Never before in the history of poetry have so many small publishing companies emerged to produce poetry chapbooks. Inexpensive and accessible, the chapbook has become the chosen means of publication for many talented Chicago-area poets. Let's take a close look at seven of these recent selections, many of which are available for purchase on the internet.

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1.
The Mulberry
by Constance Vogel
Finishing Line Press

This bittersweet collection of 17 related poems explores the grief and confusion felt by a mother who has lost her daughter. Like the crippling effects of shock, the poetry in this 22-page limited collector's edition is sparse, reflective, and in search of some deeper meaning from a tragedy brought on by nature. The author seems tormented by the symbolism surrounding her, symbolism that offers no real answers. She sees death in a burnt out light bulb or in a missing cat; she searches for Mary in the color yellow or in the river that "flows as always":

I wonder of a sudden parting
of the water,
a sun ray through the thatch
will tell me where you went
and why so soon.

(from "Stone")

In her state of mourning, everything before her eyes (not excluding flashbacks of vivid memory) become cruel metaphors, reminding her of her daughter, as if the world were trying in vain to explain its mysteries to the limited human understanding:

A cloud-like silhouette of swarming bats
swooped down upon the gnats and moths,
then disappeared as quickly as they fed
like scarves into a sorcerer's black sleeve.

(from "The Cave")

In the absence of any clear answer as to where her loved one has gone, the author sees her daughter everywhere, in everything:

So imperceptibly did you withdraw
I did not see your image fading
like the moon waning to a crescent.

(from "Smoke")

She especially finds her daughter within the objects left behind--an earring, a photo, or a book--and even within the objects that can only be found in her mind's eye:

Where is the jacket
You once tossed on a chair?
The face-down book,
pot of soup that simmered

(from "A Month Later")

The author makes her case, in whispers, not shouts, for her right to determine for herself when it is time to stop mourning:

I am not ready
for red and purple tulips
screaming shades of green

(from "Spring")

At the center of the theme, life goes on, as the same Mulberry tree that is struck by lightning at the beginning of the book once again bears fruit at the center of it:

When the tree stirs again and green celled pips appear,

ripen to red, I look for you
gathering berries there, laughing

as you eat whole handsful
until juice runs down your chin

through your fingers and disappears
into the brown and thirsty earth.

(from "Mulberries")

Absent of anger, these heart-warming poems speak to anyone who has experienced loss. Moving in their gentleness and honesty, they do not pretend to offer solutions; instead they simply document the pain suffered in silence and the longing to recover in one's own time:

Is it a crime to slow down
on this deserted two-lane road
to contemplate the sun path
across the icy lagoon

(from "The Other Side")

The recipient of the Joann Hirschfield award for her poem "Lake Effect" (which appears in this chapbook), Constance Vogel has published over 150 poems in such prestigious publications as The New York Times, Spoon River Poetry Review, After Hours and Jane's Stories. She remains one of Chicago's most daring, honest and talented artists. One need only explore the infinite beauty of language contained in this tiny chapbook to see that, through voices as powerful and subtle as Constance Vogel's, poetry in Chicago is more alive than it ever has been before.

To inquire about ordering a copy of The Mulberry, write to FinishingBooks@aol.com.

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2.
The Science of Broken People
by Todd Heldt
Little Poem Press

I have heard Todd Heldt read his poetry here and there in the Chicago Poetry Scene over the years, but I must admit this is the first time I've actually sat down to read his work. I am more than impressed by what I have found. Through this forty-page chapbook, I have come to believe that Heldt is one of the most underrated poets in Chicago.

The Science of Broken People is a delightful romp full of the macabre. The subject matter is actually pretty gruesome (car crashes, train wrecks, stabbings, corpses). But Heldt pulls off a remarkable hocus-pocus. With consistently amazing descriptions of characters, combined with a humble sense of his audience's attention span, he manages to make the unsightly fun:

He uncoils himself like string,
Like the bobbing of a yo-yo;
Left leg turned in to the other,
He winds like a lasso when he walks.

