So Frag & So Bold: Short Poems, Aphorisms & Other Wartime Fun

"Every poet," warns Randy Brown, "has a heart filled / with shrapnel."

In his new chapbook "So Frag & So Bold," the former U. S. Army "brigade staff jester" takes aim at endless wars, parent traps, social media, and stodgy religious beliefs. It's an iconoclastic cluster-munition that's bursting with hundreds of haiku, aphorisms, philosophical puzzles, and other experiments in pithy and pulpy poetry.

Brown's careful constructions of line-breaks and language are intended to variously provoke chuckles, empathy, and thought. "Any poem is a device," he writes, "improvised to explode with meaning [...] ignited by a trigger / word."

Get ready for amusement, bemusement, and plenty of pyrotechnics!