The chapbook, as a form, is laser focused. It is brief but provides the poet just enough space to meditate on a particular subject or way of versifying experience. The chapbook is small yet powerful, and while the chapbook is as unique and diverse as the poets who make it, the chapbook reflects a vision of the world as it is right now--no matter how the poet is writing or what they are writing about, in the case of Volume 6: the "sudden loss of the wife/mother" (Peter and Nicole Cooley's Vanishing Point), "the black people that in recent and preceding years have been doused and dismembered" (Dexter Boothe's Rhapsody), and the "fusion of earth, animal, human--a one-ness, beautiful, and also damned" (CMarie Fuhrman's Camped Beneath the Dam). These chapbooks (and any of the chapbooks published over the last five years in the Floodgate Poetry Series) could easily be published on their own, and they would do so powerfully, but in the bringing together of three chapbooks by three poets (sometimes more if the chapbooks are co-written) in various stages of their careers, lives, and work, we create a unified work that celebrates the broad range of poetry being written today while offering a collective vision of our time.

Floodgate Series Volume 6

Literature & Fiction

Booth, Dexter L.

Cooley, Nicole and Peter

Fuhrman, CMarie

Poetry

Etchings Press

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Major Jackson
The stub of your left leg dangles as I hold you up, my hands inserted under your arms like a child. You are complaining about the itch, the burn; scratch the ghost of your calf and heel. ―from "Scratching the Ghost"
Dexter L. Booth's ruminations on loss in this award-winning debut are rooted in a time past but one still palpable and persistent. Here are memories of love lost, family mourned, a father absent, ghosts of hometowns and childhood. Here too is a "Short Letter to the Twentieth Century" and, finally, a "Long Letter to the Twentieth Century," as if across this collection the poet is mustering up the force to speak back to history.
"In Dexter Booth's Scratching the Ghost, a cracked egg means the universe is splitting, the slap of a double-dutch rope is a broken-throated hymn, and splitting a squealing hog is akin to lovemaking. These are poems loyal to their own intrepid logic and reckless plausibility. Yet, lest the reader get too giddy in a fun house of mirrors, here, too, are the melodic laments and remarkable lyric passages of a poet who acknowledges the infinite current of melancholy that underlines his journey." ―Major Jackson

Scratching the Ghost: Poems

Graywolf Press

Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth’s poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.

Abracadabra, Sunshine

Self-Help

Relationships

Red Hen Press

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Books by Booth, Dexter L.