It’s been a little quiet on the blog here the past few days, but to make up for it, we’d like to share three chapbooks recommended by our poetry editor Carrie Olivia Adams. Check out all the lovely things Carrie has to say about these little beauties.
Mobius Crowns by Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick (P-QUEUE)
Mobius Crowns by Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick (P-QUEUE)
This chapbook was new to me in 2010, even though it was originally published in 2008. But in a year when one of the most discussed poetry books was Anne Carson's Nox, I came across Mobius Crowns as another amazing example of the book as art object, and as an object where physical form serves content. There are two chapbooks, each with french flaps, boxed and bound in the collection. In my day job, I spend a lot of time talking about e-books and e-marketing and i-pad apps for books, so I know that if we want the book to live it must be beautiful. And it is reassuring to see small presses make a thing of beauty. "I thought a friend, like a poem, is what allows you to cease being oneself, and so be more oneself."
ZYXT by Joseph Clayton Mills (Entr'acte)
Be they prose poems or flash fiction or some other attempt at categorization, these are mini fables of madness--each beginning with "a friend who"--a bleak world of suicide and murder, albeit with an acerbic tongue. The collection is complete with an index that lists 9 kinds of murder from asphyxiation to patricide and suicides from defenestration to overdose.
In a World of Ideas, I Feel No Particular Loyalty by Adam Clay (Cinematheque)
All of the little chapbooks produced by Cinematheque are lovingly made. With a pocket-size trim, crafted with a loving attention to detail, this chapbook by Adam Clay is no exception. As well, the poems inside feel perfectly handmade:
Of course a quilt is a house--
And of course you can become so enamored
with an image that you become it:
like the snow all over town
and like the snow
all over town you become it.
--
If you're looking for a book you can hold, love, and cherish this season one of these might just do the trick!