Some Americans, by Carolyn Guinzio

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Some Americans is a collection of people as poems, the social and physical geographies of their thoughts and conversations captured as they observe themselves and each other, revealing snatches of anxiety, grief and instability. Vivid scenes are broken and backstitched with memory and fractured language, running like an old film projector that slips with distraction and despair, and then jolts with a sudden momentum of anger and frustration. Some fast-paced rants invoke the bureaucracies of medicine, hint at drug dependencies, and appeal to the logic of gamblers to explore if, in fact, things were always meant to be the way they are.Together they paint a picture of mounting foreboding and vague unrightness. The poems pulse with life and longing, dreams and disappointments, expanding and contracting around us like a cosmic road trip into the inner lives and quiet cataclysms of this American moment.

Carolyn Guinzio’s most recent collections are Cameo Blue, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2026) and Meanwhile in Arkansas, (2025) winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook Prize. She is the 2025 recipient of The Porter Prize, given to an Arkansas writer. A Chicago native, she has lived in the Ozark Mountains just outside Fayetteville, AR since 2002. Her website is https://carolynguinzio.my.canva.site.