“It Can Take Awhile Until You Sound Like Yourself”: A Review of Recent Poetry Chapbooks (on Hands-On Saints by Holly Iglesias; Cooking in Key West by Ed Ochester; The Genuine Negro Hero by Thomas Sayers Ellis; The Spirit of Blue Ink by Walter Pavlich; Freight by Sondra Upham; and Against Elegies by Jack Ridl)

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.