My Book Is on the Way...

With my book, "Unexpected Light," due out in a few weeks, I thought I better start posting some samples from the book as an inspiration for purchase. First, the jacket cover:




Yes, folks, the publisher insisted on a perfect-bound hardback with a gray cloth cover and book jacket, something that will last years. I've seen the prototype and it's a lovely book. Smells good, too.

The hardback will only be available through myself and the publisher; the paperback edition will be available to the market at large through Amazon and other stores. The hardback goes for $20.00, the paperback for $12. We tried hard to keep the price down on both; the paperback is 161 pages and the hardback, 156. That's twice the poetry you usually get in a book of poetry. And why should you buy it?

1) First, as a collector's item. My last paperback (1997) sold for $14.95 and now goes for $150 used.

2) Eleven years of hard work, publishing roughly fifty pieces a year during that time, braving hundreds of editors.

3) Because you love me.

4) Because you hate me and want to make fun of the book and my poems.

5) Because you like my work.

6) Because as someone with a mood disorder, you find solace in my poems.

7) Because you're a friend or relative and feel obligated.

8) Because you want to support poets who first achieved a reputation on the Net, despite what everyone said about having to make it in the print journals first, most of whom now have a Net presence, as I long ago predicted (even Poetry and The New Yorker now take e-mail submissions).

9) Because my poetry is a harbinger of a 21st century revolution: the broad diction of the Elizabethans combined with the pithy lucidity of the Augustans and the magical reality of the Romantics, along with the irony of the Moderns and the anxiety of the Post-Moderns. Because my style is a fulfillment of my essays on the Logopoetry School that prizes communication above mere linguistic entertainment or intellectual puzzlement. Because language isn't dead but has been suborned by the aficionados and the New York cabal, and we need some via media between the excesses of performance and academic poetry.

10) Because you've never bought a book of poetry before; for the sheer novelty!

11) Out of pity for me.

12) Because you're nice!


Expectantly,

At 1 Kilobunny,

Thine in Truth and Art,

C. E. Chaffin