Yes, I’m including chapbooks in my list. Why not? They’re short, but they have pages, covers, words. I like this one a lot: Ariel Gordon’s A Mudlarker’s Diary. It’s published by Pinhole Poetry, and it’s lovely as an object: there are tiny illustrations, it’s printed on nice stock, it’s sewn and not stapled. Nice.
When I think about mudlarking, I think of Victorian London, and urchins collecting pennies and buttons on the bottom of the Thames at low tide. I know people still do mudlarking there, but the word “mudlarking,” its combination of river bottom and joy, feels Victorian.
But you don’t have to cross an ocean to go mudlarking. Ariel Gordon does it in Winnipeg, where a CPR landfill and a bottle recycling depot beside the Red River disgorge their collections of broken glass and china into the water and the mud. Not just fragments, either: sometimes Gordon finds entire bottles, sometimes unbroken glass stoppers. It’s a meditative practice, it’s exercise, it’s material for her writing. Including A Mudlarker’s Diary.
These poems are a diary, covering spring, summer, and fall of 2023 in fourteen poems, all written in tercets, all free verse. They’re walking poems, too; that’s how Gordon and her colleagues make their way along the gumbo beside the brown water. Repeated themes emerge: leaky rubber boots (punctured by sharp debris), falling in the mud, the way different kinds of material is uncovered as the water level rises and falls, the human and more-than-human residents in and along the river (encampments of unhoused people, police putt-putting by in their patrol boat, various passers by, other mudlarkers, ducks and geese, willows and toads). Gordon takes to asking the Red for specific objects—unbroken stoppers, for instance—which it then provides. This damaged place, polluted and abused, has so much life. Gordon’s poems do, too.
I encourage you to order a copy from Pinhole Poetry, but hurry: my copy is number 50 out of an edition of 60. The supply of broken glass in and alongside the Red River is endless; the number of copies of A Mudlarker’s Diary is not.