“I Am Telling You This as Calmly as I Can”: A Review of Recent Poetry Chapbooks All in All by Laura Chester; Catch and Release by Jamie Simpson; Fear of Everything by David Starkey; The Memphis Sun by Jim Murphy; A Day’s Work by Rick Campbell; Blue Numbers, Red Life by Roy Jacobstein; and Lilting by R. T. Smith)

Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.