Pocket poetry

Dirt and friends present recommendations for your pocket or purse.

Full disclosure: I was reared on poetry in a way that's almost antithetical to its very conceit. The complete works of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop both have spots on my at-home bookshelf, and my favorite high school English teacher was an editor for the Norton Anthology. I like an abundance of poems, and I also like my poems big. I like to print them out on 8.5x11” pieces of paper and then darken all the white space with annotations. 

A book of pocket poems resists those impulses. The small pages will accommodate a note here or there, but nothing more; they are not a canvas on which to exhibit your own interpretive acumen. Best to let pocket poems just wash over you—co-mingle with your everyday life. For this reason, I tend to think that the poems themselves should be readable in one sitting.

I’m not alone; we’ve gathered writers, poets, and other literarily-inclined folk from across the Dirtyverse to share their own favorite takes on petite poetics, from collections that aren’t even out yet to the merits of toting around a copy of the I Ching. —Walden Green

Miriam Gordis, writer and Angel Food Magazine editor

I like carrying around small books because I like carrying around small purses. In France, where I used to live, most of the books are pocket sized and soft-spined. In America, where I now live, the smallest and lightest weight books tend to be poetry. I’m self-conscious about what I read in public because I’m always looking at other people’s book spines and also because I have this dream of having a meet cute on the subway where we love the same book. Nothing says love quite like poetry. 

One of the poetry books I used to carry around all the time because I was so obsessed with it is actually not pocket-sized—it’s 6 x 9 but it’s slim and lightweight. It’s a debut by Jasmine Gibson called Don’t Let Them See Me Like This and it has these really intense poems that feel exactly like love in a dying world. My friend Nina Reljič published a poetry debut last year called Agnes, which is dark and weird and spicy and comes in a small format perfect for slipping into a tiny bag. I also love Aria Aber and Linda Gregg and Nikki Giovanni, and I fell in love with Leonard Cohen as a poet (not just a songwriter) when I was in this writing group in college, and we read some of his poems. If you’re looking for tiny books to impress your soulmate on the subway, these are all excellent choices. Otherwise, I work at a bookstore and we have a lot of small poetry books on display near the cash register. They all sell well but the perennial favorite—like everywhere—is the New Directions Cat Poems book, which actually has really good poetry as well as being very cute. 

I published a book of very bad poems myself with a small UK press when I was 23. Thankfully, the book is hard to order because you have to get it shipped from London, and almost no one owns it with the exception of my mom and a few really devoted friends and this one man I went on a couple of dates with who ordered it at during a brief moment of obsession and then ended things before it arrived. I hope he’s donated or pulped it by now.

Aidan Ryan, cofounder and publisher, Foundlings Press

You won’t catch me in the streets with a Pocket Penguin. Small, independent presses and individual artists are putting out the best pocket-sized reading today.

Some, like The Song Cave, have a consistent, recognize-them-anywhere style, much like the City Lights Publishers’ Pocket Poets Series that debuted in 1955. Others, like Fonograph Editions, range more widely, with both full-lengths and chapbooks in delightfully purse-and pocket-friendly formats.

Some pocket-sized publications are hard-wearing, maybe even meant to deteriorate or get lost on the subway—like One Story, which offers a subscription to one-hitter fiction in a small, cheap, staple-backed format. But many presses produce art objects, books and chapbooks in limited runs, often letterpressed or hand-bound, that either are delicate or just look delicate—not fit for back pockets or unruly totes. If you have a clean and snug means of transport, consider venturing out of the house with one of the beautiful titles from The Economy Press (I recently enjoyed Zach Savich’s The Motherwell Sonnets), Factory Hollow Press (which also prints a supremely portable Emily Dickinson tarot deck), or Garden Door Press (check out the landscape-format affect theory by Julianne Neely). My own Foundlings Press has published both easy-traveling titles (try the Strays series) and more delicate editions (Bianca Stone’s The Black House). 

Think beyond presses, too; plenty of individual poets and writers make their own books and zines. I love anything Molly Young puts out with her husband, designer Teddy Blanks—especially The Things They Fancied, an historical survey of the rarified frivolities of the ultra-wealthy, and Sleepy Hollow Motor Inn, a blend of true crime, memoir, and portraiture of place. 

And if you really can’t make up your mind, turn to the poet Mathias Svalina: he might deliver you poems as dreams each morning or send you monsters in the mail. 

