Bread for Ducks, by Noah McIlroy-Shachar

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This is a shoebox of forgotten letters, a shelf of old takeout containers. Streetside poems written for strangers who never came to collect. Each piece sparked from a prompt–a word, a theme, or a short phrase–waxed and spun into verse on a 1971 Olympia typewriter named Ollie. What were the prompts? Who knows. Their bolts of inspiration have already flicked out of mind and disappeared with the folks who provided them. Now, what’s left are little mysteries under the refrigerator light.

Bread for Ducks contains bite-sized takes on nature, self-expression, relationships, and spirituality, among other themes. The result is a punchy, ephemeral collection of short poems, like a crumpled bag of leftovers. Slices of bread too old for sandwiches, but still useful perhaps for a stroll around the duck pond.

Noah McIlroy-Shachar is a traveling street poet, peddling poems with his typewriter partner, Ollie, across the west coast of the United States. His poetry has been featured in Catalyst Magazine, and journalism writings in Santa Barbara Independent and OlyArts Magazine. Bread for Ducks is Noah’s first published poetry collection. He and his life partner Darby live with their dogs, Hanzo and Charlie, in Salt Lake City, UT.