A Thousand Paper Cranes by Pamela Miller Ness, $3 —a 28-page chapbook Don Wentworth publishes the tiny, intelligent literary journal Lilliput Review. He also produces single-author chapbooks like this one, a tanka sequence written by the poet Pamela Miller Ness over the course of seven years. The linked poems chronicle, in a spare and haunting way, her mother's illness and death. The cover image is a simple Matisse drawing of two women. This is a beautiful book. Ahoy There! by Missy Kulik, $1 —a 12-page, 5.5 x nearly 3" illustrated book of sailor haikus Missy makes absolutely adorable drawings and, in Ahoy There!, she tells tiny stories about sailors, seahorses, seamonsters, mermaids and such—all in haiku, all illustrated. This little lengthwise book is charming and lovely, something you'll want to show to everyone who comes over. Bats With Baby Faces by Liv, 75 cents —a 16-page collection of poems "I think of this zine as the shedding of an extra layer of skin," says Liv in her handwritten introduction. This collection of her poems is an issue of her zine Ribald, and it's a nice selection of mostly free-verse poems. Strips of laughing picture-booth photos and photocopied school notes accompany them. One especially warm poem is called "Observations," though that's what these all are, word-snapshots of old houses, childhood friends, and doors opening onto scenes like a "sunday morning in a hot city church." Breakdancing for the Pope by Katie, $1 —a 14-page, half-size chapbook "Katie has put together a powerful little packet of poetry in her latest zine, Breakdancing for the Pope. I enjoyed the title track the best, a piece which includes the metaphor 'words put on paper / are tin cans with strings / they twirl and buck in my mind / then in yours.'" So says Alan Lastufka, writer and founder of the indie publishing resource Fall of Autumn. This little book contains 12 poems, all free verse, and don’t be scared; they’re not pretentious, but they’re not sappy either. The Bumblibee: Pomes by Liz, now 26, when she was about 5, $1 —5 sheets of 8.5x11" pages stapled together, with a hand-drawn color cover Says Liz: "I came across this book of poetry not too long ago while cleaning out the closet in my childhood bedroom. I have no idea how old I was when I wrote these. I'm also not entirely sure what was going on in my life to inspire these poems, but I showed them to my sister and she absolutely loved them." I'm the sister, and I do love them. Liz read these to me over the phone and we were howling with laughter. They're so great and funny that if you didn't know a kid wrote them you'd swear they were by Carl Sandburg. From the original introduction: "If you love POMES read this book / It's for all ages / From 3 to as old as you want." I reproduced the book to look just like the original. You need to own it. Did You Know That You Could Heal Yourself? by Sean O'Keefe, $1 —a 34-page chapbook + a nice cardstock cover I recently heard from a fellow named Sean Casey, who publishes poetry chapbooks by other writers, and he sent me this one, which was written by a poet and musician named Sean O'Keefe. I like it. It's an unusual book-length poem, in a sense, with only one line per page. Each sentence reads like an oddball piece of advertising copy, a line from a hokey movie trailer, or a spooky aphorism. As a whole the chapbook is like a piece of pop detritus urked up by, well, by a poet. (Urk is my word for puke. I think it's just a sound I started saying and now consider a word.) This is an attractive book. Eight Beatitudes by Katie, $5 —a letterpress poetry broadside I letterpress printed my poem “Eight Beatitudes” onto a broadside, or poster. Letterpress printing is when you set metal or wood type on a big old Ben Franklin-style printing press and crank the printed matter out by hand. This run of 35 prints is signed and numbered and, as they’re all printed on lovely art paper, suitable for framing. Erik and Laura-Marie Magazine No. 41 by Laura-Marie, free —a 24-page, half-size zine ELM is a personal zine, but Laura-Marie is a poet, and she includes many poems throughout the zine. I am not exaggerating when I say that she is as good a writer as I’ve read, in the zine world and outside of zines. All of the poems are good. Particular bright spots in this issue include the gut-puncher “don’t make me say the title” and the first poem, “what you need to know,” which is a list poem, I guess you could say. Laura-Marie is completely right in all the things she’s deemed need-to-knowable, but they’re all so surprising at the same time. That’s what makes a poem good, friends. glory-of-the-snow number eight by Heather, $2 —a 32-page, half-size zine Heather writes the literary-minded personal zine glory-of-the-snow, and issue #8 is made up entirely of poetry. She writes in her introduction that she took a class during her senior year of college for which she read the book The Daily Mirror by David Lehman. She tells us that in Lehman's book he wrote a poem every day, “whether he felt like it or not,” which inspired her to do the same. So from May 13 to June 13 we have a poem a day. Heather describes wonderful, weird scenes from New York, a place she clearly loves, and arresting childhood memories. Lovely and intelligent. Ground-Truthing The Sanctuary: Four Poems, Cantabile by Katie, $.50 —an 8-page, quarter-size zine with a vintage rubber stamp of a camera imprinted in paint on the cover This little zine is a collection of four sonnets that I wrote during the week following my visit to a nature sanctuary that is one of my favorite places in the world. "Ground-truthing" is a term used by map-makers, surveyors and geographers to mean physically walking a piece of land in order to really understand it—to make sure the machines got their calculations right. "Cantabile" is a music term that means "in a singing style."