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...

THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME by Meg Pokrass (Pelekinesis, September 15, 2019.) Pokrass' flash fiction has the magic of loved and lost, humans and creatures. Imagine Flannery O'Connor would enjoy the dark wit of  Meg Pokrass ' THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME (Pelekinesis, September 2019) . Here the usual mysteries; love, youth, age, the games people play with themselves and others, the texture of time and our bodies, are given strange life. Pokrass often writes about us as creatures. The wilds we are and inhabit may refer to "familiars." Canine, avian, insect qualities are guides of sorts for the women relating stories. One shelters under her lover's wing. Another disappoints her husband when she falls for a blue tongued squink instead of the idea of a new baby.  Some samples below. The Rescue He told her how his parakeet died, all at once, in the middle of a regular day. A bird holocaust. She could see, behind his words, such gorgeous, frantic color that...

Flash fiction may be "still as slippery as footprints in wet cement", as Peter Wortsman writes in his foreward to FOOTPRINTS IN WET CEMENT (Pelekinesis) But in this impressive collection, he defines an ephemeral form with a wild variety of selections in an entertaining array of categories. There are "True Confessions," "True Encounters," "Wise Cracks," "Delphic Telegrams" and here-- "Stories on the Run." These are audacious stories which puncture our assumptions. Among my favorites are Girl on a Train  (Intelligence?), Let there be Lies   (Deity's shortcomings?)   I Am Not Myself  (Metaphysical identity theft?), After the Storm (Alive?) and many others. Here is a comment about an earlier non fiction work of Wortsman by a master of the short story and another on his fiction by a novelist. “The behavior of the people [in ‘Snapshots and Souvenirs’] was wonderfully human and moving—the sort of thing even the best ...

THE NIGHT SHE SLEPT WITH A BEAR by Holly Anderson (Publication Studio, Portland, OR) is like visiting an alien country, you think you remember--from dreams you might have forgotten.  It’s a novel-like fiction made up of mesostics and flash fiction. I checked Wikipedia:   A   mesostic   is a   poem   or other   typography   such that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. It is similar to an   acrostic , but with the vertical phrase intersecting the middle of the line, as opposed to beginning each new line. The practice of using index words to select pieces from a preexisting text was developed by   Jackson Mac Low   as "diastics". It was used extensively by the experimental composer   John Cage   (Walsh 2001). The Night She Slept with a Bear also comes with music by Chris Brokaw on itunes.  And since the fiction resembles a musical composition, with themes repeated and intersected, it’s probab...