The Poetry Chapbooks of Red Ceilings Press

I’m not sure exactly when I first heard about “those beautiful, little” poetry chapbooks, but I had three of them in my hands by late last fall. And yes, they are little, postcard-size measuring four inches by slightly less than six inches, and about one-eighth of an inch thick. I also have one of the Red Ceilings eBooks, but I’m not sure if I can say I have it “in hand.”  

The Red Ceilings Press may be one of the most unusual publishing enterprises I’ve come across. Based in the United Kingdom, it publishes small poetry chapbooks in print from and short collections in ebook form. A printed pamphlet is about 30 pages. The ebooks vary, but mostly run about the same length or shorter (the ebooks are published as pdf documents). 

 

The press has been operating since 2010 with a very simple operating philosophy: “We love doing our chapbooks and that’s really our main thing, but we also publish the occasional eBook.” The approach to ebooks means no one involved is going to get rich, except perhaps the reader, metaphorically: “Our eBooks are available to download for free because we are nice like that.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Some days you don’t have it – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

Alexei Navalny’s Letters from the Gulag – The Free Press.

 

Of Lord Byron’s faults, writing dull letters wasn’t one of them – Alexander Larman at The Spectator.

 

Learning to Receive the Day – L.M. Sacasas at The Convivial Society. 

Poets and Poems: Paul Brooks and "As FolkTaleTeller"

In southwestern Missouri near the Oklahoma border, a story is told about the “spooklight” or “ghost light,” a mysterious ball of light seen at night. It’s supposedly best seen from just inside the Oklahoma state line, facing west. Reports of the light began in the 19^th century, and some say it’s associated with the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. Similar lights have been reported in Texas, Michigan, Thailand, and Norway. All the reports fall into the general category of “will-o’-the-wisps,” often associated with marshes and swamps.  

The will-o’-the-wisp is just one of the folk tales poet Paul Brookes puts to work in As FolkTaleTeller, his new poetry collection, a chapbook of 33 poems, each about a different folk tale or character. The folk tales are local to where Brookes lives in England. But most of them of them are familiar enough under other names to be close to universal, like that ghost light or will-o’-the-wisp.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Paul Brookes – A Poetry Champion Who Writes Poetry

Paul Brookes is a writer, a poet, a historian, a photographer, a genealogist, a shop assistant, and a grandfather. He’s written a play that was produced for stage. He’s been a member of poetry performance groups. He’s published numerous poetry chapbooks and collections. He’s lived in Wombwell, in south Yorkshire in the U.K., for most of his life. And it is there that he manages a web site called The Wombwell Rainbow. 

The site is about poetry, and it’s about poets. Brookes regularly, sometimes several times a week, publishes interviews with poets, most in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., but from many other countries as well. And whenever he finds poems and stories that he likes, he writes a brief story and links to them. He promotes poets and their new poetry collections. It was through The Wombwell Rainbow that I found poets Nigel Kent, S.R. Jakobi, Tom Sastry, Sarah Thomson, and others. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.