Whitney Mallett, founding editor, The Whitney Review of New Writing

Like my dearly departed iPhone 5, my copy of the I Ching (Shambhala Pocket Classics) fits nicely in the palm of my hand. Rarely do I follow the whole method of throwing coins, but I read the divination manual the way I read most books of poetry. Like Augustine with his bible, or the killer in The Jerk with the telephone book, I crack open a page at random and receive whatever passage I land on like a message meant for me. Even smaller than my I Ching are these books from the imprint isolarii. A mere seven centimeters by eleven, they’re beautiful objects that feel like secrets, and exactly one of their nine titles is a collection of poetry—F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry. The Cyrillic letter dominates the cover, which will complement whatever you’re wearing when you read it (it’s red). The only other poetry books I found on my shelf petite enough to fit into my small Anna by Luar are Important Please Read by Jason Harvey—existential yet silly with a fabulously simple square format that feels at once like a plea and a meme—and deep in your best reflections by Danny Simmons. I like the premise of this one; each poem is limited to 160 characters, which was, at the time it was written, the space of a text screen, but the book’s design is giving Moxy Hotel. A childhood favorite is the illustrated A Friend is Someone Who Likes You by poet Joan Walsh Anglund. It’s a perfect shade of green and all the girls wear bows.

Brendan Joyce, poet, teacher, and essayist

Here’s what’s in my tote right now: Heaven is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin. Eisen-Martin explodes each page with an afro-surrealist dialectic, jamming the contradictions together as though in a tiny Super Hadron collider. Alli Warren’s Little Hill pulls out the language of the fully automated carceral cloud hovering above the Bay Area, and splays it in such a style that it almost feels like an incantation; perfect to mutter to yourself on a long bus ride. Plus the cover makes it feel like the enclosure acts were passed in 2004 and you’ve ripped a hole in the first fence around the commons. Stephen Ira’s Chasers, a slim, skin covered chapbook, peels back layers of humanity to reveal desire at its core. An ode to trans men and those who want to fuck them, this book will make you blush and research HRT. In a less lineated world, Kevin Latimer’s just released collection SOUP leaps through war, magical realism, God and the 90s with prose poems, bits of script, and couplets that can barely contain themselves until they finally and triumphantly stop trying. As the chaotic melt of the cover suggests, these poems bend and break beautifully under the weight of their subjects.

Jamie Hood, author of “How to be a Good Girl: A Miscellany”

Once I was the sort of woman who only carried small purses—phone, keys, wallet, lipstick—but I have never been, and could never be, the sort of woman to leave her apartment without reading material, which meant what I usually had to hand was brief: a novella, a chapbook, a poetry collection. I was asked by Dirt to reflect on the possibility of literature as lifestyle, or accessory, but I’d be lying if I said books felt like either of these to me, because they don’t—books are as vital as my name or as air. At times I wish I felt more stylish, mainly because I’d like to be someone who pictures my own books in the manicured hands of celebrities and influencers, or could see in my mind’s eye my work on film sets. My first book was, in point of fact; you can find it on Carrie’s bedside table in the premiere of And Just Like That. But to my mind, a good book must be of the moment and able to transcend it. It must be an art-object you hold and a breathing creature that lives, parasitically, beneath your skin.

Maybe it would be fun—fun for me, I mean—to offer recommendations like I’m costuming a bride. It used to be I often carried Anne Sexton’s Transformations in my little purses, the poet’s fifth book, a series of narrative poems which revised something old: the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Anytime I was out and saw a copy I’d buy it, waiting to pass it into the right hands, which is a kind of lending, although I’ve never asked for those copies back. Surprising nobody, I’ve read Sylvia Plath’s Ariel more than any other collection of poetry. A blue book in the depressive sense, surely, but also for these lines that haunt: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” But be sure to get the revised edition, with Plath’s original ordering of the poems—this changes everything. Lastly, I offer something new, another book on depression: Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World, which is also, wonderfully, an engagement with the paintings of Agnes Martin, an artist it seems all the best writers are wrestling with lately.

On occasion I miss the days of my slim efficiency, but I confess: a bigger purse means I can carry more books with me. What a relief.

Ben Fama, author of “If I Close My Eyes”

If I'm talking pocket poetry, I'm probably talking about chapbooks, which are affordable, beautiful little handmade books. Everyone should have a chapbook collection in their apartment. They're basically the EP version of a full length book, usually around 8-12 pages. Some of my favorites are Dodie Bellamy's Barf Manifesto, Ad Hoc by Teline Trần, and Flounder by Molly Ledbetter. Also fun: Doublecross Press does a unique do-si-do binding where two books are sewn together. 