Eyes on the floor, he finds
The strange always on his left foot
Like a snake flattened in the middle,
Twisting on the tile...

(from "Surroundings")

The poems in The Science of Broken People are lean and mean, absent of fat, rich with voice and momentum, full of magic. Each one of them grabbed me from line one and didn't let go until they were done. I rarely enjoy reading poetry this much, which makes me believe Heldt has something truly extraordinary.

Take, for example, the following poem, which is one of my favorites from the book, titled "The Frog Finds His Home In The Damp, Damp World":

At the bottom of the swamp out back
sits a frog who bellows, fat with flies,
on his lily pad. It knows, I'm sure,
how it drives the night, slowly to daybreak,
belches heat into my four bare walls,
plasters me to sheets. I am awake--
hiding in a bog, breathing steam,
thinking how I lose my sense
of direction when I'm alone.
How the far end of the marsh
became the bottom; the edge
at my back door, the top.
How north and south don't matter
since I can't move.
If I slept I might dream of leaving,
leaping stump-to-stump over water,
ducking rusted fishhooks
dangling from bald cypress
My toes could find hard clay.
But beneath the frog,
lower than lily pads, under the water,
even deeper than mud, lies a woman,
a secret that keeps me pinned
to nowhere on a map
anyone will ever find.

That is truly an amazing poem. It defies spatial boundaries and kidnaps the consciousness for one brief, exciting moment. It stores itself in the memory bank to be replayed at will, and uses the minimum to create the maximum.

I'm assuming it is no mistake that the first line of The Science of Broken People is "Like trying to polish stone with words," (from "Saying Grace among the Rocks"), because ultimately that is what Todd Heldt does with his poetry. He uses his freeform style to cause worn out swatches of Americana to shine like gold leaf. Heldt is able to accomplish this with a brutal honesty mixed with a wild imagination, demonstrating that there are as many worlds as there are existences:

How disappointed I was at her funeral
when they talked about Jesus instead of her

(from "Saying Grace among the Rocks")

and that any given moment in time does not exist independently from all the other moments leading up to it:

on a day that fell light as leaves, stepped over--
our backpacks filled with last year's birthday party,
and happy hour in Memphis, days with no weight.

(from "Crossing Rivers")

It is obvious by the courage of this writing that Heldt's poetry was lived before it was written. Fortunately, Heldt knows the difference between a poem and a diary entry, and he has chosen to encrust his memories with the jewels of sharp imagery:

The curb is harder than your couch,
and you might miss your kitchen--
clean spoons that curve your face above soup--

(from "Advice to Hitchhikers")

Heldt also owns a remarkable ability to walk in other people's shoes. By doing so, he creates dizzying vantage points based in reality but filtered by his inventiveness:

I skim grounded clouds
of cotton and grain, breeze
beneath power lines, clear cars
by stolen breath. I weave
the threads on your back,
wrap the wheat round your gut.

(from "The Crop Duster's Epistle to the Earthbound")

Reality and interpretation are blurred together with stunning results. Heldt offers crisp story poems that are grounded in reality by a strong sense of narrative. At first so real, these stories quickly become warped, as though the memory is bent like a mirror in a carnival. Throughout the book, Heldt offers tiny, hidden clues as to how to approach this blurred vision:

how easy a fact turns into a story,
and a story turns into a fact--
the burden of things that happen
in my head...

(from "Story at the East St. Louis Bus Station")

A poet who can inspire so much intrigue, with just one little paperback chapbook, and at such a young age, is a poet America should keep her eye on very closely.

