Smiling with Teeth by Harley Anastasia Chapman

“Chapman’s poetry refuses to settle. Where words do not exist, she creates them new. Where words do exist, she pushes them out of their familiar meanings. Through character and voice she creates a fresh, searching mythopoeia. She tells stories of a man turned into a reindeer turned into a man, a boy who has always been a witch, of mothers determined to create a new world while ignoring “matrilineal / cracks,” and of doctors who refuse to see symptoms of truth. All the while, her speakers know where they come from, even if they don’t always know where they’re going. Somewhere in the constellation among Niedecker’s Objectivist work and Plath’s Confessionalism lies Harley Chapman’s work, simultaneously new and familiar, at once playful and solemn.”

–Ricki Cummings, author of Hypersigil