Chapbook Series I
REDEMPTION CENTER / Kevin Varrone ($10)
Kevin Varrone’s endearing little collection feels like a nest woven from whatever’s on hand: twigs and grasses, but also unraveled cassette tape. The nimble music of Varrone’s poems is a pleasurable vehicle for the heavy matter of mourning extinctions—the passenger pigeon, the dodo—while attending to the given world with devotion and curiosity (all this looking, I thought I might see / a pair of chuck t’s thrown over a power line). The self set in motion by a long, solitary train ride accesses the redemptive quality of observation: a quality that both raises possibilities (a house for sale / along the tracks / by water // is that a life // of mine?) and makes home shine more brightly (harbor or harbinger, forsythia / I miss you). Like the eponymous site to which one brings spent bottles and cans, expecting a meaningful accretion of dimes and nickels, REDEMPTION CENTER is a humble and hopeful operation.
“…The eight poems included here are…composed as meditations akin to short essays…straightforward, but almost deceptively so, writing out a series of turns and turns, skips and short clips, somewhere between the sharpness of rough sketch and carved, polished stone.”
Kevin Varrone’s
most recent full-length collection book is box score: an autobiography, available as a free, interactive poetry app for iPhone and iPad. He lives outside Philadelphia, where he organizes the annual small press/hand made book arts festival PHILALALIA (philalalia.com).
RURAL / Hailey Higdon ($10)
Hailey Higdon’s RURAL is a love letter to what lies in the middle, turning over of worlds hidden beneath the seemingly nondescript and the commonly discounted. On this drive, Higdon takes a second look at the self, applying layers of experience to objects and places and finding the sticky ‘middles’ of her micronarratives. RURAL’s destination is an unexpected detour, weaving in and out of the questions: what does loneliness look like in the wide-in-between spaces and what is enough?
HAILEY HIGDON writes letters, essays, stories, novels, children’s books, and not-too-bad greeting cards with her partner, T. She creates sound poem experiences about once a decade. Hailey is the author of several poetry chapbooks including: The State In Which(above/ground), Packing (Bloof Books), How to Grow Almost Everything (Agnes Fox), and A Wild Permanence (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She is originally from Nashville but currently resides in Seattle with T.
THERE ARE TREES / Maxwell Shanley ($9)
Through familiar objects, gestures, and relationships, Shanley explores the interplay of duration and instant, layers of history and the edge of the present moment. A bend in time moves through these poems like a crack in the glass, calling quiet attention to the turbulence of memory and the inadequacy of narrative time. A mantra of universal change drones delicately beneath these poems, unwritten but present nonetheless. Here, time may steal cruelly from itself, as a sudden wind snatch’s one’s attention. Here, aging may be a refinement, a smoothing of time’s and one’s own edges. Here, layers of accumulated histories are almost tactile, almost tenable, as they build skyward and spill out around and from us. My life / issued forth like a bridge / of hands.
“…I look back at Shanley. At his work in There Are Trees. At his earnest undertaking, like shovel to sunlight, filled with matter, raised, offered, a gift, a proposition, propped up, or extended, muscles aching, but strong is the response to the ache. Like a smile.”
MAXWELL SHANLEY lives in San Francisco where he works as a bookseller. He is currently completing an MFA at San Francisco State University. His work from his poetry chapbook THERE ARE TREES (Drop Leaf Press, 2017) has previously appeared in New American Writing and Slipstream.
SONOMA / Lehua M. Taitano ($9 / $14)
The second addition to our chapbook series is a beautiful and complex love poem examining displacement, rivers, dams, and queer identity. Featuring the coptic stitch and, in limited edition, special embroidery art, this hand-bound field guide includes cover art and lettering by illustrator and designer Mary Lundquist.
“This new chapbook continues Taitano’s diasporic mapping of landscapes and bodyscapes. Here…a languid love letter to Sonoma, California, its lake, its lack, and its simultaneous familiarity and foreignness. The speaker here is ‘adrift’ in diaspora, but also attuned to the pleasures of displacement. From a diasporic Chamorro perspective, there’s of course an irreconcilable difference between island and mainland, and between the expanses of California and the accidents of the psychic archipelago, but Taitano’s poetics works by queering that distance, by finding the homology in difference, by embracing the synaesthetic intimacies of landscape… As with other Chamorro and Pacific poetics, Taitano’s work evinces a strong eco-poetic dimension, especially with regard to the intersections between environmental and colonial violence… A great poet once wrote, ‘Pardon me 4 breathing, can we borrow some of your air?’ Taitano’s Sonomaunpacks the question with the exquisite flow of its breath.”
LEHUA M. TAITANO, a native Chamoru from Yigo, Guåhan (Guam), is a queer poet, writer, and artist. She is the author of A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press, 2013) and a chapbook of short fiction, appalachiapacific, which won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize- nominated fiction have appeared in Poetry, Narrative Witness, Oxalis, Witness, Storyboard, and The Yellow Medicine Review, among many others. She has served as an APAture Featured Literary Artist (Kearny Street Workshop) and as a contributing Kuwentuhan poet (The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University). Taitano currently serves as the Community Outreach Coordinator on the Executive Board of the Thinking Its Presence: Race, Literary, and Interdisciplinary Studies Conference.
INNER RIVER / Tanya Holtland ($8)
The first of our chapbook series, Inner River carries us across the breadth of the page and into the depths of our darkest and saturated currents of being. With cover art and lettering by illustrator and designer Mary Lundquist, this hand-sewn book of poems holds an immensity within. If you care to step deeper into the forest, the limited color edition features rich silk stitching, a velvety green cover, and an elegant olive ink creating a verdant pause at the center of the book.
“Holtland in Inner River is punctuating the world with her words. She makes me not just aware of the world, but also the language that can point at it. Two heavy tasks for such a small book. And they are both accomplished. Holtland is entangled in ‘the eventuality of all things,’ and entangles us all to be part of the world. Ah, such fierce whispering.”
—Maged Zaher
TANYA HOLTLAND is a poet with roots in California and many other places. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in The Collagist, Statement Magazine, Mary: A Journal of New Writing, OXALIS, and elsewhere. She holds English and Creative Writing degrees from San Francisco State University. Currently she makes a home in Seattle, where there is so much water.