For more information check out celaine.com/LittlePoemPress/

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3.
Elegy For James Gerard
And Other Poems For The Larger Voice
by Daniel Cleary
Fractal Edge Press, 2004

Under the guise of its dedication to an obscure author:

Your final work "This Gift of Myrrh"
For which we shed a poignant tear
Gathers dust upon the shelf
Unread by all except myself

(from the title poem)

The theme of Dan Cleary's Elegy for James Gerard is "Love, love, unmistakable love!" There is a great respect for Chicago, its places ("Downtown") and its people ("Poet's Repast" For Joe Roarty) in this inspiring collection of rhyme schemes. The verse searches for innocence and often finds it in such local places as Barbara's Bookstore, but at other times the innocence escapes as merely an illusion:

Some quiet little Eden
Where birds come all the year
And sing and play there every day
And fill the Earth with cheer.

(from "This is How it Is")

What true innocence is found diminishes with time and change:

Now that she's gone the building stands dejected,
Looking no more than what it always was:
A pile of bricks that someone once erected
Obeying neither art nor beauty's law.

(from "Ingred at the Inner Town Pub")

While traveling the pages of this book we find ourselves in well-known Windy City spots, such as Wicker Park or Bughouse Square, though the poems that have been inspired by these locales don't pass judgment but observe with gentleness that is Cleary's trademark.

The soft sweet sandlefoot of fame
Performs her dance for all to hear

(from "Bix Lives At Oakdale Memorial Gardens")

Cleary's work is influenced by other Chicago poets, both young and old. In the tradition of John Dickson, he creates poetry that is important to people of all ages.

I still hear of a reading that you gave
At Pontiac Produce at which you wowed the crowd.
Weaving back and forth in that way you had,
You brought them to their feet without being loud.

(from "The Death of Frank Bonomo")

Cleary's magic is that he offers timeless gems that woo the heart, such as his poem "The Beauty Spot". These gems know their audience, often addressing a person ("Written on Shakespeare's Birthday") or an object ("The Green Dress") in a series of light-hearted odes that celebrate life:

And though at times working here was great
(In the larger mystery of the night) it would seem

(from "Goodbye to the County")

Cleary's rhymes don't offer much flexibility in how the poem can be read or in or what the meaning of the poem is; this is the way he would have it. We see the poem the way Cleary wants us to see it. Sometimes his rhymes act as links to larger metaphors:

My darling, my love, my sweet chickadee
Whatever you do don't be angry at me

(from "To an American Wife")

At other times the rhymes stand up for themselves in defense of an often-rejected style of poetry:

The wind that courses round the world
Was not less still than I,
The floating of a thistledown,
The breeze that passes by.

(from "The Lure of Distant Lands")

Cleary is not afraid to admit that rhyming poetry is often made fun of, and he hams it up here and there, having fun with the limitations and believing in the virtue of the rhyme:

All the things you stood against
Of which you dislike was intense
Would seem to be on the increase
And needing ever more police.

(from the title poem)

At their best, the lines in these poems are composed of near rhymes:

Quick, as they say, the weaver's shuttle,
time passes, nor will stay a bit
Its steady progress, plain and simple
to the frail majesty of death –

(from "Memento Mori")

What makes Cleary one of the all-time great rhyming poets, is that he never fails to coax our mind's eye to pan gracefully around or even to pull back a thousand miles:

While up between the pavement cracks
Grow grass and weed galore;
In sheer profusion growing wild
Up to the very door.

(from "Gloria's Bridal Shop")

or

White clouds sailing by my window
As if upon some quest,
An odyssey around the world,
Full of sweet unrest.

(from "Clouds")

Elegy For James Gerard is a book of Chicago poetry that will survive the ages. It is truly an important documentation of a master at the height of his craft.

For more information, check out fractaledgepress.com

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4.
The Laundromat Girl
By Lee Kitzis
The Puddin'head Press, 2005

Lee Kitzis' book The Laundromat Girl is fun to read. If it were a rock album, there would be several singles (actually, performance pieces) such as "It's Hard to Write a Political Poem" that Kitzis has read at various venues around town. Basically, the theme of the book is "some poor schlub" getting drunk and trying to get laid. It is done in an honest way that is felt from the heart, each poem part of an American time capsule:

It's the night of the eclipse and the Red Sox are gonna sweep

(from "Allison")

The time capsule contains pieces of Chicago, such as el stops or waitresses. Together these pieces shatter all illusions, with glimpses of life that contain some adult language and moments that Bukowski would be proud of.

cus this world's cruel
and cus soon we'll be old and...

