Pen and Anvil Press - Homepage Pen and Anvil
Home Catalogue About the Press
Submit Contact Us The Ampersand blog
KOMMA SERIES No. 22:
“The Bug Orchestra”
by Maggie Farren
// published in 2020
// sale price $2.25
// poetry
<< download as a PDF
<< back to the catalogue
by Maggie Farren // a Pen & Anvil chapbook
Imran Boe Khan

Maggie Farren is studying English at Boston University, where she edits Burn literary magazine and received the 2020 Core Journal Prize for Creative Writing. This chapbook is her first solo publication. Find her on FB @maggie-farren.

// To buy this title, via PayPal or with a credit or debit card, please let us know how many copies you'd like to order:
Select:

// Customers who hope to arrange an order for delivery to an address outside the US are asked to click here to contact our staff directly by email.

“Now I fall asleep beside a shoulder and a ribcage / and wake to their rise and fall...”

“These five pieces are a rising poet's stake in the ground. With keen observations and humorous side notes, Farren strikes a path through every obstacle opposing the freedom of youth.” - Cat Dossett, Chapbooks Editor

Note: A version of "The Bug Orchestra" appears in the multi-author chapbook collection Cicada Sex-Songs, published by Hawk & Whippoorwill in 2020.
A note on the "golden shovel" poetic form
“The golden shovel form was created by Terrance Hayes. It is a style in which the last word of each line of the poem together reference a line from another poets’ work. He originally used a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks as the last word of each of the lines in his poem, as a way to pay homage to Brooks. I wrote the poem ‘Milwaukee’ in this style because of a unit on Brooks’ poetry that I participated in in high school; Raymond Antrobus is a poet from London who came to my high school to perform and left a large impact on me.” - MF
About this chapbook series:

These bite-sized booklets are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.

To request a single copy of any chapbook in the series, or a set of copies in bulk quantity so you can pepper them around your neighborhood, just contact the Pen & Anvil Press and we can put a plan together to mail some over to you. You can reach us via the good folks at the Boston Poetry Union, at 139 Mt. Vernon Street, Fitchburg MA 01420. If you don’t have a stamp, feel free to send us an email.