I just picked this chapbook up in April, so reading it in October represents reading it right away at Nogglestead. As you know, gentle reader, over the years, my autumn reading has drifted toward poetry chapbooks and art monographs that I can browse during football games. However, this year, we have opted out of the NFL Sunday Ticket package because it’s on YouTube TV. Instead, I have gotten the NFL+ package, but due to the scraps of streaming rights that the NFL swept up after making big deals elsewhere, I can only get games that appear in the local market and only on hand-held devices. So it’s hard to hold a book while one holds an iPad and struggles with the deficiencies of the NFL app (stopping it, restarting it every couple of minutes when it bogs down). Which is just as well as I have not collected a bunch of monographs recently. So I have been reading chapbooks recently by themselves.
Now, this book must come with an interesting story. It is a chapbook copyright 2013, but the copyright page indicates that some of the poems within it were published in the mid 1990s. Which would seem to indicate that the poet took almost thirty years to come up with a chapbook’s worth of material. Gentle reader, my first chapbooks appeared in 1994 and 1995. It did take me almost thirty years to work up a full length collection, though. Well, not exactly–most of the material in Coffee House Memories comes from the middle 1990s. It just took me thirty years to get up the desire to enbooklenate the poems. And it might be another decade at my current pace to cough up enough for another chapbook. I have to wonder if the poet here experienced something similar. Or maybe it took thirty years to save enough money or for the cost in rights for a Peter Sellers movie still on the cover.
And the poetry? Overall, pretty good. A couple of them are meta poems about poets writing poetry, a couple of reflections on other works (including a Peter Sellers movie moment), but the lines are long enough to convey meaning, and the poems rely on images although sometimes a bit obscure. Still, leaps and bounds above most of the things I read.
This is her first chapbook, but Finishing Line Press has a number of later ones listed. I will keep an eye out for them.
