Ghost City Press’s 2017 micro-chapbooks are here, and they won’t cost you a thing. The annual series released more than two dozen titles, all pay-what-you-can. And if you can, please tip your poets!

1) Dream-Like Houses — Joyce Chong

Joyce Chong’s Dream-Like Houses contains seven haunting poems. Through strong imagery and intricate metaphors, Chong deals with grief, dread, loss, desperation, sorrow, and the nature of dreams. Chong’s poems are highly personal and directly address the reader, making the reader part of the speaker’s own experience.

Dream-Like Houses begins with “inhale”, a poem that bluntly asks, “Don’t you know the sound and shape of grief by now?” Within this poem, Chong paints a sorrowful picture of anguish, and colourfully reiterates how grief impacts the physical human body. The next poem, “residual” describes the suffering the human body goes through after experiencing trauma or loss. A sensation of dissociation or trance; how one becomes a different person, yet still remains the same during the aftermath. Chong’s poems continue with this idea throughout their chapbook, as they allude to how when a person suffers, it’s the only time “you will ever feel like you truly exist in your body”. This is a jarring poem. It made me question if one can truly live only a happy life. Does happiness necessitate suffering?

Drowning is another prominent theme, with many references to suffocation and being trapped. Chong writes “you are drowning until you realize you can breathe,” suggesting that even in the darkest times, there is still a small beacon of light. Poignantly, Chong ends the poem by telling the reader they are standing on a cliff with the ocean beneath.

2) Goddish — kari sonde

Goddish is a powerful micro chapbook by kari sonde, with illustrations by Ariel Schleicher peppered throughout the poems. As the title suggests, Goddish is a meditation on faith, God, enlightenment, and emptiness/love. The entire collection is brilliant, and sonde eloquently expresses ethereal evocations, through brief collections of words. The first poem, “deification of love” is short, but powerful, much like the other poems. In this poem, sonde contemplates the different types of love with an interesting use of punctuation. sonde laments romantic love being heralded above the other types of love, as if romantic love were a deity, and reminds us that love can be more than just simply romantic.

sonde plays with length as the second poem “creation myth 7:29 AM:” is much longer, and in fact, the only poem over a page. This poem transforms the human body while interacting with the author. First, the speakers turns the body into colours, “if i turned your body into colors,” and the speaker describes smudging and cleaning these colours. The speaker then changes the body into a landscape, “if i turned your body into land,” and the speaker swoops closer to describe wandering this body’s crevices and potholes. This concept of human transformation continues throughout the poem, with the speaker constantly alluding to the body with different metaphors. The poem is a question — can the author permeate the being of this person, fix the person, without losing themselves in this person’s darkness?

“would I find my knife marks?

or will your bark swallow me, leave nothing

but

the afterthought of a puckered scar”

Most poems in this chapbook are around ten lines, though some of the ‘longer’ poems are a full page. The poems deal with shattered adulation, loss of faith, love, desperation, and at times, gives advice. “laddu” is amazing and gives insight and advice in a frank, almost bitter way, which is juxtaposed wonderfully with sonde’s use of the word “candy”.

sonde makes use of interesting structure as well; in “self-righteous”, erasing words one by one from a sentence, different aspects are highlighted, emphasizing different parts of the message, ending with fluid, changing meaning gelling powerfully:

“didn’t they tell you you’d leave forever
didn’t they tell you
didn’t they

didn’t”

3) Urban Nectar — Shirley Jones-Luke

Urban Nectar is powerful and breathtaking, as Shirley Jones-Luke tackles heavy and urgent topics such as police brutality, murder, poverty, and Blackness.

Jones-Luke gets right into it from the beginning, “Bete Noire’s” first line “chalk marks on the sidewalk/bullet casings on the street” instantly conjures up images of a dead body. The chalk marks could also allude to children, as police have shot many children as well. The poem describes the scene of a murder, simply but powerfully, illustrating the striking, unjust difference between the grieving families and the “thief of life.”

Police brutality is a constant theme throughout Urban Nectar and Jones-Luke lays bare how utterly destructive it is. In “Wilmington Street Woods”, she also points out and laments the destruction the police inflict upon nature and how mainstream society turns away from these atrocities. “Nature in custody,” with “nests in ruins on sidewalks,” but “no one mourns the loss.”

Urban Nectar’s power not only comes from it’s harrowing examination of brutality, but also the warmth and joy in times of trauma. “Even when we didn’t have anything, we had something,” describes Jones-Luke’s experience with poverty, as she focuses on what she did have, instead of what she didn’t. It is lighter, more descriptive, a joy to read.

Allusions to heat are sprinkled throughout the chapbook, as Jones-Luke describes how the heat is pressing, unbearable, escalating and escalating. This refers to escalating climate change and the escalating climate of police violence against Black bodies.

Jones-Luke writes a great deal of descriptive poetry, in many different tones. Heavy poems and lighter poems often follow each other, intensifying the heavier poems. Nevertheless, heavy or light, Jones-Luke’s poetry is incredibly sharp, both in word choice and the images she conjures with these words. Certain poems such as “Ghetto War Story” and “Hood Goddess” are short, to the point, powerful poems, with vivid and strong imagery.

Urban Nectar ends with the poem “UnColor Me” that I have to say is my favourite and one of the most amazing poems I’ve read. The first line is so powerful; it was as if Jones-Luke was speaking to my soul.

“Drain from my flesh the hue of my ancestors”

This line is heart wrenching, a plea to erase a source of oppression out of desperation and fatigue with racism. “UnColor Me” takes you back to a time in Africa “where the tone of [your] skin did not matter,” before slavery, before stereotypical assumptions gave way to racism. It has a wistful sense of nostalgia, and in the end, leaves the reader with a succinct, poignant picture of the treatment of black women throughout history.

4) Stop Goddamn Apologizing — Sarah Jean Alexander

Sarah Jean Alexander’s STOP GODDAMN APOLOGIZING is another fluid work where the untitled poems bleed into each other like the woven thread of a tapestry. The story of this “almost love” weaves throughout meditations on the mundanity of texting, and sharing a bed. Swinging you around in rolling mountains of emotions, the narrator demands you stop goddamn apologizing “for things you aren’t sorry for,” and then in the next breath starts the line with “the worst I’ve ever felt.”

STOP GODDAMN APOLOGIZING is relatable to millennials because Alexander frequently uses colloquial language and abbreviations such as “dms” (direct messages), and feels genuine. This is also aided by the fact that they take a very honest approach, almost raw, and blunt.

4 Microchaps That Will Make You Forget You’re Broke was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.