apron.”

-“Will Spudnik want to save my paper scraps?”

-“I’m sure...”

(posted by Rebecca)

#spudnikpress

All publishing poets know what chapbooks are. So, I’m not going to provide a history of the chapbook. The internet is full of good essays documenting that history. In fact, one brief essay can be found here on TheThe Poetry Blog by Sam Riedel. Here’s another link to one by the British historian, Ruth Richardson. What I want to draw attention to is the importance of the poetry chapbook and the folly of considering it as less significant than a full-length collection. A chapbook, which is basically any book with a page count under 48, will not be considered for any major prize. No matter how good, it cannot win a Pulitzer or National Book Award or National Book Critics Circle Award. In fact, there is, to my knowledge, only one prize in […]

A recent article about chapbooks.

#chapbooks

Birds of Lace press and Carrie Murphy’s “Meet The Lavenders” (2011)

1989, the number: Chapbook collaboration & chapbooks “on tape”

“1989, the number” is a chapbook written in collaboration by Nate Marshall and Kevin Coval, two Chicago poets whose writing often centers around city politics and urban discourse. The chapbook, written in only 6 days at the end of 2015, pays homage to the year 1989 in America; the chapbook plays like a mixtape “incorporating the hottest records and stories of 1989 and reflecting their relevance for today.” Coval and Marshall recently edited an anthology called “The Breakbeat Poets,” which is a curated poetic anthology (I own) that examines issues of cultural appropriation, urban life, and contemporary American politics, and “1989, the number” feels like a natural continuation of the Breakbeat themes more specifically focused and more musically produced.

Though the collection is marketed exclusively as a “chapbook,” it is available only online in audio form, and is compared to a “mixtape” for the way that it is separated into tracks (like poems) and transitions musically from track to track. The poems themselves are “spat” rather than spoken; and the audio aesthetic of the chapbook is very Mos Def/ House music/Urban cypher, for lack of better references to explain it.

The language in the chapbook is undoubtedly compelling (line breaks denote pausing in the oral delivery):

“I didn’t know how to feel anything/ that wasn’t fury. The bridge to my body/ was F-A-S-T-E-DD-I-E-/ You- see, a death here.../ House music ruled juice clubs/ the all-ages places/ Hip-hop was a bunch of dudes at a bar/ hard-mugging/ head-nodding/ monks in some form of a cult/ I dug that,/ that was my lane but House/ was open/ queer/ wild with bodies and booty/ sweat everywhere you could sweat from./ House grinded against you from behind/ without you knowing who or what it was/ dancing a panic.”

The audio form of the chapbook is undoubtedly its most impressive feat. The audio medium forces attention from listeners that a book object cannot; listening to the chapbook mixtape, I had to stop what I was doing to listen to the poetry and mind the lyrics-- because the language does not exist in writing online, it felt sacred. The audio medium perfectly illustrated the themes discussed within the chapbook: the way that time erases history, “like smokes from the stacks gone....” how a year like 1989 can exist in memory or music but never quite as concretely as in text. Additionally, the audio medium blends language with music, and challenges the poetic language to do the unique work of acting as song lyrics, or chants, or raps. This summoning would simply not be as strong or as apparent in text form; the audio medium proves quite successful and compelling for a chapbook like this one. Questions I am left with ask about the nature of language as performance or as text: how is a chapbook altered when it circulates through audio and not text? Is it still a chapbook?

Link to chapbook: http://www.breakbeatpoets.com/1989-the-number.html

-Natalie Richardson

Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson

Review of Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011 58 pages Reviewer: Sarah Claypoole

Ugly Duckling Presse, perhaps unsurprisingly, publishes out of Brooklyn, New York. It was founded out of a 90’s zine of the same title. UDP rests in two concurrent spheres as an editorial collective and a nonprofit publisher. The divide between the positions becomes apparent when it comes to who is paid: the press manager and the managing editor, a few others involved in straightforward publishing work, but not the executive director, who falls firmly into the nonprofit aspect of UDP’s work. They run a broad-based operation: there’s a podcast, a Tumblr (quite cute, can recommend), and a substantial number of regular series focused on particular formats or, oftentimes, translation-based or internationally oriented projects. The Reg has about fifty UDP chapbooks from across the past fifteen years whose poetic content varies greatly.

