Nicole and Peter Cooley

Floodgate Series Volume 6 Nicole and Peter Cooley

The chapbook, as a form, is laser focused. It is brief but provides the poet just enough space to meditate on a particular subject or way of versifying experience. The chapbook is small yet powerful, and while the chapbook is as unique and diverse as the poets who make it, the chapbook reflects a vision of the world as it is right now--no matter how the poet is writing or what they are writing about, in the case of Volume 6: the "sudden loss of the wife/mother" (Peter and Nicole Cooley's Vanishing Point), "the black people that in recent and preceding years have been doused and dismembered" (Dexter Boothe's Rhapsody), and the "fusion of earth, animal, human--a one-ness, beautiful, and also damned" (CMarie Fuhrman's Camped Beneath the Dam). These chapbooks (and any of the chapbooks published over the last five years in the Floodgate Poetry Series) could easily be published on their own, and they would do so powerfully, but in the bringing together of three chapbooks by three poets (sometimes more if the chapbooks are co-written) in various stages of their careers, lives, and work, we create a unified work that celebrates the broad range of poetry being written today while offering a collective vision of our time.