Pearl Pirie had some nice things to say in her ongoing 2013 reading notes about recent Apt. 9 chapbooks from Jeff Blackman and Stephen Brockwell. On Jeff Blackman’s So Long As The People are People:
Rather like a tight rope walker in the park ho makes it look easy. Then you see other people get on the line and fall before they stand […] Now that’s as much self-awareness and audience awareness and profundity as a stack of books to my right were reaching for but didn’t quite reach, let alone with clarity and economy.
And on Stephen Brockwell’s Excerpts from Improbable Books:
These poems are more subordinating sentences, the end filtered by clauses and delays and layers of reflection so that by the end there’s more punch. Here the punch comes from an angle you couldn’t have predicted but like the Made to Stick fellows were talking about it’s “postdictable” not an arbitrary gimmicky twist. The syntax holds the subject on track even while the subjects jump from a tree to a house to a person and another person. It coheres within the form of the sentence.
Thanks, Pearl!
Apt. 9 Press 