Ravi Shankar is a great poet, a scholar, and, over the years, became an editor to reckon with, at the literary magazine he founded, Drunken Boat. His poems are luminous and voluminous; they shimmer with ideas and color and a great love and curiosity for life, art and music. He is widely respected for his advocacy for the poets and people of Singapore; he is a prophet of the polyglot, perhaps diversity’s best muse.

On June 24, 1947, small businessman and hobbyist pilot Kenneth Arnold was on a business flight in his CallAir A-2 Mountain plane, when he saw something. An unnameable thing. What becomes the topic and title of Brooklyn poet Matthew Bialer’s epic poem, Formation.

In terse and clipped three and four word lines, bundled mostly in couplets and tercets and occasion longer stanzas, Bialer delivers up a narrative poem that traces events from the middle of the last century surrounding the origins of the phrase “flying saucer”.  The New York-based literary agent, well-known street photographer, watercolorist and author of eleven previous books from such prestigious presses as Coffee House, effectively uses repetition and imagistic description, artfully (and interestingly) combined with a quasi-journalistic research of the topic. He has located both official and anecdotal materials recording these events from all sorts of sources and in the book he recounts various versions of these mysterious sightings.

Ah, the poetry chapbook.  These mini-books, often between fifteen and thirty five pages, can be a delicate reminder of what we love, a toe-dip in the pool of a specific writer’s relationship with language. Often they are themed; they tend to have a preciousness. They fit well in even the smallest of purses. They offer up poetic hors d’oeuvres. Tasty imagistic nuggets.

Now, forget everything I wrote above. This summer I met a chapbook that, despite its scant twenty-four pages and the most delicate of covers– a 19th century botanical illustration of plant and bird– is meaty and substantial, a sensual and narrative feast that satisfies, rather than teases, the reader. In Wandering in My Mind, Michigan poet Laura Smyth parses nature in all its grandeur, and the place she has witnessed it intersecting with humanity, whether her loved ones or strangers.