zine review:
Grit
I’m gonna get my bias out in the open right off the bat. I get bummed out when chapbooks sneak into the zine community unnoticed and hit you smack in the face with a ridiculously high price. Eight dollars? Really? The poems in this half page sized chapbook take up about five to 10% of the page. They average 20 words. That’s totally cool, I can appreciate short poems, but I think this chapbook would have been a million times better if it was a quarter-page and cost $2. Do people actually pay $8 for chapbooks?
Grit is filled with short and sweet poems about poetry, literature and the woes of being a struggling poet. There’s something I find a bit tacky about talking about poetry in a poem, and the struggling-tocreate-that-one-epic-poem-you-will-always-be-remembered-for sap story seems pretty overdone. Nonetheless, “Ghost Closet Dream,” a poem about when your sock gets stuck in your shirt sleeve in the dryer and stays there unnoticed in your closet because of the static, was kinda cute and probably the more original of the poems in this chapbook. (Samantha Trees)
Poetry Chapbook, Corey Mesler, coreymesler.com, $8