At qarrtsiluni, we’re looking for a few good chaps.
Why a chapbook? Regardless of what you call it, the fact is that a pamphlet-sized collection of poetry can be an astonishingly beautiful thing. It’s not just for emerging poets anymore; a poet at any stage of her career might find she has a collection of work too long for a featured section in a journal and too short for a full-length book. And a chapbook designed to be read in a single sitting offers a nourishing alternative to a magazine or newspaper. With roots in the 16th century, it’s the original sleek and sexy mobile device.
I don’t have nearly as many poetry chapbooks as I’d like, but the photo does give some sense of the variety in their production style: the sewn and the stapled, the offset and the xeroxed, the book-shaped and the pamphlet-shaped. This outer variety suggests something of the variety in their contents, as well. I suppose it might be no greater than the variety one encounters among regular books of poetry, but sometimes I do think chapbook publishers are a bit more tolerant of eccentricity, more willing to take risks with content than they’d be if they were publishing a full-length book, which after all is a bigger investment. I’ve found some of the most satisfying short collections of poetry housed in really cheap, copy-shop editions — such as Howie Good’s latest collection of prose poems, Tomorrowland, which has just been very well reviewed at One Night Stanzas. And if your taste runs to sonnets, you can’t do better than Water Signs, Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s thematically unified gathering of three sonnet chains, where the last line of one sonnet forms the first line of the next. This, by contrast, is a beautiful production (aside from a flubbed table of contents) from Finishing Line Press, which specializes in books of poetry up to 26 pages in length.
For qarrtsiluni‘s inaugural poetry chapbook, we’re hoping to marry good design — courtesy of Beth, who’s worked in design for three decades — with great content, courtesy of all y’all. Or some of y’all, at any rate. Everyone who enters the contest gets a copy of the winning chapbook, so if you have a shortish cycle of poems lying around waiting to be spruced up for publication, it should be worth your while. Here are the guidelines.
