by Joel Chace (24 pp. Saddle-Stitched.) $8 ppd.
In Sharpsburg, Joel Chace splits open the archive and finds the seeds of consciousness inside; contrapuntal narrative threads are woven together in an asynchronous braid for the muse of memory. History’s violence eclipsed by the violence of living and the violence of desire. Chace makes a mandala of the disparate grains of syntax, cognition.
From Sharpsburg
by Joel Chace
Your rope is our hope. He tried to explain what his mother meant, but the doctor told him to shut up; there was no way he could translate her suffering. During that hour, while bullets snipped leaves from a young locust tree growing at an edge of the hollow and powdered us with fragments, we had time to speculate on many things. Huge problems with the petard. Night started at the end of creek water. His handwriting is neat and legible, he spells accurately, his observations are hardly ever emotional, and he rarely mentions religion. I would like to think that he is part of the burial party in that photograph.
There were a great many left unburied, and where they were exposed to the sun they were as black as darkies. I will here correct an effort made on page 13. Butterfly or penguin? Manifestly, there’s a point to bad taste. She could feel it coming, so she kept her composure when—right in the middle of the viewing—he said, “What do you think’s going to happen?” He runs the place, on paper, at least. Wrenching an answer out of that set of variables. I avoid clichés like the plague. He was officially released about three weeks later, which meant that, as he says it, “I was once again, legally and technically, food for powder.”
