Word: chapbook
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EVEN THE PHYSICAL make-up of a chapbook suggests that whatever it is getting at hasn't found its true from yet. Neither a paperback nor a resolutely bound hard-cover edition, it consists of a few pages, with an occasional misspelled word, tucked stiffly into a cardboard cover and secured by staples along the slender crease. It's a trial publication without the slick veneer that cajoles you into buying a book on sight...
...poet is still experimenting with style in this chapbook. If the poems weren't collected under a certain name, you might not guess that they all come from the same writer because Miriam Sagan hasn't settled into a recognizable tone of voice or mode of diction yet. Her work is compiled largely of images. From the careful control she maintains over each of these, it is evident that she is attuned to the way words balance one another. Sometimes this sense shows through as long as the poem lasts. A structure may emerge that is based on poetic techniques...
...CHAPBOOK'S cover features a nude by Degas--apparently it could double for the "dangerous body" in one of the narrative poems. Degas's subject does indeed convey the emphatic sensuality that figures in Sagan's conception of women. Sagan's women are wrapped up in their own sexuality, even tormented by it. One craves bloody flesh; another, the Russian named Ytrasie, whose romanticism pushes her into rather appealing heroism, has black braids which "flew out like whips." Yet they are frightened of their own desires, and tend to suppress them. As a result, they remain unfulfilled or their bodies...
...most amusing pieces in the chapbook (Chaucerian jargon for this sort of collection) are not really supposed to be taken seriously. Cast From a Coffee House Comedy and Verbatim II have some funny lines, and some neat images, but lack coherence. Also in Cast From a Coffee House Comedy, the poet rhymes quartz with schmaltz, which is enough to stop any reader right there. The prose poem Battery Manhattan again has its brief moments, but is cluttered with incomplete sentences which have no function, and forced quaintness of expression. Mr. Phelps does however call the cry of a sea gull...