Thursday, January 13, 2022

From the Face to the Bin by Kim Eggleston (1985)


 From the Face to the Bin (1978-1984)

Kim Eggleston

Strong John Press

Greymouth, New Zealand

(c)1985  2nd printing

I have few rules about this chapbook blog that I have been writing/keeping since starting and one of those rules is that books with spines that have text on them are not chapbooks. And while that is technically true and I often scoff at chapbooks with spines as "cheaters", in this case I will make an exception since this is a 38 page book which can qualify as a chapbook but it does have a spine, yet it is - seemingly - quite rare so I wanted to note its existence here. The only copy of it that I found on the "internets" is in an Australian National book catalogue. None for sale anywhere and the copy I received needed regluing. So, there was this female poet named Kim Eggleston who had this book come out and then reprinted (my copy is a 1985 reprint) but it's New Zealand and that's a bit of the English language frontier, isn't it?

A fair number of these poems are "location-specific" in the sense that they refer to people and places in New Zealand but I found the last piece, a prose piece entitled "Waiting" to be more universal (about squatting/roommate hell) This poet needs to be rediscovered.  

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