These Poetry (Chap) Books Will Change Your Life - Haunts, Emergency Room Wrestling and a patchwork of rooms furnished by mistakes.

There is travel and read and we were thinking poetry and writers and publishers we love, but mostly we were thinking that we must read more poetry, it seems like a requisite, can you write and not read poetry, it seems wrong, and we are not anti-poetry certainly, but we are crazy-ass compulsively driven to read fiction, so there you are, and here we are, traveling and reading poetry of all kinds by writers and from publishers we love. See how that works? Good.

We begin with "a patchwork of rooms furnished by mistakes" by TBWCYL, Inc. favorite, This Zine Will Change Your Life contributor and This Podcast Will Change Your Life podcastee J. Bradley and published by TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Deckfight Press, which is up to all kinds of wonderful things. All good yes, sure, but what about the collection itself? "a patchwork" is a wonderfully Bradleyesque series of mini-pop saturated relationship implosions which is reminiscent of Local H's 12 Angry Months, and richly captures why Bradley is the well-deserved King of Pain when it comes to break-up morass.

We recently had the chance to read with TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Laura Cherry, who was such an absolute pleasure to listen to, humorous and touching, refined, but with a wink, and this despite all sorts of intrusions and bar noise. We were particularly taken with "7. Lila: Found Poem" which is part of a suite, is that the right word, of Lila poems, all of which are in "Haunts," and what's so great about this collection, is how it takes a sweeping look at not just the life span, both the grand and mundane, marriage, birth, work, neighbors, love, loss all of it, but life lived, fully, richly, and yes, sorry, poetically.

Finally, and what is maybe the greatest surprise in this sort of round-up, "Emergency Room Wrestling" by the dirty poet, who we are embarrassed to say we were not nearly familiar enough with before this chap, but were geeked to hop in based on the publisher, Words Like Kudzu Press, and its fearless leader, the endlessly awesome Eye Scorpion herself, Karen Lillis, alone, but wow, what an amazing collection of pieces, all vivid and slamming, and so full of death, endless death, but less upsetting or overwhelming, than absorbing, fully absorbing, as life seems so unbelievably fleeting in these pages, a breath here, a brain injury there, then gone in a flash, a sad, sad flash, no time to react, because it's all done, all of it.