(from "The Real Sounds of Lovers")

and

...screwing and
of a fat guy walking
are two distinctly
different sounds

(from "Love Poem for Kristi")

Just as the reader is hoodwinked into thinking Kitzis is being as sentimental as Neruda, the author throws us for a loop and makes us guffaw into this book.

me? I'm a poet...oh you wanna be alone...

(from "That Lonely Older Woman I See Around")

Kitzis also has the keen ability, through a confident voice, to bring us right into the scene. For example, I felt like I was right there at the table in the "Cuban restaurant on North Avenue" while reading Kitzis’ "My Family". This confidence of voice is what carries this book and makes it much more than a college student's diary:

I told you to close your eyes
and since I couldn't say
"I love you"
I tried as hard as I could to sound like it
when I read the poem

(from "My Little Neruda Girl")

This confidence of voice is also what makes the punch lines to some of these quips so startling, such as the one line following this:

I was a kid
until I picked up "HOWL"
and that made me want to be a poet

So this bowl of Ramen's for you
Ginsberg

(from "On Being a Poet")

or the great pick-up line:

"You're the fabric of my life"

(from "The Laundromat Girl")

This is an exciting new title from a grassroots publishing house that is an intricate part of Chicago literature. As a young poet, Kitzis has already done more with his work that most middle-age poets have, and has a bright future in the American literary circuit. Laundromat Girl is a delight to read; it is funny in its candidness, and the voice of the author talks to the reader as if he wants to be a good drinking buddy.

For information about how you can obtain a copy of "The Laundromat Girl" check out puddinheadpress.com

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5.
A Period of Trees
A Chapbook by Michael H. Brownstein
Snark Publishing

Michael Brownstein's book, A Period of Trees, is edited the way a fine gem is cut. I get the impression that Brownstein worked and reworked this collection over a great period of time, and then that someone else put in a great deal of effort making this book not merely a collection of Brownstein's work, but a well thought out piece of art. The poems are tight. The order of the poems has purpose. The result is a clarity of intention that moves the soul.

These death and nature poems are shrouded in mystery. Though I sense that the accumulation of the poems are telling a story, I'm not quite sure I know what the story is--or that I am supposed to. There is no narrative to guide the reader through it. Instead, the reader absorbs a series of metaphors that are hauntingly abstract:

This is the view from the train's window
at once salt stained, sun scarred.

(from "A Fire in the Study")

Brownstein does not blink at the deadly images that thicken these poems, like dirt turning water into mud. These images do not come across as urgent, but are disturbingly presented as matters of fact, as unmerciful as the changing of a season:

All winter long I read about children
falling through cracks in the ice
surviving quarter hours underwater

(from "Time")

or

Suddenly he is thirteen years old
pedaling across the street after looking both ways.
too quickly there is a squeal of brakes.

(from "Autobiography")

or even

My brother took one tumble
from a tree frail with the cough of winter
sap stilled in hardened soil,
icicles not yet turned water.
The ground held no forgiveness.

(from "Brother")

The sense I get, from the dull, toothache-like emotion inspired by this book, is one of déjà  vu. What is presented before my mind's eye seem to be the most significant moments of life, though Brownstein doesn't offer a clue as to why. Nature is personified. It whispers the profound in a language only the subconscious can understand. The images, especially those of the Autumn entering into Winter, speak of greater things. They point to personal loss and change, not only in the immediate family, but throughout the history of America, as well as throughout the history of the Jewish people. It's as if the link to the déjà vu feeling is an ancestor who has stood in the same spot, witnessing the exact same sunset or a very similar leaf falling. And, of course, those ancestors are the trees themselves, because nothing else on earth has lived that long.

