GESTALT by C. Show

One of new words {press}'s two selected authors as part of our first chapbook call! GESTALT is a collection of autobiographical poems with accompanying illustrations that work in concert to play with space on the page. The chapbook takes the reader through a heartfelt journey through trauma and fear, emerging in a place of hope.

C. Show (they/them) is a Central Arkansan author who writes poetry in nontraditional forms as well as speculative fiction and satire. Their short fiction has been previously published in ImageOutWrite, Every Day Fiction, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Their chapbook GESTALT is their first poetry publication.

The book itself is meant to break a cycle. There's a flow of trauma that is disrupted by a breakthrough, which is not meant to be overwhelmingly and falsely positive. The final poems weave the positive into the fabric of a painful life changing the appearance of that life's tapestry.

Each poem is accompanied by an illustration. The poems themselves are formatted in a way that plays with space on the page. As an artist, Show enjoys using space having found themself limited by traditional forms. The way they experience the world require their poems to be hypervisual, while the space interferes with how the reader interacts with the work, forcing them to slow down or consider a different way of reading the work than they might have previously thought.