Love Quote by Robert Morgan

There is a quiet pragmatism hiding inside Morgan's praise: he isn't just talking about poetry, he's talking about stamina. The chapbook, in his telling, isn't a lesser container for "minor" work; it's the format that respects how attention actually behaves. Nineteen poems becomes a unit you can hold in your head, a sequence you can finish before life, fatigue, or duty interrupts. Sixty or seventy pages asks for a kind of leisurely immersion that most people don't have, and many never did.

That matters coming from a soldier. Military life is structured around intervals: waiting, moving, brief windows of privacy, long stretches of exhaustion. The chapbook fits that rhythm. It can be slipped into a pocket, shared, reread, carried through mud and boredom and back again. Morgan's affection suggests a reader who has learned to value forms that meet people where they are, not where publishers imagine them to be.

The subtext also nudges at a democratic idea of literature. Chapbooks have historically been cheap, portable, and slightly outside the gatekept prestige economy of "proper" books. By calling them "ideal", Morgan sides with the minor, the handmade, the intimate. It's an argument for density over bulk: poems hit harder when they're not buried in a mountain of poems, when the book's scale matches the genre's intensity. The result is less about lowering ambition than sharpening impact.