Lives of Dead Poets by Penn Kemp
This chapbook is a precious glimpse into an extraordinary time and a special group of writers
chapbook
a disobedient gathering: poems for plants who can’t stay put by Katherine Barrett
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
Nightstand: Leafing through a little darkness by Berdene Owen
Nightstand is a quirky chapbook, but one that works very well, The irreverence sheds light on the darkness Owen is exploring.
Mining the Quiet: Twelve Poems by Tara G. Harris
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick
[Burdick] concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”
Robert Duncan at Disney World by Andy Weaver
From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.
Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #40
Featuring Chelene Knight, Sheila Stewart, Damian Tarnopolsky, and Luciana Erregue
Poems for Burning by Spencer Folkins
As children, we’ve all been told not to play with matches, but Spencer Folkins can’t seem to resist the lure of starting little fires in his debut chapbook.
Busy Secret by Micah Ballard
Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work.
Permutations by Paula Turcotte
Permutations by Paula Turcotte is a high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times.
Fifty-Two Lines About Henry by Cary Fagan
Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).
Rooted: poems by Tricia Snell
How not to judge a book by its cover when production values of Spot of Poetry are so high? Heavy, cream, textured cover stock with French flaps and full colour and inside-cover graphics, designed by Berdene Owen.
Groping in the Daylight: poems by Augusta Wynde
The language is striking and fresh in reach without being self-important, adding humour to the poetic palette such as in “Bout” (p. 8) which you’ll have to buy to see— no spoilers on that.
