It’s been years since I created a chapbook.
Six, to be exact.
I released Selected Squares of Concrete — a de facto “best of” poetry collection of new, revised, never-before-released and old favorites — back in March of 2003, smack in the middle of the razor-thin slice of time between my return to the NYC poetry scene after living down in Virginia for a year, and my walking away from it again about three months later, more or less permanently.
I’ve wanted to create a new chapbook for a little while now, just for myself, to collect in one place the handful of newer poems I’d written over the past few years, for those random times I end up at a poetry reading and want to get on the mic. Like last night, for example, when I decided to check out my local poetry reading and had to dig through a pile of random poems, several of which were 2-3 edits old, to find something I liked.
It was interesting reading in a totally unfamiliar setting with only one other person I knew in the small audience, and there were a couple of poets there I would have liked to have had something to give, partly to promote Spindle, but also to establish myself in the scene since I’m a terrible self-promoter.
That’s when the idea hit me; an experiment in social networking: offer a free chapbook and see how big my platform, and what my social “reach” is!
So here’s the deal: for the month of February, I’m offering a free PDF copy of my newest chapbook, Crazy White Devil: and other heroic tales…, just created and released TODAY! It’s a brief mix of new work and a couple of encores, and, unless my fickle muse ignores my desire to write fiction and strikes me with the poetry wand yet again, it is what you’ll likely see me reading from if you ever catch me onstage at some point in 2009.
It’s absolutely free, and the only catch is that I ask you to spread the word far and wide, but do so only by directing people to this post, not to the link itself. Share this page on Facebook, or ReTweet it to your followers, or blog about it or just send people an email; whichever method, please direct them here to this page.
You can download the PDF right here. (Click to open in a new window, or right click and “Save as…”)
The PDF will only be available through the end of February, after which time Phase 2 of this experiment begins, when I dip my toes into the world of self-publishing and eBooks!
NOTE: The chapbook, still free, is now available in a variety of formats via Smashwords.
PS: Let me know what you think, either here in the comments, with a review on Smashwords, or via email.
