At a critical point in Tallahassee writer Michael Trammell’s new novel-in-verse, “Chiefs,” (Hysterical Press, Tallahassee, 2026) the phantom of Burt Reynolds rides a stolen Mustang convertible into Tallahassee’s Mission San Luis amidst a heated stickball game.
Soon after, the adventurers—Chief Crow, a Cuban scholar, and the narrator — find themselves leaping from a present-day replica of Ponce de Leon’s ship into a manta ray-shaped portal that leads to the place and time of Calusa natives and conquistadors.
Tallahassee writer Michael Trammell has published a novel-in-verse, “Chiefs.”
This is the poetry in which we find ourselves: free verse poems that invite us to tally-ho upon one swashbuckling maritime adventure after another and, in the same breath, dismantle the cultural and historical framework they are built upon.
Trammell, the author of the novel “Rad Sick Record” and a Senior Lecturer at Florida State University, will give a reading from “Chiefs” at Midtown Reader on May 7.
“Chiefs” author Michael Trammell will be at Midtown Reader on May 7, 2026.
Trammell’s “Chiefs” is poetry that seduces cautiously by throwing caution to the wind, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.
The plot follows the match between the Miccosukee’s Chief Buffalo and Old Crow, Chief of the Calusa, a once-dominant indigenous people of South Florida. Joining Crow on his quest to win a years-long stickball match are the failed-professor narrator, the Cuban-intellectual Antonia, and, yes, Burt Reynolds, the resurrected movie star of the 1970s.
All follow Crow almost blindly, compelled by his charisma and strength, feeling that he’s got what they’ve been missing.
The gateway to understanding this playful plot is arguably summarized in the poem, “Sir Real (of Spain),” which is a “Meditation on the protean nature of time and space.” The verse claims we’re entering a time when royal Spanish Conquistadors “can balance a globe on the tip / of a hummingbird’s wing.” This is a narrative where structured logic can break down.
As the story unfolds, it is easy to forget we are reading a novel-in-verse with distinct poems and not prose simply cut into shorter lines. There’s a skillful balance between the unfolding plot and the intense imagery of personal poetry.
The poetic form carries the narrative along. Subtle rhyme appears freely alongside free verse. And each poem begins with a sly summary — like stage directions in a play — connecting it to the larger tale.
The synopses are helpful to maintain the thrust of the narrative while the failed-professor dips occasionally into his mounting identity crisis. In the poem “My Johari Window,” the narrator recalls unfocused classroom discussions at Seminole Tech that ended without point. These reflections make him question his abilities as an instructor.
Nevertheless, the professor applies his best teaching moments during his escapades with Old Crow and their run-ins with the time-displaced Spanish, natives, and Burt Reynolds — who’s return from the dead makes him the unlikely star of a displaced Native American nation.
The result is an ingenious, reality-splitting quandary where we “feel a trembling in the atmosphere / as if every molecule of time and space / were breaking because two versions / of the same universe scraped together.”
This is what helps the narrator find a new approach to his teaching-life because “when the Johari-believers / meet the Calusa people,” both will see two selves, “one Shadow and one / Unknown.” Thus, the professor will recognize these “voices through fractured glass / and finally know [his] own.”
How cultures organize and retrieve memories, how mental frameworks develop, and how information is interpreted through existing knowledge, all these questions are explored in this fast-paced epic.
By the end it’s the reader who learns what the professor finds so difficult to teach, and it’s the professor who learns, from Crow, how to “remake [himself] with future plans” as “. . . the dreams . . . pause / to await a new cycle.”
Timothy D. Welch is the author of “Odd Bloom Seen from Space” and winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
If you go
What: Michael Trammell, a reading from Chiefs: a Novel-in-Verse and conversation with Jay Snodgrass
When: 6:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 7
Where: Midtown Reader, 1123 Thomasville Road
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee poet Michael Trammell plays with Burt Reynolds in ‘Chiefs’