Good Chip - by Charlie Peck (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In a follow-up to his prize-winning debut collection, Charlie Peck's Good Chip traces addiction and the criminal justice system against the backdrop of a Midwestern childhood. From Nebraska thunderstorms to balconies in Germany, Good Chip contrasts the natural with the inhumane. Featuring narrative poems interwoven with a cast of characters, Good Chip is a story about addiction, recovery, and searching for home.

Review Quotes

Charlie Peck's wonderful Good Chip is a long hard look back at a wild and wayward past. "What do I regret most? / Mostly all of it," he writes, but what sets apart these poems of grief, addiction, and regret is that there's not an ounce of self-pity. Instead, a bright spirit laughing behind every line.

--Will Brewer, author of Nocturama

Time and space do not sit still in Charlie Peck's Good Chip: a brother's silence lasts "three cornstalk months," a gas pump rusts at "forever $8.34," Daylight Savings ends a week early on one side of an ocean, so that for "seven short days" a man stands "an hour closer" to a woman already gone. The poems meet this slippage with an accretive syntax. Clauses accumulate toward endings that invite resolution without requiring it. It's as if Peck's speaker wandered out of the goliard's tradition, those "winedrunk" scholars of the medieval road, quoting Rilke to a judge as the charges are dismissed-carrying away only the stare, "empty as a church house on Tuesday." Out of time, out of place, he finds himself in place after place where the music of these poems arrives as speech: a woman at a fun run shouting "faster, faster," not at the racing boys but at an old man lost in his camera; a bartender icing a glass for a sister barely through the door. And a Miami seamstress pinches his gut: "Stop trying. Let it out." Which is to say that here, in Peck's second collection, the song and the story are one. Let out, the story sings, and a man who once swore to stop being the loudest in the room has become its finest ear.

-- "Kerry James Evans, author of Nine Persimmons and Bangalore"

About the Author

Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska. His poetry has appeared in Indiana Review, The Journal, Ninth Letter, and Poetry, among others. He is the author of World's Largest Ball of Paint, winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award, and Good Chip, both from Black Lawrence Press.