Description
Boxed Juice, Danielle Chapman
$25.00
ISBN: 979-8-9870199-4-8
Fine Softcover with Dust-jacket; 89 pages; 5”x7.5”
Publication Date: October 8, 2024
Summary
Boxed Juice is a rare and original work that makes clear why Danielle Chapman is so vital to contemporary poetry. Spontaneous and indelible, enchanting and disillusioned, extravagant and direct, these poems reveal what Chapman sees from within roles that our culture often renders invisible or ridiculous — mother, caregiver, Christian mystic, literary wife. From the taut, linguistically nimble stanzas of “Unspeakable” and “Kumquat” to the devastating and funny lyric essay at the book’s center, Chapman invokes constraints even as she exuberantly shatters them. Yet, as acclaimed poet and critic Peter Campion notes in his foreword, “for all its elegance, this remains a work pitched against despair, an act of survival.” Chapman and her husband, Christian Wiman, had been married for only 10 months when, in 2005, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of lymphoma, an event that ignited the couple’s mutual thirst for God, and their quest for poems that could capture it. Chapman’s work witnesses that harrowing story even as it maps a vision forward, stubbornly relishing the mischief and the joy, the ecstasy and absurdity — and, above all, the sound — of life, even when threatened by catastrophe. Following Delinquent Palaces (TriQuarterly, 2015), Boxed Juice distills Chapman’s craft into a miracle of resilience. Danielle Chapman’s poems are those of a spirit in whom the experience of being crushed is saved by the music that it yields.
Author
Danielle Chapman is a poet, nonfiction writer, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her previous collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by TriQuarterly (Northwestern University Press) in 2015, and her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, was released by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. She currently teaches Shakespeare and creative writing, and lives in Hamden, Connecticut with her husband, Christian Wiman, and their twin daughters, Fiona and Eliza.
Praise for Boxed Juice
“On some days, the only song worth singing is one of how to love well. Here, Chapman gives you that in a musically rich abundance that could be called Auden or Funkadelic: you can live these lines.
Reginald Dwayne Betts
“Boxed Juice is something rare, an original vision of being … that makes Danielle Chapman so important to poetry right now.”
Peter Campion, from the Foreword
“The poems [in Boxed Juice] are strikingly precise, their beautiful deployments of image and perception powerfully constrained …”
Lisa Russ Spaar, Adroit
Previous Praise for Deliquent Palaces
“Everything is alive and fully charged in Chapman’s poetry of ardor and loss, survival and renewal as she revels in the music of language — the fruitiness of vowels, the clash of consonants, the swoon of rhyme. Incisive, bemused, and impassioned, Chapman gives strong and lucid voice to the rapture of existence and the mysteries of consciousness.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review
“Danielle Chapman’s poetry is brilliant, mysterious, and impetuous in its quest for intensity. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, she knows the secret to charging the world with grandeur, with words and their music; like his windhover, her words buckle in two senses: both secured and “halted in a breakbeat.”
Ange Mlinko
“Delinquent Palaces is one of those rare things, a first book of an already developed, master poet. The one who looks out from the ‘yard that has been left untended / by any hand but the that of God.’ And the name of that yard is music.”
Ilya Kaminsky
“For Chapman, love is a matter of piercing, irreverent enchantments and chastening tragedies, a symbol of grace and an inevitable source of pain. The poems in Delinquent Palaces show this again and again, and they suggest what poetry offers its readers, not just in National Poetry Month but the whole year-round: a reminder that, if we look, we will see a world bathed in beauty and terror, ‘the fire hydrants redder / than berries of blood on islands of thorn’.”
Anthony Domestico, Commonweal
“This is a first book of great breadth, means, and detail. Chapman’s landscapes — mostly American, all over America —are familiar and strange, animated by startling metaphor.”
Daisy Fried, On the Seawall
Previous Praise for Holler: A Poet Among Patriots
“There’s no opportunism here, no pandering to the political side to which she belongs, no sacrificing of one’s ‘problematic’ family in order to absolve oneself. What Chapman has done with this book is much riskier, and more interesting, and more beautiful.”
Kate Lucky, Commonweal
“[A] dramatic, frank, witty, and intellectually lush family memoir. … [Chapman] brings her ancestors to vivid, fully human life with ringing details and compassionate insights, recounting the splintery oddities of her youth in a world right out of Flannery O’Connor. Chapman is a sure-fire storyteller as she also deploys her poet’s gifts for ravishing language and resonant metaphors in this thoughtfully intricate tale of loss, love, and moral quandaries in which the verdant land itself is a vital presence.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review
“Chapman’s richly lyrical yet incisive voice never falters. … This is what the memoir achieves: an angle of repose, an integration of opposites, an acceptance of paradox. Just as those who loved her contained both shadow and light, so Chapman herself is rich with contradictions. She tells a story that in a way belongs to all of us. We are simultaneously unforgivable and worthy of the deepest compassion. We are failures, and yet our efforts sometimes salvage beauty from the ruins.”
Elizabeth Genovise, Plough
“Holler traces out the strands of self, place, and history that bind us to any past we claim or disclaim, that live on in our pride and regret, our nerves and our senses.”
Marilynne Robinson
“With blazing lyric intensity, [Chapman’s] story builds to a conclusion of mythic power and surprise made real in every phrase of her phosphorescent prose. An astonishment. A lesson in being human.”
Rosanna Warren
“Danielle Chapman’s Holler is a magical and rare species of a book. … I am moved by the grace this book seeks and the textured moments it evokes.”
Major Jackson
“In a time when so many offer lip-service instead of actual reckoning, Chapman [is] … full of character, full of refusal to speak in platitudes, full of personality and heart, brimming with the kind of verbal music that makes emotion come alive for the reader almost viscerally (indeed, few can write a prose as musical and precise as Chapman’s). Holler is stunning book.”
Ilya Kaminsky
“Holler is exquisite and moving, an excavation of personal history and national mythologies, and Danielle Chapman’s complex and sensitive approach offers a brave and insightful path forward as we confront the past.”
Philip Klay
“Chapman has broken into the past without prejudice. This is new.”
Fanny Howe
