When a poet tells people he or she has published a chapbook, the poet is often met with a confused stare. "Chat-book?" the person asks. "No, chap-book" the poet replies.
The term chapbook first appeared in print in 1824, according to Outlier Press. Since only the wealthy could afford hand-sewn, leather-bound books, the chapbook served the purpose of providing literature for the common people, and consisted mostly of folk tales, popular stories, ballads, and tabloid material. Nowadays, many poets publish a chapbook of poems before they publish a full-length book.
Most chapbooks are saddle-stapled with a simple card stock cover, meaning they do not have a flat spine. This makes it difficult for many chapbooks to make it into the marketplace in big chain bookstores that prefer to sell books that allow for customers to easily browse the spines for title and author names.
Barbara Tran's chapbook In the Mynah Bird's Own Words, was published by Tupelo Press, which takes a radically different approach to chapbooks than most other publishers. Tran's chapbook is perfect-bound with a flat spine and a four-color cover. It is a beautifully-produced book that you would not even guess is a chapbook until you notice that it is only 32 pages long.
Tran's collection of poems is the winner of the first Tupelo Press Chapbook Competition. Once you've read it, you will understand why. The lyrical intensity and cohesiveness of these poems will make you want to come back to this book often.
The axis on which this collection turns is a sequence called Rosary, which includes 13 prose poems. These poems are perfect examples of the form as they illustrate the difference between a simple paragraph of text and a prose poem. For example, these lines from "Bait":
Through the eye, my grandfather threads the rusty hook, forces it back through the body of the fish. The tail curves around as if frozen mid-leap. The seagulls never leave. The smell of fish always in the air. Today, the old man will give them nothing. It is his daughter he is thinking of. My mother is fourteen and beginning to turn heads.
Chapbooks are wonderful ways to check out emerging poets. With Tran's gorgeous lyrical voice evoking her Vietnamese-American history, and Tupelo Press' beautiful publication, you can't go wrong starting with this fine example.
