From Pennsylvania-based poet and activist Abby Minor comes Real Words for Inside, a chapbook that oscillates deftly between the beautiful and the hilarious. In Real Words for Inside, Minor navigates the wilderness, cataloging wildlife and human experiences (joyful, traumatic, and banal). Minor’s language is tight and conversational; the lines require that you sit with them for a moment, watch how they twist and move. She writes with care and precision and asks her readers to give the book the same.

This chapbook is printed on white paper with a sand-coloured cardstock cover (designed by Dani Spinosa and beautifully typeset by Kate Siklosi). Each chapbook comes with an excerpt of the poem below (the editors’ favourite!) printed on a card filled with wildflower seeds, so you can plant a poem and watch it grow!

Sample Poem

In South Dakota they are looking for neutrinos
underground. Down
in a hole which used to be
cracking out gold they see
what passes through or we
could pass through it. Later they feel down

in a hole talking to “the public” about science &
that’s how I feel talking
to “the public” about poetry. Yet
we shouldn’t feel that way
because people know a lot via April
sex & gas station parking lot
feelings unrecorded, yet a petal
off the dogwood tree is not dark
matter. Do we all understand dark matter.
Something could pass through
or we could pass through
it. What they are about to discover is something
funny that I already know.

~
I was talking to a young Mormon
mowing the grass at the big country house
where I am the gardener           His wife
is expecting again           We weren’t expecting
it to happen again so soon, he said, But
I guess God has
his fingers in everything.

(I am truly not trying to make
fun when I say, Excuse me
Beloved co-worker I totally agree & know
from my own experience
that God’s finger
is a dick.)