Punctuated, by LeeAnn Pickrell

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.

Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks of punctuation had troubled her as well …

In art and photography, images reflect emotions and ideas. These poems explore the idea of a poem as an image. Each poem in this collection is not only about the mark of punctuation; it also looks like the mark of punctuation, so a period looks like a period, a question mark like a question mark … The poems explore the function of the particular mark of punctuation and its metaphorical and visual representation out in the world. Punctuation, or the lack of in poetry, is as essential as the words on the page. This chapbook is her homage to punctuation.

"LeeAnn Pickrell proves she’s more than a punctuation maven in her chapbook, Punctuated, with her inimitable interpretations of the ubiquitous marks. In shape poems brimming with startling connections, she enchants us with epiphanies packed into such little space.

—Cathryn Shea, author of Ghost Matinee from Unsolicited Press

LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet and freelance editor. Her work has appeared in many journals, most recently in One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, and in the anthologies Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life with Coffee, Electica Magazine Best Poetry, and A Trembling of Finches. She has been an editor for almost thirty years. Her book Gathering the Pieces of Days: A Year in Poetry is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2025. She lives in Northern California.