Seven Kitchens Press, founded in 2007 to publish contemporary poetry and fiction chapbooks, found its stride in 2009, releasing nine poetry titles in the first half of the year, including Lisa Sewell’s Long Corridor, winner of the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Prize, selected by G.C. Waldrep.
The fluidity of Sewell’s language is elegant, swirling around itself as the narrative arc of each poem becomes evident. Most of Sewell’s poems in this collection are titles of books (“Little House in the Big Woods,” “The House of Mirth,” “King Lear,” etc.), pulling lines and sections from the stories – as a builder would repurpose wood from an old barn – to create something new.
In “To the Lighthouse (1980),” Sewell deftly splices together the story of a student’s reading of the Woolf novel with lines from the novel itself:
And like an Elizabeth in a waiting room
she too tried to stop herself from falling
lay back to stop the sand, to keep the ocean
from seeming mirror still and mirror flat
and from there not being anyone to tell her
where the ocean stopped and she began
or if the long anticipated journey and what
would happen next, who would choose
like a wave which bore one up with it and threw
one down with it there with a dash on the beach
and how to make what took a place inside her
beached her body on the sand or perched lightly
on the narrow bed floating.
Again, in “Little House in the Big Woods (1968),” Sewell visits the theme of literature’s affect on its reader, this time with a first-person narrator looking back and comparing her own childhood with that of Laura’s:
Among the strip mall stretched sidewalks
of North Hollywood, no one tanned my hide
fired Johnny cakes and hardtack
to keep the Angel Dusted otherwise at bay.
Laura too didn’t know to mind her manners
wished she had nothing to wear but skins
and within those covers, between pages, amid prose
my onlyness startled toward remove in snug
sparsely furnished rooms with Ma and Pa,
baby Carrie and little Grace,
good, blonde Mary and the hand hewn.
While each poem is reliant on its parent text for its birth, the poems are able to stand on their own, even if the reader has little to no knowledge of the parent text. However, I do feel as a reader that there must be nuances I am not getting because I have either not read the novel referenced, or read it so long ago that I don’t remember much beyond basic plot.
For me, that’s all the more reason to go back and read the well-known works of literature referenced here. As Sewell intimates, literature and life are integral to each other – each influencing or illuminating the other:
was more exactly not herself than anyone
she had ever seen reflected in the mirrored surface
of the ocean’s depth and now and in these paragraphs
like rooms that she had never seen but always lived.
(“To the Lighthouse (1980)”)
All chapbooks by Seven Kitchens Press are hand-trimmed and hand-tied. These are gorgeous works of art in and of themselves. Books can be ordered directly from the press.
42 pp.
