The Chapbooks Trilogy - Paperback

by Hank Youngman (Author)

And I wrestled with reeds in perilous bogs,
I've set fire to weeds and snuck up on stalks.
I've walked through meadows all covered in sand,
I've planted my seeds in infertile lands.

The Chapbooks Trilogy is a printed collection of the three books in the Chapbooks series, featuring a total of 50 poems and three critical essays on the subjects of verse and culture.

• Ambition, in Vain is a poeticized account of the disillusion of curtailed ambitions in the emergent culture of the 21st century. Melancholic, at times cynical, and on occasion humorous, Ambition, in Vain aims to illustrate and communicate the reality of the new zeitgeist in an intellectually stimulating medium.
• Songlets is a poetic discourse on coming of age, ideological convictions, modern culture and its impacts; psychological, social, and historical; 20 sonnets with a diversity of subjects and themes, united in form and their poetic scope.
• Chapbook #3 concludes the series with a variation in form, and a subject matter laden with enduring, temporal, universal, and subjective motifs; aware of a spiritual reality, yet just shy of esoteric. The mood combines the serious with the expressive, and the continuity in focus portrays a spectrum between optimism and bleak lucidity.

Written for an educated audience, The Chapbooks Trilogy is a somber yet hopeful account of a reality which prosaic character becomes enlivened by the lyrical narrative employed to explore, understand, and communicate the unexplored, misunderstood, and the unheard.