Points of Amperture and When I Ask My Friend

Authors: Daniel Owen and Jennifer Soong

Publisher: DoubleCross Press (2021)

Two chapbooks bound together.

About Points of Amperture, Dan writes: "I thought that amperture is how you spell embouchure, but when i found out it's not, I started thinking of amperture as being some kind of hybrid between embouchure, amplitude, aperture, and armature. This mistake serves, I think, as a way of describing the poems in this book, which I also think of as points of departure. I think these poems are about gratitude and wonder at being part of processes that are baffling, disturbing, immense, mistaken (perhaps sometimes serendipitously)… maybe the poems are prayers for belief in the goodness of endurance in the light of such processes. maybe they are sometimes denunciations of such a belief. at any rate, the intention to make a considered, spontaneous expression that could possibly (hopefully) do something ultimately positive for someone else animated the writing. a cyclical expression of gratitude intention. along with a whole batch of other questions, speculations, concerns, and hopes."

The poems of When I Ask My Friend engage various degrees of density: density of line, density of phenomena, and density of breakage and fluctuation. Meditating on everything from bug bites to optimism, The White House, and onion and parmesan scones, these poems test the possibilities and impossibilities of poetic freedom, how one "moves in / uncertain ways."

Edition of 300