Decaying brush and limb. All I ever
Wanted was a place of beauty to share.
It has never happened. I alone watch

(from "Field Tripping")

The beautiful but cruel nature passes by the eye of the reader as if the reader is on a train with Brownstein, looking at the history of the world through the steamy window.

And how in the end, as the sun rises like a fiery maple leaf in the
dreary east to a blossom of blue sky

(from "Because Death Controls the Hall Pass")

or

Night dense over grassland until
An orange pearl pasted with braces
Rises low over brush, over groves of red cedar,

(from "Harvest, Central Illinois, October")

A Period of Trees is a remarkable vision with as many layers to it as a tree trunk has rings. It is to be read alone, under a dim light or by a fireplace, when you have the luxury of allowing yourself a tear or two.

A Period of Trees can be purchased by sending $5 to Snark Publishing, 637 W. Hwy 50 #119, O'Fallon, IL 62269.

*****

6.
A Place Beyond Luck
A Chapbook by Jan Bottiglieri
Moon Journal Press

Jan Bottiglieri owns a mental zoom lens and she uses it with the skill of a seasoned artist. The overall theme in A Place Beyond Luck (of the tightrope walker) is an appropriate one. As we read the poetry in this book, it is as if we are looking up...and the thousands of people around us vanish, the entire stadium vanishes, and all we can see is that dot of a person up there on the string. We see him clearly, and flinch at his every gesture. Bottiglieri has the uncanny ability to focus in like that, magnifying the details of her dreamy images ("milky chips falling, little hailstones") and clearly relating what she sees with a minimum of words. One of the ways she accomplishes this sleight of mind is by commanding a strong sense of point of view. Notice, in the following example, how Bottiglieri gracefully skates from the point of view of Death right into the point of view of a crow:

Through the fine, floating hair
of his ash-white children Death
sees the black crow
eye its own reflection, too perfect,
too happy, utterly, to speak.

(from "Death's House Has Good Bones")

The result is a startling, vivid depiction of what the crow sees. It's as if Bottiglieri's camera pans through the dream image, moves in on the eye of the crow, and focuses in on the blackness of it so closely that we can see in it the reflection of the reflection of the bird bath.

Here is another example, this one also taking advantage of the scary black bird eye image:

One day I discovered a
ragged hole pecked into its pearly side.
How exciting! But improbable--
until I saw, or imagined I saw,
the black proto-eye peeking
from within the hollow ruin,

so curious, so lovely
and unblinking.

(from "Egg")

In this case, the similarity in the shape of the objects acts as the catalyst for her awesome clarity of image. Earlier in the poem, at a distance, we see the round, white shape of the egg. As Bottiglieri zooms in, we see a "ragged hole" in the egg shape. Upon closer observation, we see the round, black eye of a bird, and finally we zoom in so closely that the fact that the eye is "unblinking" is noticed. It is the contrast of the white egg shape to the similarly shaped black eye that acts like a warm and a cold front colliding, producing lightning. These two opposite colors crash together in our mind and produce a sense of place so rapidly that we don't know what hit us. All we know is that the author accomplishes something very rare.

Bottiglieri often sets us up in advance for the internal firework display she has in store for us. Notice in the following lines how she sneaks to the goal of making us not only see, but feel and smell her object as well:

and put it between these two...
(because I always got my own special pizza)
"...pizza boxes to warm
and here it is. Are
you cold?"
And I was--

And I slipped on that sweatshirt
all box-warm and smelling good,

(from "Poem I Would Want My Son To Write")

It's a wonderful pitch, resulting in a Grand Slam of a literary miracle. By offering just the slightest bit of personal information, the description of the sweatshirt as "box-warm and smelling good" effortlessly comes to life for us.

Through very original personification combined with the use of gestures, Bottliglieri continues to bombard the reader with her happy bombs:

The parking lot geese
are punks.
They stand in the road
sullen,
splayed feet planted,

(from "The Parking Lot Geese")

or:

just crouches in its glassine cathedral
on knobby, white-knuckle knees...

