The chapbook has a two-hundred-year history, and a search overview describes the chapbook as originally a type of street literature. Certainly today, there’s a potential for multiplicity, for revealing voices that might be too Other for the increasingly oppressive monotone of the more corporate presses. For anyone dedicated to the literary arts, a support of the chapbook is more than crucial.
Some chapbooks become into existence through the auspices of an institution, and the book is intended to be laudatory, the author presented as a debutante to literary society. In the case of Northwestern University Press, an established institution—that of an expensive school—presenting a chapbook seems to be more of an aristocrat endeavor than a funded effort at street literature. Since chapbooks tend to be the annoyance of booksellers --and thus often require special order-- a well-heeled sponsorship of a chapbook does present a middle ground between world bank publishing and that of the threadbare independent press. Thus, we might approach these works with our determination at inclusion still held dear.
If finding new voices is the reader’s goal, the chapbook often contains poems that were individually published, often by periodicals with their own position on the publishing spectrum. A discerning reader will not let the voice of status overshadow that of the work itself, although authors are pressured into the Sisyphusian task of complying with a market that rarely considers the work for its own merit. What can be equally annoying to a serious reader is a superficial introduction to the work itself, as if the work were a magic trick instead of an artistic endeavor with the potential for layers of nuance. In the introduction for Jonathan Fletcher’s This Is My Body (Northwestern University Press, 2025), the work’s introduction, with two authors, seems to consider the first poem only, a childhood recollection. Nonetheless, this first poem, “Jonathan”, contained the striking stanza
As we bathed together,
compared bodies—mine brown
and foreskinned, yours light
and circumcised—we wondered
whose was better, cleaner.
And while the introduction’s authors find the work “nakedly intense and overwhelming at times”, they appear to leave it to the reader to discern the vowel shifts from “brown/foreskinned” to “light/circumcised” and the triple alliteration of “we wondered whose” that speaks to a consideration of technique, in addition to the intimate action portraited.
Each poem in this collection is a portrait of an intimate moment, many of which might create binaries of experience among readers—those for whom the poems resonant, and those for whom the poems frighten. Fletcher’s language seems conversational and smooth, balancing topics often barely whispered. In “Medusa”,
The way you attach
electrodes to my scalp,
let them drape behind
my head, I must
look like a Gorgon.
Though punished
by no goddess, I feel
cursed. Though not quite
a Hippocrates, you diagnose,
treat. Though no oracle,
you foresee recovery: (15)
The resonance is the now, often-fraught medical experience—a cultural hotspot, too ubiquitous now to be a taboo topic. Even the specificity of electrodes is balanced by the classical allusion. Once again, Fletcher uses a subtle vowel shift to shift the point of view. A look at the assonance shift from the a vowel of “Way/attach/scalp/drape” gives us that physical moment of touching, which shifts to the more distant view posited by the allusion to a monster and the use of “cursed/punished”. That intimate perception, those personal reckonings that too often happen because of medical settings, are still also too often the taboo topics that surround the stigmas of disability.
Fletcher’s portraits of intimate moments do give the work the overall feel of memoir, but the work doesn’t follow that as a sequence. In the closing poem “Boys”, the scene is of a slumber party and action figures, with sound effects and off-stage directions (“time for bed”), a scene culturally seen as utter normalcy. The poem concludes with
[...]Our heads atop
your X-Men pillows, our bodies beneath
your matching comforter, we’d fall asleep,
warm and peaceful, in one another’s arms. (26)
the rhyme here of “beneath/asleep” does not conclude the poem, but leads up to it, as if musically introducing the concluding assonant that sonically seems a sigh.
Whilst those who bean count status might just become aware of Fletcher’s sublime offerings through the ivory influence of the press, for those to whom the work itself matters would be advised to add Fletcher to their personal collections. His social media profile, and this chapbook’s acknowledgements, show him to be a diligent producer of work. This Is My Body is a strong start for a writer worth watching.
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Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.
Check out her author page on Amazon.
