Unbound Edition Press today announced a two-book agreement with Danielle Chapman to publish her second poetry collection, Boxed Juice, and her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots. The memoir will be released first, in October 2023, with the poetry collection to follow in April 2024. A special edition box set is also planned. Both works confront the fragility of life, the rupture of death, and the moral reckoning a search for meaning requires.
“Boxed Juice testifies to the life and love, the acts of consciousness and perception and beauty, that are demanded by living in ‘the valley of the shadow of death’,” Chapman said. “Whether that shadow is illness, grief, or spiritual despair, there is joy—even, sometimes, triumph—in finding the words and images and sounds that articulate one’s experience and change it into meaning. I hope that, in Boxed Juice, readers find all the music that can be squeezed out of one life.”
Of her memoir, Holler, Chapman said, “It is the story my childhood and the Southern, conservative World-War-II-era war horses I lived with after my father died. As a poet’s memoir, it’s a book about how poetic consciousness and liberal zeal fought their way out of a Marine Corps mentality doctrinally opposed to the overflow of powerful feelings. Set mostly in the Deep South, the development of a racial consciousness is central to this struggle.” Holler is also Chapman’s passionate attempt to evoke the people and places she’s loved and refuses to forget, despite their difficulties. In this way, the project is similar to that of Boxed Juice. “I hope it reanimates the singular beauties, absurdities, sins, and graces of individual lives – and thereby uncovers the mysterious ways in which they connect with and transfigure, and maybe even save, one another,” Chapman said.
Acclaimed poet and critic Peter Campion acquired the two titles for Unbound Edition Press, where he serves as executive editor. “Danielle Chapman’s second collection of poems, Boxed Juice, offers tremendous lyric intensity. She matches formal precision with verbal ferocity, as her poems depict and embody the sheer will to survive. This book brims with ‘insights lighting into the very / Heart of pain’,” Campion said. Campion will write the foreword for Boxed Juice.
“Holler highlights the ways in which a literary life gets created, and the ways in which it can be put in the service of understanding love, loss, and the overwhelming moral confrontations life presents,” said Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at the press. “We are honored to publish both of Danielle’s next books together, presenting them in the dialogue that exists across them.”
Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University, where she teaches Shakespeare and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International and elsewhere, and her essays in The Oxford American and Commonweal. Her first collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces (Northwestern University Press), was published in 2015. She lives in Hamden, CT with her husband, Christian Wiman, and their twin daughters.
