Add to Paper, by Howard Kaplan

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Add to Paper is a collection of poems that inhabits the charged space between perception and disruption, where the ordinary world slips into something unstable, surreal, and emotionally exposed. Moving through moments of stillness, observation, and interruption, these poems explore how intimacy, memory, and identity are shaped not by clarity, but by fragmentation—by what is missed, misread, or only partially understood. A bobcat leaves behind an empty leash, a clown serenades a silent audience, and a cloud becomes the evaporating trace of a body; each poem captures a moment suspended just before comprehension, where meaning flickers but never fully settles.

Blending visual precision with conceptual play, Kaplan’s work reflects his background as an artist, layering imagery and structure with a painterly awareness of composition and space. The poems shift between humor and unease, often using irony and self-revision to undercut expectation and expose deeper tensions—between tenderness and resentment, control and vulnerability, connection and absence.

At its core, Add to Paper is a study of how people move through a world filled with signals—linguistic, emotional, and cultural—trying to make sense of them, misreading them, or pretending they understood all along—and settling into the awkwardness that follows.

Howard Kaplan is a poet and visual artist. His work has appeared in Bullshit Lit, Mad in America, Cool Beans Lit, and elsewhere. He received a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and an M.Ed. and Ph.D. from the University of South Florida in Tampa. When he is not writing or creating art, he can be found with his wife Andrea, daughters Hyla and Kinsey, and their mini schnauzer, Princess Leia.