aftermath by leah angstman ($6)

A very thick chapbook of poems from veteran underground author leah angstman, this collection is an anthology of years of writing that had gone unpublished. This collection contains most everything written between 1999 and the end of 2001, combining them into one thick book that can hardly find a blank spot on the page to breathe. The poems are fast, tumbling, circular, a bit angsty in their spewing, and at their worst, they are sentimental without reverting to mushiness. The reader can feel the growth, the changing of the guards inside the author's mind as she travels from one landmark of youth to the next landmark of adulthood, leaving a trashing of chaos and words and anger in her wake. You catch glimpses of the refinement of her craft, mixed in with the rawness of her youth, with no rewrite, often penning out three or four poems a day in quickness and intensity, leaving this book as a testament to her true coming of age in the literary world.