HAL: Heuristic Algorithmic Library
American Chapbooks: Reconfiguring Literary and Artistic Prestige
A STILLNESS IN MOTION
A Review of little prose by David Person
Click on the title A STILLNESS IN MOTION to download this free PDF review.
Click here to explore or download the free PDF chapbook little prose.
David Person.
little prose.
HOT BUTTON PRESS: Contemporary Issues,
an imprint of OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L),
2025.
A prose poem collection succeeds or fails by how well it sustains poetic intensity without the visual scaffolding of line breaks. Prose poetry must balance imagery, rhythm, and emotional compression against paragraph‑based syntax and narrative flow. little prose, David Person’s 2025 collection, leans fully into this tension. Across its brief, titled prose pieces, the book offers a sustained meditation on landscape, light, and temporal drift, privileging atmosphere over plot and repetition over narrative resolution.
At first glance, the work appears deceptively simple: a series of short prose blocks named for locations, moments, or conditions—“There by the night,” “Some cold night,” “The old clock.” Yet as the reader progresses, the cumulative effect is immersive rather than static. Person’s prose poems are less about arrival than about remaining—remaining within light, weather, memory, and time as mutable states.
The dominant thematic concern of little prose is presence within transitory natural and temporal states. Recurrent motifs—night, daylight, twilight, water, wind, sand, stars—appear across the collection, often reframed through subtle shifts in syntax rather than new imagery. The poems ask not what happens, but how it feels to stay with what is happening. Many pieces foreground liminal moments: twilight becoming night, daylight dissolving into shadow, water in motion but never fully displaced. In “There by the night,” the speaker inhabits a space where “the glowing light of the sunlight” persists paradoxically within night itself, collapsing binary distinctions between darkness and illumination. Time behaves similarly. In the closing prose poem, “By the course of the time,” repetition replaces chronology, as “time then in the time when the time could stand in time” becomes both statement and enactment of temporal suspension.
Rather than offering personal anecdote or overt autobiography, Person’s work abstracts experience into sensation. Emotion is present but diffused—felt through atmosphere rather than confession. The result is a collection that invites contemplative reading rather than interpretive decoding.
Attention to how paragraph structure controls rhythm is essential when evaluating prose poetry. Person’s sentences often spool forward through conjunctions and soft repetition, creating a drifting cadence that mimics the natural phenomena he describes. Many prose poems begin mid‑motion, without capitalization or clear syntactic grounding, immediately situating the reader within movement rather than exposition. Punctuation is minimal, and sentences frequently resist closure. This stylistic choice produces a discernible gait that becomes more apparent when read aloud. The prose moves not by argumentative progression but by accumulation and return.
Imagery in little prose is concrete but deliberately cyclical. Waterfalls, waves, sand, campfires, clocks, and curtains recur, creating a shared visual lexicon across the collection. In “There by the course of the waterfall,” clarity and motion coexist as “the last streams of the clearness could be found…falling into the vast cavern.” The language emphasizes process rather than endpoint. Repetition functions as both musical device and thematic anchor, knitting the collection together while reinforcing its meditative tone.
The order of the collection subtly shapes the reading experience. Early pieces situate the reader outdoors—by water, under starlight, near trees—while later prose poems introduce human artifacts: campfires, clocks, ships. The movement suggests a gentle widening of scope, from elemental surroundings toward timekeeping and passage. Despite this progression, no single piece dominates. Instead, the collection functions as a sustained tonal environment. Reading little prose straight through produces a cumulative hush, where individual prose poems blur into one extended meditation.
little prose is a disciplined and immersive contribution to contemporary prose poetry. It exemplifies the genre’s defining tension between paragraph form and lyrical intensity, sustaining mood through repetition, rhythm, and image rather than plot or persona. Readers seeking conventional narrative momentum may find the work elusive, but those attuned to atmosphere, cadence, and quiet variation will find much to return to. As a collection, little prose rewards slow reading and rereading. Its success lies not in individual standout pieces, but in the way its prose poems accumulate into a unified, contemplative experience.
Click here to explore or download the free PDF chapbook little prose.
ABOUT DAVID PERSON:
David Person is an American poet whose work appears in online literary venues and chapbook publications. His prose‑poetry collection little prose was published in 2025 by HOT BUTTON PRESS, an imprint of OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L). His poems are also available on PoetrySoup.com, where he is listed as an American poet with multiple published pieces. According to the publisher, no formal biographical information was available at the time of little prose’s publication, suggesting an authorial focus on the work itself rather than public biography.
Image: I’m Sorry, Dave #16 (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
Copyright © 2026 by HAL: Heuristic Algorithmic Library
An imprint of OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L)
All rights reserved on behalf of OJAL Art Incorporated, O:JA&L and its various imprints.
Publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints
Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues,
HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, Dally Post Press: Cowboy Poetry,
HAL: Heuristic Algorithmic Library and FIREFIGHT PRESS: Trench Art
OJAL Art Incorporated serves artists and writers worldwide.
HAL is the O:JA&L imprint featuring AI-assisted discourse.
Formatted in Create Space.
Set in Garamond and GARAMOND ALLCAPS.
Made available online and/or printed in the USA and elsewhere
as a novelty and commemorative document
celebrating the publication of O:JA&L’s PDF pamphlet.
This project was made possible, in part, through support from
Grayling and Wraith, a growth marketing company.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
BUTTONHOOK PRESS MASTERS SERIES
Click on the titles to explore or download the free PDF chapbooks.
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Brian Clements on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Mark Budman on Flash Discourse
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Ray Gonzalez on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Michael Martone on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Roberta Allen on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Master Series: Peter Conners on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Maxine Chernoff on Prose Poetry
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Pedro Ponce on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Tom Hazuka on Flash Fiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Kent Dixon on Flash Fiction & Nonfiction
With an Interview by Associate Editor Pamelyn Casto
The Buttonhook Press Masters Series: Jim Meirose on Experimental Discourse
With an interview by Associate Editor Warwick Newnham
O:JA&L’S HIGH BUTTON PRESS ART CHAPBOOKS
Click on the titles to explore or download the free PDF chapbooks.
RITES OF CALIBRATION: Images & Excerpts
Fine Art Photography by Rex Wilder
Fine Art Photography by Natalie Christensen
Painting and drawing by Anne-Marie Brown
BY LAND AND BY SEA: Awakening the Sensual
Sculpture and Installation by Mark Yale Harris
Painting and drawing by Bette Ridgeway
Painting and drawing by Kathleen Frank
Painting and drawing by Catherine Eaton Skinner
Implications of Energy
Artist portfolio of Dr. Ernest Williams III
