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Target Practice--Parallel Press' latest chapbook is published
Posted 3/9/2009
MADISON, Wis. –“I feel a wound in my heart, / as if some well-aimed ammunition / has found its mark.” Jan Chronister’s metaphorical use of the heart as an archery target is evident throughout many of the poems in this latest chapbook from Parallel Press. In Target Practice Chronister tells a story of 
love, heartache, pain, and death.
Jan Chronister has been writing poetry for over forty years. She has been published in state, regional, and national anthologies and is a two-time winner of the Lake Superior Writers Contest. She has also won awards in contests sponsored by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, the Tallgrass Writers Guild (IN), and the Brainerd (MN) Writers Alliance.
Chronister is a regular contributor to Dust & Fire, an anthology of women’s writing published annually by Bemidji State University, and she received their 2008 Diane Glancy Award for Poetry. Her poetry also frequently appears in the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. Twelve of her poems have been published as collaborations with printmakers by the Northern Printmakers Alliance in Duluth, Minnesota.
Chronister currently teaches college-level English as an adjunct instructor. She has a son and daughter, both graduates of UW-Madison, and two grandchildren. She lives with her husband in the woods near Maple, Wisconsin.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from his chapbook, Target Practice :
Farmhouse Steps
Grandma walks in flat-soled shoes
up her back door steps,
one solid block of Wisconsin limestone
smooth from countless sweepings,
sun-bleached,
with boot-worn grooves where water gathers.
Age has weathered her powder-soft skin,
wrinkles washed away by rain
like sedimentary veins in rock.
Only fossibl thoughts
disturb the pale surface
of puddles.