notanotherbookreview

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 orang...

Anne Waldman's SANCTUARY (Spuyten Duyvil, spuytenduyvil.net)  is a mind bending book of poems with wonderful collages by T Thilleman. Anne Waldman is an renowned poet and founding member of the "Outsider" experimental poetry community. She has read in the streets, as well as Casa Del Lago in Mexico City, the Dodge Lit Festival in the U.S.A., the Jaipur Lit Festival in India and teaches poetics all over the world. Waldman is an original "Open Field Investigator" of Consciousness.  Among her many books are "Fast Speaking Woman" (City Lights), the P.E.N. Award-winning, Lovis Trilogy "Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment", and her 2018 "Trickster Feminism" (Penguin). An excerpt from a poem in SANCTUARY below.  Her calligraphic design, important to the text of the complete poem, couldn't be reproduced in this blog. I think you get a sense of her dynamic words. More at annewaldman.org. Light Coda Occludes   w ell,...