If you want something longer but still pocketable, I recommend Brooklyn poetry darling Chariot Wish's O Fantasma, Ariana Reines's Coeur De Lion, or Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency. 

Walden Green, Dirt Intern

For my money, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems is the gold standard here, although it’s missing “Having a Coke with You,” which is the exact kind of poem I’d like to pull out of my pocket and recite to a deserving man one day. Speaking of gay yearning, I’m a total devotee of O’Hara disciple Alex Dimitrov. His latest collection Love And Other Poems is a bit hefty for my Wranglers, but the titular poem also has an endless version written as a series of Tweets. Call it cheating if you must, but I like to think of “Love” as a pocket poem that lives inside of my phone. It’s always there when I need a reminder that there are plenty of things I already love (the first snow, being back in New York) and others that may one day be worth loving (minor exes, sending long texts). I’ve always had a soft spot for the Irish poets, too; my favorite is Galway Kinnell, but lately Paul Muldoon’s Why Brownlee Left has been my briefcase standby. The entire thing is so inundated with place, and I adore when a poet isn’t afraid to rhyme. Poets stop being afraid of rhyming challenge!!

Khadijah Queen, poet, visual artist, and professor

I'm teaching a 17th century Spanish anti-epic called The Solitudes, a rather obscure but accomplished work that highlights the value and pleasure of praise. We read the dense passages slowly in class, aloud, lingering in the footnotes, finding joy in the way Luis de Gongora describes a shipwrecked sailor’s clothes drying in the sun, how its “moderating fire / sets upon them slowly, and in gentle fashion / sucks the smallest ripple from the smallest thread.” And in Spanish, the description of the horizon—“que hacían Desigual, confusamente / montes de agua y piélagos de montes”—has mountain and ocean transforming into each other. There’s abiding, refreshing pleasure of language(s) describing the natural world’s transcendent beauty in this fraught moment.

At a writing conference in Kansas City, the only book I bought was Palestinian poet/doctor Fady Joudah’s brand-new work [...]. These poems remind us of both absence and continuance, what we say and don’t, what we recognize and don’t. Devastation, yes; love, beyond measure; dire dreams and reality converging insistently. “Your grandeur is your insignificance,” Joudah writes. In these poems I recognize the spectacular undeniability of that truth, the pain. “I feel the world / as we feel each other. Cold, / tender, cruel.” And I push—hope, for the tenderness to prevail at next sunrise.

No longer a fourteen-year-old stumbling upon a worn library copy in high school, I am rereading Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf as I approach my fifth decade, in anticipation of a new book of her unpublished works. I have reread this book many times in between, but I think this is the first time the humor catches me off guard. The power of humor—to be sexy, to be sad, to be rough, too, and clear about how you want to be treated—boundary-setting at its best. “I can’t get to the clothes in my closet / for alla the sorries” is etched in my spirit. Refusal to accept BS! Now that’s my favorite language.

Rachelle Taormino, writer and editor at Peach Magazine

I’m a sucker for a beautifully designed pocketbook series. Among my favorites are the minimalist New Direction Pearl editions, which republish small weird books by classic authors, such as Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño and The Red Notebook by Paul Auster; Faber’s Typographic cover series, especially 81 Austerities, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, and After Fame by Sam Riviere, a fantastic trilogy of procedural poetic works; and Black Ocean’s Undercurrents series of lyric essays, poetics essays, and manifestos, especially The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert and Silent Refusal by Kristina Marie Darling. There’s also Metatron Press’s entire catalog, whose managing editor and book designer Ashley Obscura never misses; Capricious’s Say Bye to Reason and Hi to Everything, a one-time box set—which I wish were a series—of small previously uncollected works by Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Cecilia Corrigan, Amy De’Ath, and Jackie Wang; and Peach Mixes, my own contribution to the genre of beautiful pocketbook series, in which Peach Mag contributors guest-edit themed collections of work previously published in our journal.

I’m also a sucker for free shit. There’s Edric Mesmer’s staple-bound Among the Neighbors pamphlet series through the University at Buffalo, which publishes free bibliographies, indexes, essays, interviews, and other studies dedicated to little magazines and small press culture. One of my favorites is Nick Sturm’s bibliography of publications from The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. And then there’s Free Poetry from Boise State’s MFA, another great series that publishes free and copyrightless collections of poetics essays, interviews, and poems; I particularly love A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews of Peter Gizzi.

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