Chapbook Roundup by CL Bledsoe

Let’s begin with Zachary Bush’s mini-chap Spin. Kendra Steiner Editions, 2009. The collection opens with “All Hunger is Silent,” a vivid descriptive scene in which a boy sits, “listening to the sound of beavers’ teeth…gnawing through a soggy cypress trunk, until the crunching stops/ suddenly and the slender tree topples over, slapping the belly of the dam.” This sets in motion a series of events culminating in the emergence of a water moccasin. The boy watches and “studies the snake’s spin--/an infinite circle on the ribbed surface of the stream.”

“Everybody’s True Gothic Story” is a standout two-part poem deconstructing gothic motifs as it follows “Somebody’s” tragic story. I’m blown away by Bush’s language and descriptions. he moves from eloquent gothic turns-of phrase to striped down language that propels the action. A few random lines: “Somebody’s dirty laundry spider-webbed/ over the black and whites of our local papers,” and later, “Somebody…turned on the lights/and there caught Nobody belly-sprawled across Somebody’s wife,” and still later, “the couple was still honeystuck,” and finally, “the chilled light [of the moon] would milk Somebody’s wife to ivory.”

Many of the poems in this collection reveal a sense of place that balances nicely with Bush’s language play. The truest thing I can say about this collection is that it makes me want to read more of Bush’s work.

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when i come here, by Ryan Eckes, is that rarest of things, a chapbook in its third printing. Plan B Press released this attractive chapbook in 2007 for $7. Plan B also published my first book, so I suppose I’m biased. Furthermore, I got this particular book as a swap at a reading I did with Eckes, so this further calls into question the validity of anything I might have to say about the book. So you should probably stop reading this review.

Eckes poems are spare, frequently brief, portraits of what must be Philadelphia life. Eckes is, at times, funny and revealing (this is perhaps redundant…), at times, stark. Many times he is surreal, as with the opening prose poem, “natividad,” which describes a baby staying in its mother’s womb to escape racial persecution, or in the pared down series of couplets he uses in
“paying respects,” which describes a group of people faced with a man who died after stepping off a train. “we all just kind of stood around/the heap of trench coat…thinking well shit/we can’t just leave him there.” Eckes world is fierce and human. “the bhagavad-cvs” throws into sharp relief the mindless toil with which many of us fill our lives. “dog” describes a man unsuccessfully trying to get rid of a dead dog at the dump; “i had to heave it over the fence, which was higher than i’d remembered. the dog hit the top of it and fell back on the pavement…i picked it up. fuck, she said…do you need help.” The scene is absurd, moribund, profoundly human and hilarious. Eckes captures the awkwardness, the viciousness, and the humor that come with being human.

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Call Me Misfit, by Joanne Lowery, Frank Cat Press, 2009.

This themed collection focuses on “the Misfit,” a female character who defies conventional sex-roles and societal norms and searches for her own identity. Lowery tackles fairy tale portrayals of women, artistic interpretations of beauty, literary conventions, and conventional societal standards with her free-spirited titular character. The Misfit is unconcerned with the pursuits of everyday life. In fact, her concerns are so different from the “norm” that she can come off as eccentric, even deranged to those caught in the rat maze of the workaday world. Many of the misfit’s antics defy obvious parallels. She is truly a free spirit—and sometimes this leads her to act in ways much of society apparently perceives as “crazy.”

Lowery uses her character to rail against middle-class ideals and bourgeois lifestyles. But much of the Misfit’s struggle seems internal—rarely is she faced with recognizable antagonists. Instead, she vents her spleen about shirts, she picks cotton, she is shipwrecked, she begs for change. She is trying to free herself from within and without.

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Put Your Head in My Lap is Claudia Smith’s new flash fiction collection from Future Tense Books ($5). Many of the stories focus on domestic life—women dealing with dirty sheets and failing dreams, children playing ‘show me yours and I’ll show you mine while’ watching their parents drink themselves into a stupor. The theme of miscarriage, lost children, and the inability to conceive permeate the collection. Smith’s prose is clean and vivid. She doesn’t settle for simple one-trick revelations, but instead strives to create portraits of her characters’ lives that have the richness and complexity of novels, though they rarely clock in at more than two pages.

“Hook” tells the story of Jennifer, a teenage prostitute looking for a john. Jennifer claims to be fifteen to appeal to her clients, though she is apparently a little older. One of the more powerful moments in the story occurs after the transaction has been completed. The john starts to whimper. To placate him, Jennifer says, “I’m not a little girl…I’m a teenager. Don’t feel bad…And this isn’t the first time either.” It’s a heartbreaking moment. She then says, “[I] pulled his sad face into my lap. I felt something open and shut inside me…like a valve in my heart. It wasn’t love that I felt, of course it couldn’t have been. But it was something like love, a mixture of gratefulness and yearning.” This scene could’ve easily devolved into a trite example of emotional blackmail, but Smith handles it deftly, empowering her female lead, which, at the same time, makes her seem even more vulnerable.

These characters are looking for something, striving to find solace or love or a child or even money—whatever the problem is today. There is love in this book and yearning and pain and healing. And Smith manages it in two pages, a page, a paragraph at a time.