Business as Usual, by CC Webb

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Business As Usual is a collection of poetry playing an egg toss between opposites: optimism & pessimism; objectivity & subjectivity; compassion & indifference; clarity & confusion; logic & absurdity; cynicism & idealism—and by the end, there are indeed eggs smashed all over the place. It’s a collection much more concerned with questions than answers, and specifically with questions that have no answers. If Business As Usual had to be boiled down to one sentence, it might be: what the hell is the point of all this?

Composed primarily of narrative poems with a surreal edge, Business As Usual is both approachable as an introduction to contemporary poetry and sneakily rewarding for the poet who decides to pick it up for a quick read. In these poems, cockroaches pay rent and philosophize on existence, the size of shirt buttons is turned into a conspiracy, fish develop stringent behavioral standards, taxidermied birds reflect on their origin of species, worm saviors make headlines—and let’s be honest, none of that is really much weirder than the rest of what’s going on in our day-to-day anyway.

CC Webb is a writer and teacher living in Cincinnati. You can find their work in BRUISER, coalitionworks, and Fatal Flaw. In their spare time they are usually listening to a Kurt Vonnegut audiobook and cleaning their kitchen.