Three Count Pour Chapbooks : Elizabeth Robinson + Randy Prunty,

 

“baptism”

What if a hand

came from behind,

 

if it wetted the hair. A gesture that neither 

understood nor misunderstood

 

what the hand could measure

when the sound was not water, was

 

instead

the fall of nakedness from

the body. The surrender, the squander, the thing

that could not adhere, submerged below its surface. (Elizabeth Robinson)

I’m intrigued by these lovely new chapbooks by American poets Elizabeth Robinson and Randy Prunty, apparently two of a cluster of four new chapbooks by Bay Area poets produced in 2025 by Three Count Pour, an imprint of Chicago publisher selva obscura press—Robinson’s for the catechists (2025) and Prunty’s Gravity Catches All Things (2025). Elizabeth Robinson is the author of a slew of poetry books and chapbooks over the past two-plus decades—see my review of her latest, vulnerability index (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025), for example—and this new title follows her relatively more recent trajectory into elements of faith, offering lyric conversations through and around scripture. What is interesting, also, is how the book is structured as a kind of abecedarian, offering fourteen lettered section-clusters, most of which hold but one or two poems, but the section “s” holding six poems, with all poem titles within each section beginning with that section’s featured letter. That same “s” section, for example, offering poems “sacred heart,” “shofar,” “shroud,” “sola scriptura,” “soul” and “spirit.” The abecedarian structure hints, perhaps, at a far larger collection of these pieces, which is interesting, and something I would be eager to see. Robinson’s language is sharp and dense, and there’s an approach to and through her subject matter propelled, first and foremost, through the language. “Echolalic with odor,” she writes, as part of the poem “carnal,” “the creature is able to smile, to fill / countenance with perception, mill / its arms around, its legs, loll or hunt / its field, its plural. /// Critter in fur, incarnate howl, / call, mineral tang of voice, voice stalled. Its / whiff transferred, diurnal. Only paw and pall, little /// hell of beingness, crawl to haven.” I haven’t seen much of Randy Prunty’s work prior to this, but the title of his Gravity Catches All Things is quite good, I must say. The pieces assembled here are composed as fourteen word/line sonnets, one word per line, what Ottawa poet Seymour Mayne has referred to as “word sonnets,” although Prunty’s are far more precise, exact. There’s such thinking between these lines, these words; such marvellous density, one word set upon another, offering a kind of silence throughout each piece, even as the poem speaks. One hopes that, or even wonders if, Prunty’s reading style allows for the line breaks, the spaces between words, and not the way Canadian poet Ken Norris once told me of the reading style of American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): reading sans line break, as though his poems but a kind of ongoing sentence, making one wonder why those line breaks were even there at all.

Back Porch Sonnet

When
there’s
no
space
between
thinking
it
and
saying
it,
you
know
you’re
home.