Twenty-Six Short Ones, by Sean West

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Allusion and reference chip through the façade of ordinary life only to reveal another façade. Nothing, it appears, is what it appears upon first glance. Flatulence becomes shorthand for love, a plane crash reveals the sandpaper quality of time, garbagemen dig up the future as well as the past. Then again, everything appears to be exactly what it appears to be. If we open our eyes, we’ll see we live lives of quiet routine – watching sports, drinking coffee, awaiting that eternal footman. Jotted down in the day’s in-between times – train rides, lunch breaks, toddler naps – and culled from two decades’ worth of notebooks, the poems in this slim volume explore the grey area between the profound and the mundane. In the end, it’s exactly what it says on the tin – twenty-six scraps of poetry. Sean West is a part-time poet. He’s also a cat person and baseball fan. He lives outside Philadelphia.