We put this post together in like ten minutes.
Adam Day, Badger Apocrypha (PSA Chapbook Award chosen by James Tate)
Construction: It’s got the classic PSA style look. Really well put together nice low-gloss cover. Fits in your back pocket. The cover looks like hair.
Critical Analysis:
Sample poem:
Mrs. Speaks
She stands before a window speaking
with a friend, she shifts like compost collapsing
beneath a dress in summer heat. On her nose
a wreck of warts that glistens in light like elvers.
She’s remembering out loud: “When the workers
marched Badger came home to find Henry
had my skirt up past my garters, and a leg
of lamb hot on the table. And I told him?
Eat up before it gets cold.” In the half-light,
the way the shadows played his face, he looked
like a bearded woman. But, Badger was a bullock.
He took me hard by the arm, on a night walk,
watched an owl snatch a cat from the road. Badger
mewling and hooting beneath stuttering streetlights,
watching with the subtle giddy smile of a retarded child.
Christopher Salerno ATM (horse less press)
Construction: Green like money. It’s a basic 8.5x11 folded paper, surprisingly economical for a collection of poems about money... oh... now we get it.
Critical Analysis:
Sample poem:
$$$$
Lost, I check the time on my receipt,
let it guide my walk. At what point does a memory
rob the new of its newness?
There is a yogurt lid in the mud (not mine).
I walk and walk
until I reach the stores.
I wait in long lines. Flickering my lighter.
I sort of burn a girl’s braids. The smoke
is sweet like a popsicle.
Though sweet for us depends
on our following the flame
into the dim. Forget what I’ve said
about being lost. I love.
I put these sentences in order
to make money.
Ben Kopel, Because We Must (Brave Man Press)
Construction: It’s a Brave Man Press Coin Library Book. It’s tiny, sturdy, and has a nice letter press cover.
Critical Analysis:
Sample poem:
Dead Bird Tattoo
What bird could be held
on the hand
in your arm
static a suburb before—
& yet here I am
with you
not rotting.
Micah Ballard and Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Doubloons (Auguste Press / Lew Gallery)
Construction Collages by Micah Ballard on the front and back covers and the interior. The whole book was printed in a small edition “for our friends and family Mardi Gras 2011.” The typeface is some old typewriter.
Critical Analysis:
Sample poem:
There is a portal of light
behind the bedroom door
wonder if it leads to the ocean
or to the Marigny
Will Lorca get lost on the other side?
The moon smiles high in the meadow
Jupiter, two panes aside
wonder about living in New Orleans
how I’m terrified of roaches
how Amselm politely called them waterbugs
so much can be swayed
by language, but not that
The portal of light stretches
next to a poem to my sister
it offers an invitation
but this one isn’t for me
Lorca whispers her decline
at the moment knowing soon
she’ll explore the other side
chasing Jupiter language and light
Brian Foley, Constitution (horse less press)
Construction: It has a hot pink cover just like the real Constitution.
Critical Analysis:
Sample Poem:
Amendment (Turing Test)
it is difficult
to value what cannot
be named. the light of
a person. the world of that
feeling. a want to want without
residue. like a gashed onion
it demands a fee.
let it be relief.
a real.
Luke Bloomfield, The Duffelbag (Factory Hollow Press)
Construction: Cool letterpress cover with original artwork by Jono Tosch, letter–pressed at Flying Object.
Critical Analysis:
Sample Poem:
I Switched the Moon with Ham
I wake up with ham shining
through the window on my face.
Window panes cast intersecting shadows
on my astronaut sheets.
the steady plip of the bath tap
undulates in my upside ear and a cat mewls.
A vague desire for the ham’s mystical properties
fills me with prides and angst
I mistakenly attribute
to the turmoil existence defines for me.
I was born on a full ham.
Mother called me her little ham child.
When the ham turns the oceans mad
I feel my head open, a kind of phalanx
of moth escape my brain and be sucked
up through the shaft of ham light.
It is a part of me that is pulled toward the ham,
It is not pleasant to think of moths on ham.
It is like maggots clinging
to a malodorous slab of oneiric meat.
But that is where these moths comes from
and where they must return to.
