A Parallax View Through a Tinted Lens: collected poetry by DW Chance

A Parallax View Through Tinted Lens

What do you see when the world tilts? When memory, satire, and dream overlap? A Parallax View Through Tinted Lens is DW Chance’s raw, unapologetic plunge into that fractured vision—a book that catches reality in a funhouse mirror and dares you to laugh, wince, and recognize yourself.

Chance writes with the urgency of a survivor and the bite of a satirist. These are poems forged in deserts, barrooms, back alleys, and restless nights. They carry the grit of lived experience—war recollections, love unraveled, absurd modern rituals—and the surreal humor of a poet who knows lettuce can hold elections and ghosts can whisper from your typewriter. His lens is tinted, yes, but that tint is what reveals the truth we’d rather ignore.

Drawing from the restless cadence of the Beats—Kerouac’s wandering pulse, Bukowski’s brutal honesty, Ferlinghetti’s wit—Chance adds his own blend of gallows humor and desert mysticism. Some poems are spare vignettes; others spill like rants on a bar napkin. Together they form a collection that feels alive, jagged, unfiltered. These are not polite poems. They are made to be read aloud—shouted across smoky rooms, muttered to the mirror, even recited to the family pet when no one else will listen.

Inside these pages, readers will find:

• Surreal satire: playful absurdities where objects scheme, vote, or misbehave.

• Autobiographical grit: echoes of war, desert wanderings, and human collisions.

• Beat-inspired flow: jazz-like free verse, raw confessional bursts, restless energy.

• Humor in darkness: laughter that cuts, satire that refuses to soften its edge.

Chance is not afraid of contradiction. A poem may mourn and mock in the same breath. Joy flashes through grief; absurdity cloaks survival. The result is a collection that feels both familiar and alien, comforting and disturbing. It’s a poetry of collision—of voices, visions, and moods refracted like light through stained glass.

For readers of Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, or Billy Collins, this collection offers both homage and divergence. Like those poets, Chance digs into the underbelly of daily life and pulls out its beauty, its madness, its laughable despair. Yet his voice is all his own: sardonic, desert-dry, haunted by memory, and unwilling to let go of humor, even at the edge of collapse.

A Parallax View Through Tinted Lens is for those who have stared too long into silence, for those who know absurdity is a survival tactic, and for those who believe poetry should hit the gut before it ever whispers to the intellect.

About the Author
Donald W. Chance (writing as DW Chance) is a U.S. Navy veteran, desert dweller, and lifelong poet whose work bridges autobiography, satire, surrealism, and Beat-inspired free verse. His collections include Purple Sage, No Sweat, GI, A Poetic Horn of Plenty, Portrait in Poetry, and The O’ My Grab Bag Collection. His poems are tough, funny, and painfully human—rooted in lived experience and sharpened with wit.

Open this book and adjust your vision. Through the tinted lens, the world may look stranger, sharper, darker—and more deeply alive.