Last year my friend Liz Volpe won the 2007 Robert Watson Poetry Award chapbook competition and finally, a year later, her chapbook is in print. I was lucky enough to run into her at a screening of Man On Wire and am now the proud owner of #110 out of 150 copies of Brewing In Eden, hand-crafted and letter pressed. It's available through Spring Garden Press, though buying it out of the trunk of her car in a movie theater parking lot is a much more authentic experience if you ask me.
My favorite poem in Brewing In Eden, if I must pick, is "Black Walnuts," which I remember seeing an earlier draft or two of back in the day when Liz and I were in the same writing workshop. What starts out as a meditation on why she doesn't like them (they take too much damn effort for one thing: "Hulling these cranky old trolls requires / safety glasses, rubber gloves...") spirals into a comparison to the Salem Witch Trials ("...to check for infestation, drop the nuts into a bucket of water. / Nuts without injury will sink...") and then ends up at "I wish I could love more," which floors me every time.
So congratulations to Liz. A chapbook as lovely as the woman herself. :)
Oh, and I totally stole this picture from her Facebook page.
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