Chapbook Review: In the Year of Our Making and Unmaking

Title: In the Year of Our Making and Unmaking 

Author: Frederick Speers

Date: 2021

Publisher: Frontier

ISBN: 978-1-7363695-1-7

Length: 22 pages

Quote: "the day of your death / any day in my life / is a frame /for / what is / & isn’t / impossible to lose"

This is a chapbook, a "cheap book" of just a few poems traditionally sold by poets to support themselves while working on more substantial books. Publishers still like and encourage chapbooks, even now that they're likely to be e-published in digital forms, and invite poets to submit "up to 25 pages" or "up to 50 pages" of poetry.

In this chapbook, Speers experiments with a new poetic form: lines are written in calendar format, tables with seven columns and four to six rows. It's possible to read down the columns but the poems are clearly written across the rows. This short collection touches on other themes, like nature and faith, but basically it's about a male couple, one dead and one anticipating death. From AIDS? From COVID-19? From the combination? Speers doesn't mention AIDS but his surviving narrator does mention being told he probably won't survive "the inflammation." The surviving narrator also pens a "poem" filling the calendar page for a month with the word "pill." 

So to some extent all the poems make the same point: "Remember me!" Then again, maybe that's the fundamental point of all writing. (I am working at night. Really noir insights can be generated simply by working at night.) In a chapbook it can be called unifying. The word "chapbook" was apparently a fortuitous coincidence with the phrase "chapter in a book," which is how they can be reprinted later if the poet continues writing. A single unifying theme in a chapbook doesn't have time to become boring.