Chapbooks that make you laugh at the dark. BAMBOO DART Press reinvents the Chapbook with PELEKINESIS. Review LIFE, Orange to Pear, The Loss Detector, Five Ghost Stories

What is a Chapbook? I always thought of it as poetry, printed on vellum with letterpress and largely undistributed beyond poetry community. According to Wikipedia:  "A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature."

These prose chapbooks by BAMBOO DART PRESS may be a 2021 version of "street literature".  Attractive to hold in your hand, around 45 pages, they offer a meaningful, even inspiring read. But can these books be long enough to deliver that experience?  In these disconnected days of isolation, I enjoyed the humor and wonder in these books.   

Books and Tapes and Art and a series of chapbooks, a collaboration between Pelekinesis and Shrimper Records and Tapes. 

  

John Brantingham is a poet, novelist, essayist and foremost in this book, a man who remembers being a kid and profound moments, like peeling an orange. He also shows what it's like to have a child and respect their framework to the ambiguous world you share. Why would the tooth fairy sneak into houses looking for body parts?  Is Santa a weirdo?  Yet the subject of this book is spiritual "home"  divine sensations--the smell of that orange, the feel of it's skin; the redemptive taste of a pear. In 45 pages of insightful prose, you go through a man's life events and sensations. Here is confusion, pain and joy; all normal and sublime. 

Meg Pokrass' book is called a Novella-in-Flash. Her Flash Fiction is inspired but it's interesting to read longer work. Wither her weird, funny sensibility Pokrass  tells the story of a family break-up and a young girl's coping as "the loss detector." Nikki's jokes are serious questions. In "Dad's Ears", she wonders if  having small ears really means you can't be trusted? Then she and her brother Josh, who may be autistic or crazy or both,  move with their mom from their East coast life to the Monterey Apts in California. As their mother morphs into a driven blonde real estate agent, and Josh is in and out of schools, Nikki begins to get a sense of  what holds them together. 

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Dennis Callaci is both a musician and a writer. His Five Ghost Stories are a wonder of  meditative  precision. Characters have an unsettling sense of  "deja vu," human ghosts living in a foreign present. In isolation, they are less witnesses to their lives than to what "real"  life once was. I found The Cemetery of Calendar Days to be the most chilling.  Here's the opening: 

Be careful tonight. My wife cupped my ears with her hands, a kiss on the way out the door. There had been seven in the last month in my line including two colleagues I was close to. Down the steps, "Be careful honey, I love you." I took her car tonight with three quarters of a tank, I didn't want to risk any stop this evening that I needn't make. An oldie flashes out with ignition from the stereo, Too Real by Fontaines D.C. The two of us worked hard to keep a sense of normalcy not only for our family, but the neighborhood as well...

I kept thinking of early Twilight Zone.  But the "Model Home" is a kid's assembly project of Dracula's Castle,  "Michael's" is a meat market, gag worthy smells and metaphysical revulsion. "Sundowner" was funny, in the way of Beckett's old men. Here's the first sentence. I'm no longer who I was. I tried hard to remember who that had been for a good long while, couldn't quite reckon with it, but I know it's true. 

These stories were fascinating, because they addressed the feelings behind so many thoughts in this plague time. They made me laugh at the dark.  A bargain at 7.99 , For more info: www.bamboodartpress.com. 

Bamboo Dart Press. "A collaborative marriage of Pelekinesis and Shrimper Records whose aim is to allow writers and artists to godspeed works into the physical world without the hoops and machinery of manufacturing that slow the process of finished to physical work in the world of books and LPs that are the day jobs of the two parent companies." 

S.W.