Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Heroes and Monsters by Kate Schapira (2009)


Heroes and Monsters
Kate Schapira
The Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs
Brooklyn, NY
(c)2009

Unlike most entries in this blog about chapbooks, this one comes with a backstory. In 2010 AWP met in Washington, D.C. which is my town these days. I attended as Plan B Press and sat in the huge rooms with publishers, poets, organizations and writing programs from across the country. At one table sat one woman with a few "tiny-tinies". I was intrigued by the smallness of the chapbooks and their production. Only later did I read through it, a tiny Kate Schapira chap called Magpie's Box If it could even properly be called a chap. It was definitely tiny though. And I had become a fan!

Kate Schapira is a lecturer at Brown and the author of three collections of poetry as well as a number of chapbooks. Her name is so familiar now that when I see it, even in a photograph of an ebay book lot being offered from someone in Georgia, it's enough to make me close the deal. I got 10 chapbooks from The Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and am taking the other 9 chapbooks as a learning curve.

This is a prose poetry collection with cover art by Brenda Iljima. 32 pages. The work is very good. It's a beautiful chapbook. It's a pleasure to read.

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