PORTRAIT in POETRY

By Donald W Chance

Portrait in Poetry
by Donald W. Chance

Portrait in Poetry - this could be any portrait. A wake where nobody stops the stranger taking photos. A man who ordered a T-bone and got handed a hamburger and somehow that's the whole story of his life. A woman dead at the counter, blood dripping steady as a clock. A con man in silk who already made peace with the heat.

Thirty poems. Six sections. No apologies.

This is a book about the faces people wear and the ones they can't take off - the violent and the grieving, the lovers who throw things, the workers stacking empty beer cans into pyramids just to say they built something. Literary ghosts show up uninvited: Bukowski behind the bottle, Plath mistaking the oven for her bed, Virginia Woolf waddling toward the river with rocks in her pockets while children sing about the big bad wolf.

It moves from brutal to absurd to unexpectedly funny, sometimes inside the same stanza. A one-act tragedy ends with a pizza order and a trigger pull. A birthday is marked alone with a dog and a space heater. Boogeymen come back after thirty years and find nobody home.

The voice never flatters. It just looks - and tells you exactly what it sees.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1711257672
• ISBN13: 9781711257679
• Release Date: November 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"