Terry Persun

Problems with Opaque: a Collection of Six Poetry Chapbooks Terry Persun

The chapbooks in this collection span from 1986 through 1996. During those ten years, I wrote and published literally hundreds of poems in little magazines and university publications across the country. I regularly entered chapbook contests and actually won a few. But, just as often, a small publisher would contact me and ask for 16 or 24 or 36 poems to create a chapbook. Those were great days, and I am eternally grateful to those publishers. Since chapbooks are typically published in very small runs of anywhere from 50 to maybe 250 copies, the chapbook poems collected here are no longer available in that wonderful format. I?ve tried to honor those chapbooks as best I could. So, to do so, I?ve included the original covers (only in black and white instead of color), and as much of the internal artwork as possible (also scanned in black and white). By including these pieces, I hope that the personal touch of the chapbook comes through even to a minor extent. Where the same poem showed up in more than one chapbook, I removed the second or third appearance from this collection. So, if you happen to have one of the original chapbooks, there may be a poem missing from this collection.