Pond Champ, by Zach Arnett

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Pond Champ is a collection of surrealist poems rooted in the psychic terrain of the rural Midwest where the Wabash River, addiction, trailer courts, ritual, manual labor, retention basins, poverty and kinship all converge. Death is a concern in these poems. So is what happens after death. Animals don’t fare well in this selection, but neither does any living thing here. The point is that they endure. Pond Champ aims to find grace inside exhaustion and shame. Zach Arnett lives and works at the library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Bodega, Bending Genres, Hominum Journal, South Dakota Review and elsewhere.