These Curbside Splendor Chapbooks Will Change Your Life - The Chapbook: Poems by Charles Bane, Jr. and Piano Rats by Franki Elliot.

We suppose we could have done separate posts on the current Curbside Splendor releases, Piano Rats by Franki Elliot and The Chapbook: Poems by Charles Bane, Jr., but there is something inherently fascinating to us about diving into work from a single source and trying to ascertain what the thinking or philosophy might be behind a growing body of work. What does it say about the press and can we ascribe some kind approach or method of selection to the decisionmaking before us? When asked then to read and blurb Piano Rats and its array of oozy, electric poems, we were struck by the transitions at play and how the writer and her characters had places to go, but really had no idea how to get there, so she kept looking back, for clues or guidance, better less confusing times maybe, something. Mainly though she is stuck in her all druggy, hopeful messiness and what has passed may be all that makes sense to her now, though even that is questionable. In The Chapbook the beautiful poems we encounter reflect a different kind of looking back, the looking back of someone who has lived a life, full of love and family, and there are no bridges to somewhere here, nor any transitions, those days and challenges, the messiness that youth is comprised of has become something else, the ability to clearly look back on what once was and has made us what we are now as we settle in and review a life still full of life but also moving along towards some kind of endpoint. All of which leads us back to where we started as well, but in reading these chaps, what does that it say about Curbside Splendor and what it has and will wrought? There is no doubt Curbside Splendor is about the urban and the cool, and yes we mean this is in a good, non-ironic way, see Sophomoric Philosophy by Curbside founder Victor David Giron, but as we mushed Sophomoric Philosophy in with Piano Rats and The Chapbook, we couldn't help but think Curbside is about something else as well, reflection, and taking measure of who we are, wherever we are, and how we try to figure out not how we got here as much as what happened along the way and what the meaning of those events and feelings are to the person we are right now.