Applies to Oranges first distinguished itself to me due to the title (solid) and my interest in its medium-blue library-given binding. The library tends to bind chapbooks in the dominant color of the cover or front materials, and such was the case for Thorson’s work. The entire collection is one linked poem in which individual sections occupy between ten and fifteen lines on any given page. That length seems to be in tension with the materiality of the book: the poem takes up less than half the page, and the white space feels more like an accident than intentional in relationship to the poem. Since each section occupies about the same space, it isn’t a choice that caters to certain long sections. Each poem contains the word orange. An early section opens the poet’s anxiety about words and their meanings:

…Blue signifiers—the ocean, its downbeats, its tides that spiral and glide. You once read them as instructions: Escape. If I’d known what “escape” signified.

The color blue links all the associations the speaker has with the ocean, even though they aren’t color-based in and of themselves, and then those associations take on the weight of serving as “instructions.” In fact, these are particularly high-stakes instructions, and the anxiety is furthered by the disconnect regarding escape: that the speaker was told to escape, but could not attach the signifier to what was signified. The rest of the poem plays with these anxieties. I would have perhaps expected a more radical form for the book itself for poems preoccupied with language’s broken hinges, that to call into question language would necessitate calling into question the book-object itself. However, few amongst the UDP projects I saw varied from a normal-seeming stitch and typical bindings—this reflects the UDP commitment to the bookbinding process.

Thorson’s poems are quick to move through sensory impressions, often starting on something imagistic and pulling through its sonic elements or what it is to touch. The use of orange makes sense details easy to track, and it stands in for the individual sections of the poem, “opened/like an orange, as a child might open it--/thumbs in, fingers splayed,/and then the whole thing rips apart.” This emphasizes the sense in which Applies to Oranges feels like a fractal: a coherent whole whose detailed and profound individual sections nonetheless should be seen with context.

#chapbookreview

Afterimage by Damon Krukowski; Ugly Ducklings Presse 2011

Afterimage by Damon Krukowski with photographs by Naomi Yang Published by Ugly Ducklings Presse 2011

Reviewer: MeeSoh Bossard

“In the car driving home, I think this must also be the structure of memory—images that we retain in isolation, but sum together as they flash in our minds. Perhaps this is also the structure of dreams. Dream logic emerges as we work to make sense of the succession of images separated by blackness.”

Author Damon Krukowski describes his work Afterimage as a non-book, as a private letter with an urgent cry for help sent to many, unknown addresses. The closest to describing the work might be a memoir that hovers between fiction and reality, a fickle journal, a reflection on and construction of the author’s present and past.

Krukowski’s Afterimage is difficult to categorize as one specific type of literary venture, and this is exactly in line with the author’s intention. Krukowski actively resists classification, rejects being pinned down for fear of being dissected and discovered. The pages are riddled with letters, poetry snippets from previous publications that are quite casually re-titled as the author feels like it. There are also plenty of snippets from daily conversations as well as inscriptions taken from stone buildings in Portugal, South Korea, and Spain. At any point a reader believes they have arrived at the appropriate classification, they are proved wrong. By doing so, Krukowski not only pushes boundaries, he moves beyond them.

The reader gets a sense of the author’s experimental vision the moment he or she looks at the book’s cover: a brown paper cutout overlaid onto a beautiful purpley photograph of a surreal landscape. Even the pages themselves reflect the outer materiality of the book, with each of the words printed in a non-traditional dark brown ink against ivory paper. From the onset, the readers are made to contend with the pressing openness, warmth, and slightly mystical nature of the book.

Both the careful cutout and printing of the book is distinctive of Ugly Ducklings Presse, especially in their desire to support experimental writers and dedication to elements of traditional bookmaking. Even before opening the book (or non-book), the reader is steeped in the aura envisioned by the author and executed faithfully by the publishing press.

What is so interesting about Afterimage is that despite its heavily varied styles, it still has a distinct thematic thread. Throughout each of the work’s five sections, the author explores the fragmentary nature of memory and experience of reality. Each poem, letter, building inscription, or transcription of dialogue is grounded in memories concerning the author’s family. All of the writing is spliced one way or another, either by astrid's, roman numerals, or selective italics, but the theme of the family and the author’s struggle with familial intimacy remains persistent throughout the work.

