The newest Grey Book Press chapbook––Continued by Chris Bullard––is our second COVID-delayed release. We chose only two manuscripts from our Autumn Open Reading, and we were all set for them to come out in March and then we lost access to our cover printer and also outsourcing options. Soon after that, our website platform had to be updated, so we were down for about a month. But now we’re back and here we are.
Chris’ chapbook is a highly entertaining and darkly funny batch of poems, several of which play on the sonnet form with numbered lines (1 to 14). It fits in well with our established haunted, dystopian-adjacent aesthetic.
There were a couple blurbs submitted that didn’t get added to the cover (could be added later), so I’m going add them here. Enjoy!
| “From lists to cat scans to electrical circuitry, Chris Bullard works wittily and with not a little despair on ‘the line’ and its authority. His fine poems manage to edge themselves nearer a dark hole with each attempt: from the diamond shape that holds his mother to the (invisible?) white line delineating ‘artist.’ He asks us again and again what happens when we ‘draw the line.’ Is this even possible on our shifting planet? Bullard moves such questions into uneasy spaces in this restless, intelligent work, which knows that ‘power ran through everything.’ And that if there is a punchline, of the sort he yearns toward as a lover of art and language, that ‘All I had to do was flip the switch and the whole apparatus would start working like a dream’ is really poetry’s and maybe the world’s own end dream.” ––Terri Witek, Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing / Professor of English
“Wicked little stories, wacky writing prompts, parodic puzzle clues, and one concrete poem––this genre-defying collection supplies them all. Chris Bullard catalogues loss with his distinctive irony. A marriage falls apart in a numbered list that charts infidelity with glasses of wine and Scotch. Abalones, traumatized while migrating, seek revenge. A mother’s memory vanishes into a black hole that opens to swallow her, then closes. Comedy and tragedy slide back and forth on a continuum so subtle you can’t tell where the shift occurred.” ––Anne-Adele Wight
You can pick up a copy (or copies) of Continued on the Titles page! |