A Box of Rooms, by Gerald Yelle

Prose poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A Box of Rooms pretty much sums up this chapbook’s physical appearance. Though only some of the pieces, or “rooms,” are about rooms, they all have a kind of boxy look: solid justified micro-fiction paragraphs, many of them conveying a sense of claustrophobic confinement, within the boxlike confines of the covers. Rooms and boxes being three dimensional, there was also the idea that the contents add depth to the sheets of paper.

There is also something dreamlike about a box of rooms: large containers stacked or squeezed into a smaller container. Many of the pieces have that dreamlike quality, and because the speaker knows that what is being described isn’t real, he is free to indulge exaggerated emotions: loneliness, cruelty, sadness, elation, anger and frustration, all of it masked by desperate stabs at humor.

Gerald Yelle has worked in restaurants, factories, offices and schools. He received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts. He has published poetry and flash fiction in numerous online and print journals in addition to four books: The Holyoke Diaries, Future Cycle Press (2014), Evolution For The Hell Of It, Red Dashboard LLC (2015), Mark My Word and the New World Order, Pedestrian Press (2016), and Restaurant in Walking Distance and Everything, Cawing Crow Press (2016). An e-chapbook, Industries Built on Words, was published by Yavanika Press in 2020, and a chapbook No Place I Would Rather Be was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. He has an author page on Amazon.com and is a member of the Florence, Massachusetts Poets Society. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.