Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem PABLO PICASSO VISITS JAMES JOYCE AND THEY DISCUSS YOUTH
by Michael Mirolla
Interview by T. Liem with Ockert Greeff // Winner of the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award (No. 39)
Congratulations on winning the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award with A Mass Choir of Little Things!
T. Liem: In this work images and memories accumulate with a weighted pace, whole stanzas repeat like time-slowing refrains, and certain words become chant-like as in “A Letter from The Sea” with sea and see. This feels like a particular kind of musicality. Would you talk about where your experience as a drummer intersects with your experience of composing poetry?
Prelude by Jan Zwicky | Poem in Re-view
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem Prelude by Jan Zwicky
Vallum’s Chapbook Award/Contest for 2025 is now officially open!
Check out contest guidelines and send us your best work; we look forward to reading it!
An Inked Shorthand of Marks
T.Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
DIGITAL BATH by William Grant | Poem in Re-view
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “DIGITAL BATH” by William Grant.
Announcing the publication of A Mass Choir of Little Things by 2024 Vallum Chapbook Contest Winner, Ockert Greeff!
A Mass Choir of Little Things seems sculpted by decay. Poet and percussionist Ockert Greeff examines physical evidence of impending disaster and recent loss, from leftover clothes to leathery faces. Bodies and landscapes bear wounds of time and the promise of finality. In one poem, his mother giggles like a girl; in the next, she cannot recognize him. But Greeff’s sparse, vivid language also finds life within endings. He imagines his elderly mom as a baby turtle wading into the water; he chronicles organisms that persist. An orange pickup truck in the desert, a swimmer lifting his arms to the sky. Greeff’s preoccupation with “the dark mass that is taking us all” reveals a gentle attention to existence — the rhythms of a haircut, the silences of a funeral — figuring death as one part of the story.
SEPIA by Frances Boyle | Poem in Re-view
Check out our Poem in Re-view section featuring the great poem “SEPIA” by Frances Boyle.
ANNOUNCING NEW CHAPBOOK BY JAMI MACARTY:
“In Jami Macarty’s The Whole Catastrophe, every asterisk indicates something precious. Macarty uses the poetic form to create space for what is otherwise omitted: the fresh air outside car windows, the stars blotted out by city infrastructures, a friend gone too soon. Chronicling a road trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, Macarty reflects on fragility, greed and the disasters we must withstand, from toxic feedlots to carbon monoxide poisoning.