And Then Publishing’s second chapbook project will be available for purchase on April 4, 2025!

Three adjectives I might use to describe Hallie’s poetry are spiritual, painterly, and soft. To be more specific by way of metaphor and simile, Hallie’s poetry is spiritual in the way that the universe is dark and endless, filled with sparkling heavenly bodies, and burningly cold. Her poems’ syntax feels to me like confident brushstrokes of bright color that reveal the whole painting only when you back away from the canvas. The themes of her work are soft in the way that skillfully poured concrete feels like silk. If you couldn’t tell, I’m a fan.

I met Hallie in 2022 when I toured her around Miami’s campus before she committed to our MFA program. Hallie has singularly challenged and supported my relationship to poetry more than any other person has, as graduate students, friends, and collaborators. She supported &TP from the very start, and even became an early reader and reviewer of our first chapbook project. It’s my genuine honor to host some of Hallie’s poetry (she is a prolific writer and reader, a true force to be reckoned with–just look at her bookstagram, @ teddysreads) here at And Then Publishing.

CARAPACE by Hallie Fogarty is, in short, a chapbook about bugs. Crawly bugs, ugly bugs, fuzzy bugs, lonely, smelly, worthlessly alive and stubbornly dead bugs. The poems’ speaker is helplessly aware of these bugs. In “Lying in Wait” and “Calling Things as They Are,” the speaker is disturbed by the fact that they are unable to look away from bug corpses, and at other times, they are in awe of the bugs’ liveliness, individuality and significance, as in “Elm” and “Cecropia Moth.” In turn, the speaker is disgusted by their own imperfect existence and disinterested in life, “Any entity worth discussing:/ disgusting, distrusting, disowned,” and yet deeply moved by the bugs’ perseverance and their own, “Even though/ the beautiful and strange make the pain more unbearable,/ I am one of the lucky ones: I no longer want to die.”

I think this chapbook makes a perfect transition from the death-like hibernation of winter to the strained and battered breaking of spring. As midwesterners, our winters are long and desperate and our springs–if we can even call them that–are never without its tribulations for people and nature, but the survivors emerge.

I hope you’ll check out CARAPACE for yourself soon!

Yours,
&tp