Fat Chance: Journalism Poems

In Fat Chance, poet and publisher Kent MacCarter investigates variations on how non-fiction can be reported, taking an uncanny look into sole survivors of major airline crashes, a memoir approach at the surgical complication known as gossypiboma – where an instrument is left behind in a body cavity after surgery – a recount of marketing tactics for children’s toys and more.

Columns of justified prose lure you into the familiar channels of reporting facts; you could be mistaken for believing there is no poet or poetry here at all. Yet, the primary purpose of Fat Chance is not the transmission of information, and it thrives on contradiction. Contrary to the title’s colloquial meaning, it offers you ample possibility. Here, the journalistic and the poetic collide to liberate language from truth so you can wander in the wide, bountiful space between.

Emotion is denuded from the stories, forcing you to fill the void with your own suppositions and terrors … rubbernecking at yourself on why you are uncomfortably allured. With its irony and absurdity dialled up to the sublime, you will be confronted by this feel-bad book of the year.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
Imprint: Upswell Publishing
Publication date: 03/01/2024