Boxed Juice by Danielle Chapman

Bookshop.org

from Unbound Edition Press:

Foreword by Peter Campion

Boxed Juice is Danielle Chapman’s searing, witty testimony to living out a poetic vocation in the midst of personal tragedy.

In poems as daring as they are precise, as playful as they are unflinching, Chapman sings of what she sees from within roles–mother, patient caretaker, Christian mystic, literary wife, event planner–our culture often renders invisible or ridiculous. But she is not complaining; her songs harness the paradoxical power of her circumstances, and they use it. From taut, linguistically nimble lyrics to the devastating, yet often funny, lyrical essay at the book’s center, Chapman invokes constraints even as she exuberantly shatters them. Or, as she writes in “Optimism,” “I made a fascinating box. Then I broke/ some boxes down. I smashed them/ into boxed juice.”

The central drama of Boxed Juice is “the poet’s attempt to hold herself and her family together during her husband’s struggle with near-fatal cancer,” as Peter Campion writes in the foreword. Chapman and her husband, Christian Wiman, had been married for only ten months when, in 2005, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of lymphoma, an event that ignited the couple’s mutual thirst for God, and their quest for poems that could capture it. Boxed Juice witnesses to Chapman’s experience of that extraordinary story even as it maps out her own vision of what Harold Bloom calls “florabundance,” stubbornly relishing the mischief and the joy, the ecstasy and absurdity – and, above all, the sound – of life, even when threatened by catastrophe. Against the backdrop of Chapman’s Southern, military childhood—blazingly evoked in her memoir Holler: A Poet Among Patriots (UEP, 2023) and present here in a Faulknerian farmhouse that refuses to fall down—Boxed Juice clarifies her craft into a miracle of survival. These are the poems of a spirit in whom the experience of being crushed is saved by the music that it yields.