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"I am beyond excited to release Volume 6 of the Floodgate Poetry Series, featuring chapbooks by father-daughter duo, Peter and Nicole Cooley, Dexter L. Booth, and CMarie Fuhrman. My deepest thanks to them for their work. When selecting chapbooks for publication in the series, I ask poets whose work I enjoy if they have something they would like me to consider. Sometimes, the answers is, "I got nothing." Sometimes it's a resounding, "Yes!" Other times, it's, "No, but I have this idea ..." From there, the process is as organic as the writing of a poem. I don't worry about content. I don't think about style, subject, or length. I don't turn down a chapbook if I'm not sure how it will fit with the others. If I like the chapbook in my hands, I accept it. Chaos, you might think, would ensue or, at the least, a disjointed mess of a book - yet, somehow, the three chapbooks I select end up fitting together like pieces of a puzzle I didn't realize I was constructing. How is this possible? It's simple. The chapbook, as a form, is laser focused. It is brief but provides the poet just enough space to meditate on a particular subject or way of versifying experience. The chapbook is small yet powerful, and while the chapbook is as unique and diverse as the poets who make it, the chapbook reflects a vision of the world as it is right now - no matter how the poet is writing or what they are writing about, in the case of Volume 6: the "sudden loss of the wife/mother" (Vanishing Point), "the black people that in recent and preceding years have been doused and dismembered' (Rhapsody), and the "fusion of earth, animal, human - a oneness, beautiful, and also damned" (Camped Beneath the Dam). These chapbooks (and any of the chapbooks published over the last five years in the Floodgate Poetry Series) could easily be published on their own, and they would do so powerfully, but in the bringing together of three chapbooks by three poets (some- times more if the chapbooks are co-written) in various stages of their careers, lives, and work, we create a unified work that celebrates the broad range of poetry being written today while offering a collective vision of our time. I hope you enjoy Volume 6 as much as I do. A note on our publisher and authors: The first five volumes of the Floodgate Poetry Series were published by Upper Rubber Boot Books, a small press in Nashville, Tennessee. They included chapbooks by Sarah Rebecca Warren, Derrick Weston Brown, and TR Hummer (Volume 5); Regina DiPerna, Ryan Teitman, and Paisley Rekdal (Volume 4); Anders Carlson-Wee and Kai Carlson-Wee (co-written), Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown (co-written), and Enid Shomer (Volume 3); Kallie Fallandays, Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs, and Judy Jordan (Volume 2); and Jenna Bazzell, Anthony Martin Call, and Campbell McGrath (Volume 1). My thanks to these amazing poets and to the indomitable Joanne Merriam, owner of Upper Rubber Boot Books, for housing Floodgate in its early years. Volume 6 is the first to be published by Etchings Press of the University of Indianapolis. When Joanne informed me she needed to take a break from publishing, I wasn't sure what to do. I knew I wanted to keep Floodgate alive, but I wasn't sure how. When I told Kevin McKelvey, publisher of Etchings Press, that I was looking for a press, he leapt at the opportunity. I could not be happier with the outcome. Thank you to Kevin, Etchings Press, and the University of Indianapolis. And thank you to you, readers, for picking up this unusual collection of verse. Not quite book, not quite anthology - I'm still not exactly sure what Floodgate is, but, as the name implies, I hope it opens you up to new ideas to new experiences to new poets and, most of all, to new and renewed dreams. - Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum Founder & Editor of the Floodgate Poetry Series." -- from the Editor's Note.
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