Susie Campbell's The Bitters (Dancing Girl, 2014)

This ambitious pamphlet is excellent. Here are some favourite passages:


It is biting down it is a red cut when is it a green. It is a red green.

from "the way we bruise"

(a poem, in part, about lettuce)

         all these names Alice Jane Catherine Eliza Edith and Grace
little snowstorms of unreason blowing around the haunted ward

from "Casebook"

Go about it gently--brightly--a light-footed trick. Don't pay it too much attention, don't always feel what is felt.

*

Let the green come down. Let it fall.

from "Sayonara Libertyville"

 

Bake the pie for 25 miracles and reduce the temple to 350 delusions and bake until the top is golden brown, another 30 miracles. 

the opening sentence of "Strawberry Malfunction"

The oven grows in the dark. Out of one feast comes many....

from "The Oven"

Nobody pays for gold and silver to be conservative.

*

I sicken at the floss of it, the twist and count, knotted in cerise, gimped in rose.

*

...an innocent excision of threads from the ordinary....

from "White Work"

These are common duties.

Cheerily brutal.

You have to do it 

and do it.

from "Funeral Feast"

This opening's a ripped

paper membrane 

pearl soft

against my cheek

and a little green bridge

I cannot cross

end of "Snowdrop"

A box: a casing, a continuation, a context.

*

There will be neither lack not superfluity of paper at any edge or angle. Rent is a heavy item.

from "Homework, ii. boxes"

Me. That little whore

with a pebble in her breast

a box of sharp tools

and no hope of heaven.

end of "Wyvern"

You can purchase the pamphlet from the press here.

Another great review of Homecoming

I was delighted to encounter another great review of my pamphlet/chapbook Homecoming online here at Luna Luna. Here's the final paragraph: "There’s also gallows humor here, and magical thinking, and relationships between sisters expressed fully in three lines. Etter’s imagery relays the intensity of grief and loss so clearly that it’s impossible to look away. You won’t want to. The writing is that careful. Careful in the sense of precision, never at the expense of honesty." Many thanks to reviewer Megan Burbank for her time and attention!

A wonderful review of Homecoming

My day has been made by this thoughtful review by poet and critic Pippa Little of my pamphlet, Homecoming (Dancing Girl, 2013), at Elsewhere: A Review of Contemporary Poetry.

Homecoming (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2013)

It's here! My latest pamphlet/chapbook is Homecoming, from the fabulous Dancing Girl Press in Chicago. Here's what I've come up with as an account of the work: 'Homecoming picks up on a sense of isolation in the American Midwest as well as its emphasis on the more positive attributes of family life. Thus when the father falls prey to injury and illness, his decline upsets the meanings of family, selfhood and home. Poems in Homecoming first appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement and The Warwick Review.'

In the US, please order directly from the press for $7 plus shipping; in the UK, you can obtain it directly from me post-free for £5. 

As some may have noticed, I like to use a pamphlet as a smaller concentration of an ongoing book manuscript (poems from several pamphlets went into Divining for Starters, while The Son selected from Imagined Sons). Homecoming derives from a manuscript with the working title, The Weather in Normal. It may become book four; it's hard to say at this point. 

Homecoming (Dancing Girl, 2013)

After admiring for years Dancing Girl's handmade chapbooks and focus on women poets, I was delighted when, some months ago, I realized I had a manuscript that might suit. Last night I learned that they--or rather, she, editor Kristy Bowen, agreed, and would be publishing Homecoming in the second half of 2013. Focusing on home, family and death (no, it's not cheery work), the poems have appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Warwick Review. I guess that list suggests that this manuscript's been some time in the making; in fact it is the basis for a collection in progress, The Weather in Normal. Anticipating a question from my Sudden Prose and other prose poetry students, I'll add that one third of the poems are in prose, two thirds in lines. As the press is based in Chicago I expect I'll buy a goodly stock to sell at readings and by post in the UK--just let me know if you'd like one.