My Prize-Winning Chapbook Now On Sale!

My chapbook “Rebellion,” which won 1st place in the Medulla Publishing competition, is now on sale at the site, using PayPal:

REBELLION

The theme is challenging the system. The system could be anywhere or anything. A city, a drug, a corporation, a senator, God, death, a desert, a chainsaw, dark love ...

The pieces in this booklet are some of the best I have produced in my ten years struggling to write. It’s somewhat sad that my essence and philosophy can be distilled into such a slim volume--but there it is.

I’m not going to beg for anyone to purchase “Rebellion.” That would be like begging to sell my soul. The bottom line is this: if I sell some copies, it will bring pleasure; if I don’t it will annoy and depress; but these emotions are ephemeral either way, and I don’t think I will ever stop writing.

My goal is to let my most honest attempts at verbal beauty fly free. Not a single one of my poems is more precious than a butterfly, and like most butterflies they will live unseen and die lonely and sometimes cruelly. The world we live in dictates that miracles are commonplace and most will be crushed without awareness by blinkered beings who themselves are used by others.

This doesn’t mean we can't be judged. Each of us, for better or worse, is liable for our choices, including what we decide to see. My pamphlet intends to be part of a quest for better living. The path taken is one of unfettered passion accusing the system. My mode of travel is the most intense and evocative phrases I can, with great pain, discover and combine into a ferocious yet somewhat angelic beast.

This is the purpose of my life, this is what I was put here to do. My poems are my fig tree. At this stage, given what I’ve seen of humanity, I don’t expect anything more.


Owl

PS: Here is the chapbook blurb from Medulla Editor Jennifer Hollie Bowles, a disarming, original, surreal and dangerously good poet in her own right:

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On Rebellion

Master of brilliant metaphors, vigorous verbs, and universal socio-spiritual concepts, [Owl Who Laughs] creates a unique world of intoxicating poetry in his chapbook, Rebellion. This world reveals and challenges gods, wars, machines, and the psychology of—being and everything. Read and become instantly: “...reminded of their squelched pulse/and the storms in heartbeats...”

[Owl Who Laughs] teaches environmental ethics for the University of Maine and does much of his writing in a hut in a spruce forest. There are no traffic lights for fifty miles and moose can get dangerous during the rut. His creative angst can be described as obsessive, lycanthropic and apocalyptic. He has about five hundred poems published, including work in Chelsea, Atlanta Review, Portland Review and Disquieting Muses. Regarding his fifth chapbook, Gordian Butterflies, the Poetry Editor at Arsenic Lobster said, “[it] may just become a collector’s item one day.” He’s been nominated for various awards, including the Pushcart, Best New Poets and Best of the Web, and was interviewed twice on Poets Café, a radio show of KPFK Los Angeles. Both interviews and more extensive biographical background are available here:


http://www.timothy-green.org/blog/chris-crittenden/


He lives with his talented artist wife and their cat Portobello, and any bears, deer or bald eagles that might wander through the yard.

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