Even so, a lot about the author’s family is focused on obscurity, a desire to hide, and a consistent reemerging darkness. What begins as an excerpt from a poem on his father shifts into a discussion on a refusal to explain a middle name, a description of the dark shadows that plague his father’s face. Identity and hiding re-emerge when the author describes his own acute desire to use a pseudonym to hide from his family and yet be known to the rest of the world. Here, it is as if the author’s name is scurrying into a metaphorical hiding place.

Alluding to the title, the author writes,

“If a light illuminating successive images flashes, the darkness between causes us to merge this afterimage with the next, which we sum to one in flux rather than two in succession. If a light is constantly shown on successive images, we see only a blur. That is: interruption is necessary to the illusion of continuity.”

Afterimage, then, is an exploration of the fragments of life embalmed in memory that are inevitably spliced by human interrogation and interpretation. It creates its own “darkness” through highly varied splicing--not by varying light, but by drawing upon different literary modes. But the result is not foreboding or sad. Instead, as the silvery ink with which the book’s title is pressed onto the cover shows, speaks to the highly personal, beautiful project of intimacy that is life.

To Be Read in the Dark by Maxine Chernoff

Omnidawn Publishing, 2011 34 pages Omnidawn Pubishing is a small press in Oakland that has been publishing full length books of poetry, poetics, translation, and fabulist fiction along with chapbooks since 2001. Its mission of allowing authors’ visions for their books to take precedence throughout the publishing process aligns with the Modernist idea of how the chapbook liberates the writer. The founders of Omnidawn believe that small presses allow literature to evolve in many directions and that the coexistence of many small presses is necessary to feeding that growth and giving readers access to true diversity of voice. To this aim, they also publish a monthly web magazine, OmniVerse, that reviews and features writers not published by Omnidawn.

To Be Read in the Dark is a collection of seventeen poems all written in short lines surrounded by their own margins and without punctuation, so that they at once seem to summon their own darkness and radiate out into the dark. Chernoff’s poems ruminate on the nature of memory, endings, truth, longing, God, and other human afflictions. Her topics are heavy, yet her musings are brief and sharp. Nearly every other line is an image that propels the poem into new territory while each passing line is left gleaming, enshrined in the poem’s world––“the second of telling/becomes the told.” Chernoff is able to express yearning in each of her lines because each line longs to be the end. “Finitude, please,/frozen ground says” and even “God is nostalgic/for simple instructions.” Drawing on complexity’s paradoxical desire for solution allows every line to be an ending that is amended in the following line, demonstrating a poetics that is a repeated stabbing at language for truth. Ultimately, Chernoff’s collection provides satisfaction and moments of epiphany that are only more exquisite because they are inflected with the sad acknowledgment that these poetic solaces are untenable outside the page. Chernoff knows this: “the construction/of a sentence/enters the box/leaves the world/unsaid.”

This collection of poems is particularly well-suited to the chapbook form. Thematically, Chernoff is concerned with the idea of brevity. She says that “The essence/of essence/is essence and razors” and refers to the space of her poems as a box in “The Box” and throughout. Her poems want to condense and sharpen muddled, existential questions into discrete attempts at answering them while maintaining imagistic and emotional richness. So, it makes sense that To Be Read in the Dark would take the physical shape of a flat, box-shaped book. The consistency of the poems’ forms and themes across the collection make the titles almost unnecessary. The poems read as one poem, adding to the urgency of each new, yet familiar line. One almost expects to flip back through the pages and find a heap of discarded lines, but each one remains lodged in its white moat. The shortness of the book as a whole charges the space with pressure more than a longer book might––it would be hard to sustain the pace of expectation and satisfaction that Chernoff sets without any developed narrative threads built into the poems. One aspect of the layout I find interesting is the decision to set the text at different distances from the edges on facing pages. I think this may have been done to add distinction to the ending of one poem and beginning of another, so that one block of text isn’t necessarily the direct reflection of the previous one. I find the sparseness of the layout congruous with the sparseness of the lines and also, surprisingly, it evokes, for me, a sense of darkness in its immutability.

--Hannah

#bookreview

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Poetry Chapbooks: From Thesis to Book