Chapbooks
(Reasons for) Moving
The debut chapbook by Issue 14 contributor David Russomano was released on March 30th.
Print edition: 19 poems | 24 pages | £5
Order the print chapbook
Digital edition: 19 poems | PDF format | £4
Praise for (Reasons for) Moving:
This is an impressive and enjoyable collection of poems. Russomano deserves readers.
— Wendy Cope
Russomano is an intriguing new poet I expect big things from, based on the poems here, which seem intelligently poised between American and British poetic stances. At once exotic, historical, melancholy, and well-made, these elegant, thoughtful poems of place and change have unexpected outcomes – slipping off into new, submerged possibilities, like the house on the frozen lake, that is not, well, really all that solid. An impressive debut.
— Todd Swift
Russomano combines a serious wanderlust and wonderful evocations of place, with a careful consideration of the value of home. Perfect ingredients for the pull and push of poetry, these poems beautifully dovetail diction with structure. A true delight to the eye and the heart.
— Lucy Furlong
David Russomano’s (Reasons for) Moving records a widely travelled life. ‘Writing Home from Quepos’, ‘After the Revolution: Kathmandu, 2006’, ‘Ankara’, and other vividly compelling poems about distant places interweave with poems located closer to home, such as ‘What Begins and Ends with Water’, the delightful and mordant ‘Saint John’s’, or the chilling ‘Cutting Corners’, about a mall built on the toxic site of a former brake pad factory. Beautifully evoked, this varied and memorable collection only gets better and better with each rereading.
— Ann Fisher-Wirth
Flowers Around Your Soft Throat
Praise for Christina Seymour’s Flowers Around Your Soft Throat:
The ten poems in Christina Seymour’s debut chapbook, Flowers Around Your Soft Throat, raise everyday suburban life to the level of the sublime.
— Rebecca Foster, Small Press Book Review. Full review here.
Christina Seymour’s presence is a rare gift. From just over here, she observes and honors the lived moment, investigating its edges and finding the urgency and loveliness of spirit there.
— James Harms, author of The Only Lie Worth Telling: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
This collection explores death, love, and hope, pacing through death’s shadowy valley and beginning an ascent of the opposite rim. Seymour writes of the frailty of the heart; she pities “the earthworm, with its two sexes and five impossible hearts”. But these poems aren’t simply a confessional or autobiographical arc. There are ekphrastic pieces on Song Dynasty silks, Mark Rothko, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and an imitation of Psalm 45. Seymour’s style is textured and detailed with a subtle musicality.
— Matthew Landrum, Structo Poetry Editor
Interview with Christina at Ploughshares here.
The chapbook ships from the USA and costs $5 plus $1 or $2.50 (international) postage. All chapbook profits go to the authors.
Fitting/Her Feelings About Auckland
