Scheherazade Plays the Chestnut Tree Cafe

An old cliche talks about how a reader does not need to leave her/his chair to travel the world. In his collection of poetry Scheherazade Plays the Chestnut Tree Cafe, Boyd Bauman’s poems convert the chair into a TARDIS to whisk us away into his examinations of world travels. Alongside these, Bauman shows us his rural Kansas upbringing, too, and the times of unknowing in the midst of organized religion and ranch-talk. He lends a lens to the racism of that childhood world: though we didn’t have a clue / who a queer was / and what would a black man / want with a town like ours… rough these complications examined in this work, we get to see the worlds we know, the worlds that need revealed, and the worlds we haven’t visited but understand what we do is to survive, just as Bauman shares with us through looking at Iceland’s poet Egil: Poets are forged / simply by bearing witness / to the nature of this land, / this land of temper / and ska ld (other poets).

-Dennis Etzel, Jr., author of is Removed Utopia