Sexy black pumps and muddy hiking boots

Speaking, as I was on Saturday, of chapbook publishers who take advantage of both the old and the new in publishing technologies, Jessie Carty may be the first person ever to have a YouTube video made of the very traditional handbinding of her second chapbook, The Wait of Atom (Folded Word, 2009)

The text was formatted on a Linux-based desktop publishing software but the poem titles look as hand-lettered as the cover titles. If this is a font, it’s a doozy. As appropriate for a series of poems based on the periodic table, each page is decorated with periodic number, abbreviation, and name of the element in question.

I have my copy right here, laser printed on lovely cream stock, 25% cotton, hand-stamped and hand-number. Mine is #13. It sells for $9.00 plus shipping.

So that’s about all I have to tell you about the production of this chapbook, except that it’s also available as an e-book from the Kindle Store for $2.99 or from Mobipocket for $0.99.

Still, I recommend the print edition. It would make a gorgeous addition to your library or a beautiful gift.

Oh yes, and the poems inside? They stand up well to all this production. It’s a charming collection.

Charm is sort of a two-edged word for me, but I use it here in a positive sense. For all their “wait,” these are playful poems.

The Wait of Atom is a love story, the story of a marriage held together by the spin, always in danger of flying apart, making new bonds. Atom, who may also be the romance writer A. T. Meadows or perhaps a writer of comic books, is a man of the earth – a man who puts fertilizer on his shopping list. His wife is a woman of high-heels and city streets, a woman who would dig up the backyard garden and install a swimming pool. Atom is restless, an artist in love with an arc welder as well as his wife. He is a man who recites the periodic tables to himself while his wife lectures on the necessity of wearing a belt to match his shoes. His wife longs to live among

. . .Parking lots.
Skyscrapers. Places where I have to
remember to keep my head down so I don’t
look like a tourist.
—”Househunting” (the poem for nitrogen)

Jessie’s style is clear, conversational, strongly voiced. A number of the poems in the collection may well be prose poems. I say this in part because Jessie is very apt of break lines on a weak word — a preposition or an article. These are strong poems but they use a weak line.

These are poems that love playing with the language of a discipline. For November’s Poem-A-Day challenge, Jessie wrote a series of poems based on Yoga postures, so I’m jumping to the conclusion that she likes to work with this device.

As I mentioned, each of the 19 poems in The Wait of Atom plays with an element in the periodic table. “Bright Beacon” is on of my favorites, a poem that illustrates the way Jessie plays with chemistry. Atom wants to tell his wife that his love for her is like neon but he didn’t because

. . . she wouldn’t know that what
he really meant was, that without proper
preparation, neon is colorless. She wouldn’t
know how he meant that his love was like
perfect white light containing all colors. She
would only think he was proclaiming a
gaudy love.

Though it partakes of modern technology, The Wait of Atom performs very traditional duty as a chapbook, which is to bring you a series of poems on a specific topic in a limited beautifully crafted edition.

I have been known to complain that printers/publishers who produce books as an art form are more interested in the craft of the book than in the craft of the words inside the book. Not so The Wait of Atom. It is a well-balanced creation.

You can see and hear sample poems at this link.

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Added: I probably had better address the poem for two voices in The Wait of Atom, since I made such a big whoop-ti-do about it in A Walk Through the Memory Palace. It’s called “Co-valent Bonds” and you can hear it read here. It still is not my favorite poem in the book. It’s just a device I think is too hard to pull off. But I think this shorter punchier poem in The Wait of Atom comes closer to developing a meaning-enhancing tension between the two threads.
__________
KaBooM!, a local women writers collective, has produced an anthology When the Bough Breaks, using a similar mix of old and new technologies. In the tradtion of the quilting bee, these women have sewn and bound their books themselves.

If you are shopping for a unique Christmas gift, I can also recommend this volume. I am personally acquainted with almost all the members and I can assure you that the writing craft here is as excellent as the book craft.
It is $30 hardback, $20 paper for 90 pages of excellent writing.

Possibly related posts:

“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

I’ll Fly Away

Turning birds into words

All my people

Black swallowtail

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