B.C. Edwards’ new and debut chapbook from Augury Books, To Mend Small Children, may have just the thing to cure your ails (like earaches and baldness), often even economically. There’s tips for DIY lipstick in No. 575 – Cheap Outside Paint and a slew of applications for No. 345 – How to Make Pure Spirits.
The only missing ingredient is you.
Ben Mirov says the “miraculous nature” of these poems “really lies in the way they transform the person who reads them.”
I got a taste of B.C.’s work at the recent Chapbook Release Party in Brooklyn, and he’s been kind to share insight behind the chapbook’s concoction. The poem titles (and recipe numbers) originated from an antique cookbook:
“My sister collects antique cookbooks. Or, rather, one year I was out of ideas for what to get her for christmas and sent her three or four old cookbooks along with a note that informed her that she now collected them… I found The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes by Chas W. Brown and originally bought it to add to her collection, but as I read through it, I became more and more obsessed.”
The writing process was like trying out a new dish:
“I knew immediately that I wanted to work with the book, but it took me a couple trials and errors before I figured out how… At first I thought about turning them into some sort of narrative thread, a novel or a short story or something, but that got way too clunky and kind of boring. Eventually I started picking recipes at random and pulled lines from them that I dug or thought were interesting, and then I wrote poems around those lines, incorporating them in.”
Regarding the chapbook’s reception, he said “the hope is that there’s a nice ambiance of the original text remaining but the poems still feel like works on their own, separate from the source.”
B.C. does actually like cooking “quite a bit” and even “won a friend’s Top Chef themed birthday party with a lime-marinated pork served on a jalapeño rice wafter with some garlic-cilantro sour cream.”
For his next battle, he’s challenged Ben Mirov to a “taco-off.” Ben’s culinary arsenal includes “a mean taco recipe.”
“He’ll probably win,” said B.C.
Sample his work at these upcoming readings:
Wednesday, April 11th – 8pm
Southern Writer’s Reading Series
Happy Ending Lounge
302 Broome Street, New York, NY
Monday, April 23rd – 8pm
The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church
131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY
Friday May 4th – 7pm
Dorothea Lasky’s Multifarious Array at Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY
–Stephanie Ann Whited
Publishing almost exclusively in small press chapbooks, Micah Ballard has led a career that has been an homage to an era of poetry beginning during the San Francisco Renaissance and continuing on into the 1960s and 70s when poets like Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson and Philip Whalen were considered an older generation of masters and younger poets like Joanne Kyger, Tom Clark, Ann Waldman, Bill Berkson and Lewis Warsh (to name a few) were forming tight knit groups, and publishing communities.
Many of the poems from Julie Doxsee’s Undersleep feel like descendants of early Robert Creeley poems, especially those from Words. The torque one feels moving from line to line is very much like the experience of reading a Graham Foust poem. The density of other poems and the way individual words seem packed full of content, bear similarities to the work of Rae Armantrout. For the most part, however, Doxsee’s poems are exotic and lack strong comparison. Perhaps their most unique characteristic is their obtrusiveness, which derives from predecessors while simultaneously creating an architecture all its own. Take the poem “Ice Shapes,” which contains many of the idiosyncrasies that can be found throughout Undersleep:
Ariana Reines’s new book, Coeur de Lion, is named after a common brand of Camembert cheese (see the book’s inner cover) and for King Richard I of England (1157-1199), also known as Richard the Lionheart or “Coeur de Lion.”
Each of the poems in Carl R. Martin’s Rogue Hemlocks is miraculous and leads to a broad spectrum of meaning and possibility. Here is a poem called “Pumping Station One”:
Matthew Langley’s chapbook Letters Toward Jim is a collection of correspondence poems between a narrator and someone named Jim (potentiallly Jim Goar, editor of Past Simple and Catfish Press). Whereas other notable correspondence projects such as Jack Spicer’s After Lorca use the oblique relationship between sender and receiver as a justification for compiling and categorizing the collected poems, in Letters to Jim, the motivation behind the letters is open-ended and the relationship between sender and receiver is left unspecified. In this sense Jim becomes an idea rather than a real person. Who Jim is and what he represents remains to be embodied by the letter-poems and not by historical context or narrative explication.
There is an unabashed revelry in Nate Pritts’s Sensational Spectacular that reminds me of certain poems by Frank O’Hara. In O’Hara poems like “Having a Coke with You” or “Ode to Joy,” passions take precedence over highbrow intellectualism. As a result, the objects in the poem become manifestations of the poet’s more intuitive emotions. In Sensational Spectacular this tendency leads to an appealing, bombastic aesthetic. Take for example these lines from “A Day in the Life”:
Anthony Hawley’s second book Forget Reading is an insightful, relevant collection of poems that exist in and around the sonnet form. Though many of the poems are conspicuously labeled sonnets, their distance from traditional sonnet form speaks to the overall project of Forget Reading. Many of the “sonnets” even exceed fourteen lines. The poems in the final section, “Productive Suffix,” have a great deal of space between lines, making them feel exploded. Poems from other sections, especially “P(r)etty Sonnets,” have short choppy lines giving the feeling that the other half of the poem has been deliberately torn away, leaving only the left side. Most of the poems in Forget Reading feel like sonnets in a state of disrepair. 
