Everywhere West

The poems in Chris Green’s Everywhere West stand in the light and dark of family life and are bowled over by the beauty of fatherhood. Like a novel, the poetry asks over and over, “What’s worth living for?” The book also explores living in America at a time when basic human value is being hacked and discontinued. Nothing is simple about being a child and parent, and through complications of time and grief, the book is crowded with hope.

A welcoming collection that will connect with readers as much for its familiar content as for Green’s ability to open intimate poetic moments outward to the world.

     — Diego Báez, Booklist

You can find the entire review for Everywhere West here

“Everywhere West” is the title of my new book and also a poem-film I made with Mark Neumann about a cross-country drive.

How to Buy!
Mayapple Press 


American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans

American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans is a collective response to the individual suffering behind the shooting statistics in Chicago. I asked one-hundred poets from across the city to take turns writing a communal poem about Chicago’s gun violence. The poets range in age, gender, race, ethnicity, and poetic experience. Such well-known poets as Ed Hirsch, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Roberson, Marc Smith, Ana Castillo, and Kevin Coval write with teen poets from the South and West sides . . . many from the group Young Chicago Authors, but also young poets from Chicago’s alternative high schools, where statistically, students experience the most gun violence in the city.

Each element in this communal poem—from the hypnotic repetition of lines to the entwinement of diverse voices—creates both pattern and ambush, mirroring the interconnectivity of city lives beneath a façade of divisions and echoing the perpetual shock and horror of gun violence. 100 Chicago poets have built an elegy of rare synergistic and compassionate imagination and profound resonance.

     —Donna SeamanBooklist

You can find the entire review from Booklist here.

American Gun from Bill Glader & Susan Rohrback on Vimeo.

Press and Media

Fox News

WBEZ Reset interview with Jen White

How to Buy!
Big Shoulder’s Books


Résumé

Résumé, which sees life as a series of jobs, jobs splendid as the ditches of old Russia. Any job is both unspeakably ordinary and mercilessly strange—a stock broker or pimp’s assistant, the same. And here, slipped between pages of work, you find a series of “Jobless” poems—a recurring state of being. Also poems about the jobs of vital relatives—in my family, mangy is not a bad word—all of us with perfectly strong legs, all chasers with nowhere to run. In the end, the work of poetry becomes a refuge in the book—a stillness at the end of the day.

This a wonderful cycle of poems about working, class, America, being a guy, being a poet, being human. In order to do this book justice, a Studs Terkel quote is embeded in this blurb: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Through the vehicle of various jobs, roles, labors, and employments: manual, artistic, emotional, literary, familial etc. Chris Green gives us a lyric tour of human complexity, oddity, behavior and occupation. He has a novelist’s powers of observation. Résumé is full of humility, wit, smarts and heart, and all kinds of quiet astonishment. Studs would have loved it.

      —Amy Gerstler

How to Buy!
Mayapple Press | Amazon 


I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War

I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War weaves together the memories of fifty veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These vets were asked to submit any number of “I remember” statements—to recall the small and the large of their war experiences. The book lists veterans’ memories one after the next with numbers instead of names in the margin to signal each new voice. Readers can, when and if they choose, check the Biography section in the back of the book to match a number and its associated memories with the name of a veteran and his or her background. Because of the near anonymity of the text, the book superficially appears to contain the memories of just one veteran—an attempt to emphasize the similarities of all wars. The system of numbering is also meant to be vaguely militaristic—a way of foregrounding the contrast between a soldier’s number or unit and the unique human story of every war.

This beautiful book is built on the simplest of premises: “I remember.” Here are Chicago’s bravest, remembering all of what war can be. Theirs are memories that sear and soar and won’t be easily forgotten—not by them, of course, not ever, and not by the rest of us, either, as we become their witnesses.

     —David Finkel

How to Buy!
Big Shoulder Books  | Amazon


Other Available Books

Epiphany School

Chris Green’s Epiphany School, penned with all the wonder and curiosity of a wise child, is not a book for the timid, the slack-minded, the duped or sleeping. These are poems that hold us in their headlights and tap our backs in the dark, that beg us to notice the life and death of our lives, the big and small moments of illumination. Green’s language is unhurried, epistolary, his impulse the guy’s next to us at the Cubs’ game who snaps our picture when a foul ball lands in our lap or knocks us unconscious. Either way, he’s got our back.

      —Maureen Seaton

How to Buy!
Mayapple Press | Amazon


The Sky Over Walgreens

Chris Green’s poems consistently do to me what so few poems do: they move and amaze. In heartrending images and scenes, Green manages to say the things we really know, but are so often unable to say. Things about animals, poets, family, and marriage. Even–or especially–in their simplicity, these poems are profound.

     —David Trinidad

How to Buy!
Mayapple Press | Amazon