I Can Catch Anything by Ann Chinnis

In this, her second chapbook in just a year, Ann Chinnis once again mines memory and deep familial bonds for rich treasure. Ever the masterful storyteller, Chinnis introduces us to a larger-than-life, distant father, a doctor uncle who stitches the jaws of catfish back to new, a rainbow-loving wife who cries over poems with happy endings, and a wild girl-child coming into herself in the wetlands of Virginia of the 1960s. She’s a tangle of wet hair stiff with saltwater, face covered with fish guts, learning to fish and to navigate the Rappahannock River, just as she learns to navigate a world with limited admission to girls, especially those who dream of becoming doctors. Chinnis gives us unflinching close ups of a father-daughter relationship and long nights in the Emergency Department where the poet spent her career as an ED physician. These are poems that pop with color and light, the sound of trains and the scent of the river. The collection is a love song to the scars we carry with us into the places we were meant to be. These are poems that will travel with you for a long time.

–Valarie Hastings, winner of the 2020 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, author of Searching for Dandelion Greens.

Ann’s poems are about fishing, toiling as an ER doctor, worshipping and resenting her larger-than-life father, clawing her way back from perceived failure, imagining the lives of famous medical inventors, and they won’t stop sizzling in my brain. I kept thinking this is a full-length collection, so packed is it with wild wit and character and gorgeous language. A mini self-portrait of this Virginia Tidewater girl: “She had a tangle of wet hair, fish guts/on her face.” An instruction in “How to Be a Cowgirl”: “Grab a handful/of mane and fling yourself/onto destiny’s haunches.” Her crazy take on the pandemic: “I find a rope and a stick to dance over contagion’s/canyon, where ass eating smaller ass look up with ass in their/mouths, startled.” The minute I finished it I plunged back in at page one.

–Michele Herman, author of Save the Village, Just Another Jack, and Victory Lane