A Poetry Chapbook

I assume:

     That I'm scheduled to be run over by a streetcar soon since so many pleasant things have been happening to me lately.

     The most recent—I just signed the contract today—is a poetry collection of mine that's due to be published this summer by the interestingly named Island of Wak Wak Press.

     On their website, they define a chapbook as "between 20 and 50 pages of poetry," something I didn't know till I began this whole process. What I ended up submitting has 63 poems spread out over 51 pages, but I guess that was close enough. The title is Two Strikes, And I'm Out, and it focuses on a hapless 1st-person narrator trying to make some sort of connection to the outside world. In the first half of the book, he reaches out to a talking animal, fantasy world, and in the second half, to a computer-driven, science-fiction world. I don't wanna give anything away, but the title perhaps foreshadows how those attempts turn out...

     I plan on reading 4 poems from the first half of the book during the Zoom reading I'm doing on Sunday, April 13th, but the website says the event is "sold out." They woman organizing the series usually posts a recording of the thing on YouTube afterwards, so I'll put a link to that here once that happens. And I'll link to the book once it's available, too.

     Now where's that streetcar?

                                        Mike

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