chapbook

We hand-bind all of our books. The covers for our journals are made from 6-packs of local breweries. We’ll gather friends to help us, buy some beer and pizza, and spend a lot of time cutting boxes, and sewing our books.

It’s one thing—an important, vital thing—to read stories from other lives and get to know them, and it’s another—also vital thing—to read stories about experiences and emotions and situations you or your friends have lived, to feel those things as deeply as it can be felt because you are linked to them.

With no literary publishing experience to speak of—just a love of reading and writing poems—Founding Editor Sid Miller (and associates) released the first issue of Burnside Review in 2004 in Portland, Oregon. Legend has it it was laid out in Word. It was. Things got better.

I like that the chapbook is flimsy, cheap, and limitless. I like that the chapbook is easy, and that it comes with possibilities. You can read it in a single sitting, you can share it with your friends, you can keep in on your bookshelf forever, you can toss it in the recycling bin.

Named After Death by Sarah Blake Banango Editions, 2016   “This book is for everyone haunted, and so it is for everyone.” Sarah Blake knows your deepest fears: not fears of…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   This month, I reviewed two chapbooks by poets who work in New…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   For this month’s column, I reviewed four chapbooks published in 2015 by…

Pathetic by Shannon McLeod Etching Press (University of Indianapolis), 2016 Etching Press   I have a few favorite Shannons. In college, a Shannon on my dorm floor, whom I affectionately called…

empathy for cars / force of july by Davy Knittle Horse Less Press, 2016 “Listening is a party” in Davy Knittle’s chapbook empathy for cars / force of july; the self is never…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   This month I reviewed two new chapbooks, Soham Patel’s New Weather Drafts…

Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything, ed. by Andrew Durbin Chapbooks by Amy De’Ath, Cecilia Corrigan, Jackie Wang, Dodie Bellamy, and Lynne Tillman Capricious, 2016 288 pages – Capricious…

VHS and Why It’s Hard to Live by Tatiana Ryckman Zoo Cake Press, 2016 Zoo Cake   Confession: I often judge books by their covers. Hey, aesthetics matter, right? Or, if…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   Let me begin with an understatement: contemporary poetry has a complicated relationship…

Transitory Poetics  is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here.   Sometimes when I’m scrolling through Facebook, I think about Horace—the first century…