What is a box garden, if not rooted rootlessness? And what else might a prose poem be, but a box for seeding the language of flowers? In this shorthand account of self-consciousness, in which lanky lines à la sestinas slalom a chain of chockablock text, the speaker is swathed in a Québécois troupe from whom he’s also excluded.
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.
Check out Vallum’s new Chapbooks 2023
Exciting News: Two New Vallum Chapbooks Now Available! 📚We are thrilled to announce the release of two captivating chapbooks that have been carefully crafted by talented poets. These gems are now available for you
Stephen Kent Roney | A Review of War Canticles
War Canticles George Elliott Clarke Vallum Chapbook Series, 2022 35 pp I was married to a ghost on a mountain in northwest Seoul back in 1994. A trivial enough anecdote; I mention it to suggest that I might know a shaman when I see one. George Elliott Clarke is a shaman. […]