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The Black Narrows



For the last ten years The Broadkill Review has been associated with literary excellence in the Mid-Atlantic, co-hosting the Dogfish Head Brewery Chapbook Competition, and the John Milton Poetry Festival. This summer The Broadkill Press will release six new chapbooks. The first is S Scott Whitaker's The Black Narrows, a series of poems about a black market community on the marshes of Virginia. Set both during the Oyster Wars of the late 19th century and early 20th century, and in the present, The Black Narrows is a chapbook that explores generational poverty, alcoholism, family relations, and love against the backdrop of oyster thieves, scoundrels, opium dealers, and watermen.

“Search the oarlocks in Boston Harbor,
or the whale bars and barmaids with teeth
for your draggy knuckles....Your money,
like a shovel, will dig your insides out.”
--from "Up the Coast. For Money. For Love."

To support the release of The Black Narrows, Delmarva Now, a local news outlet, and Figment.com, a writing social network founded by former New Yorker editors--where many of the poems were published in draft form, published interviews about Whitaker's year long daily writing project, which resulted in The Black Narrows, as well as some of his other work about the serial arsonist on the Eastern Shore of Virginia who burned over hundred buildings this past winter.

“What once was a future is now
scattered cinders on a used up lawn,
our hope in men is a black charred bough.”
--from “Impostor”

The Black Narrows is Whitaker's fourth chapbook of poetry, his other work includes two Kindle direct books, Seven Days on the Mountain, a YA dystopian adaptation of the Odyssey, and Toxic Tourism, short dystopian fiction and poetry. Whitaker is the winner of the Delaware Press Award for Best Verse, The Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of a NEA grant to turn Romeo and Juliet into a rock musical for teenagers. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his writings have been featured in dozens of journals and magazines. Whitaker is a teacher of literature, psychology, and drama on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

The Black Narrows is available in softback cover for $9.95. Purchasing information can be found here, at the Broadkill Press site.



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