(from "My Son's Tooth Under Glass")

Though much of Bottiglieri's imagery incites folly, as in the poem "Night Shift At The Spider Factory", the overall tone of A Place Beyond Luck is more troubling. As the poems merge together to form a complete work, it is slyly suggested that there must be something wrong with the tightrope walker, for him to be putting his own life at risk in the first place, and we are often reminded that he may at any moment plunge to his death:

It's some other ache entirely
that sounds like a quarter in a slot,
a record dropping;
and this moonlight is the needle
scratching into black night's groove

(from "Moon Song")

or:

I can only say
that I have also been
sick and lonely in
the usual ways,
counting out days like pills.

(from "I Have Heard A Stranger")

What at first comes across as the narrator's keen ability to find humor in the darkest parts of life, transforms, as the poems work together, into something unsettling. The folly is at some point recognized as an escape from something more dangerous. The frailty of the tightrope walker's situation is suddenly realized. Combined together like a stew, all the poems cook into a disturbing metaphor, a metaphor illustrating the effects of mental anguish:

The children need breakfast.
You may have dreamed
about sustenance;
now, it is time
to crack real eggs,
get the pans dirty.
Integral to nothing
is your certainty that things will fail,
are rapturously failing
around you. Choke back
your complaint.

(from "Instructions")

The tightrope that we carefully maneuver over this abyss called life, the slender string that saves us, day by day, from falling out of the nest, is a mystery Bottiglieri allows her readers to solve for themselves:

Tonight, everyone is in love.
Look at the night's blazing buckle of moon
and try telling
the desperate stars otherwise.

(from "Tonight, Everyone Is In Love")

For information about this and other Moon Journal Press titles, write to Moon Journal Press, 2015 Woodland Lane, Arlington Heights, IL 60004

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7.
Revolutionary Patience
poems by Steven Schroeder
A Virtual Artists Collective Publication

Steven Schroeder's Revolutionary Patience packs a punch for 26 pages of brief poetry. Using the theme of Winter, Schroeder creates powerful metaphors by personifying nature.

High clouds circle
the sun to warm their
hands...

(from "Close")

From sparrows cultivating a revolution against the pigeons in the title piece, to flowers having a tea party in "Garden Apartment", to the sharp descriptions of a society composed of vegetation in "Community Garden":

. . .Even
the maple trees lay low in this box and make
a bonsai grove beside petunias. But four
ostentatious locals homesteading among maples
tower over the whole at one end, reaching
for the only remaining branch of a tree

Schroeder crams big images into his select words.

It's not the edge of the wind
but the machination of squirrels
that brings Autumn to my attention.

(from "Autumn Festival, Chicago")

The language in this book is at all times eloquent:

So the world burns from autumn red
to rich brown earth before leaves turn
to it and every lost being is left
to wander in the unfathomable blue of winter.

(from "Lost")

Within this eloquence is delivered sharp, universal truths:

uncertain as steps
on pavement that staggers
from water to ice
while it waits for sky
to make up its mind.

(from "Indecision")

And though the poems are short, they are each complete and require no more said:

Diminuendo

Walking south in gentle snow,
I pass two young girls just stepping out.
They do not walk as fast as I, so
Their syncopated conversation
Of crystalline edges rising through snowfall
Recedes behind me until it finally dissolves,
A diminuendo of interrogatives
Against the rhythm of snow's whispered assertion.

Yet some of them are re-said, as if looking at the subject matter from two different vantage points, as in the similarity to the poems "Chain Reaction" and "Tessellated" – in the first daisies "burn but do not explode" and in the second daisies hold "a golden parasol".

These are poems to make you think. Their soothing nature calms the soul.

Steven Schroeder's "Revolutionary Patience" can be purchased for $7.69 at lulu.com

C. J. Laity is the Publisher of ChicagoPoetry.com.