Chapbooks to Close Out National Poetry Month
All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano
Reading Richmond Poetry Fest founder Rosa Castellano’s debut collection is described as “encountering a contemporary Kindred-in-verse.” Transported from the poet’s Florida childhood—raised in a trailer park called Camelot by interracial parents—into the fictionalized lives of Black sisters surviving Georgia in the years after emancipation, Castellano raises a question central to her identity: what might it be like to pass as one or the other–as Black, or as white.
the space between men by Mia S. Willis
In these piercing, surprising poems Mia S. Willis looks to familial history, rituals of faith and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of Blackness and queerness relate to each other. With unwavering attention to language and the body, they turn over the grammar of gender, the chronology of writing and speech, the intimacy of naming and the patterns of colonialism that permeate everyday questions and assumptions.
Wildflowers in a Vase by Edward Cody Huddleston
The woman who doesn’t look at the camera may be his ex. The woman who names the children she didn’t have may be his mother. The woman who tells about her twenties may be his grandmother. Edward Cody Huddleston may be the wind that sways these flowers gently. Or he may be the insect nurtured by these flowers. On the darkest night there can be moonlight, and as readers it shines on our fingers, as we turn each wondrous page of this debut collection. Here we unbox inner childhoods and old train sets, run our hands through wildflowers sprinkled throughout the book, alongside other equally mesmerizing haiku. One of our featured poets this National Poetry Month, Huddleston’s debut collection from 2022 is worth a read.
Secret City by Katherine Smith
Secret City: Poems by Katherine Smith explores belonging and power through the eyes of children and adults, whether the relationships in question are to a family, to a religion, to a region or to a country. The imagery of the natural world weaves in and out of the dreams of a young Jewish girl brought to live with a Christian family in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II. A woman with a childhood of being bullied moves north only to find herself an authority figure, teaching students who are themselves outsiders marked for deportation. In the midst of confusion and ideology, where victim and perpetrator ceaselessly exchange roles, the voices in these poems search for a ground of belonging in the natural world, in serving others, and in the intimately textured language of poetry. Smith is another of our featured poets this month, and you can read more of her work here.
