A counterminimalist design ethos eggs on Steps: A Notebook by Tom Beckett. It’s one in a set of Tiny Books from Meritage Press. Publisher Eileen Tabios accompanies her poet as graphic alter ego, supplies drawings and handwrites his text, a duet then stepping onto their small stage in shared regalia to participate in what I might describe (unsneeringly) as an intense art dealership. The poems come inside a little page-turner, tiny even in chap terms — a 1.5-inch square thumbnail sketchbook with a cover jacket fabric in a colorful folk pattern. The poems come forward, sideways, and upside down in one or two words per line, mostly three lines or fewer to the page. They address ambiguities of their being composed, seeming parenthetical, always germane, as one page smack in the middle inveighs: “In / the moment / (be right there).” The poems comprise of suave quotations, sketches, and thoughts on writing, verse making, for instance, is like composing a music made of temporary flaws (“smudged work of Arias”) or like writing with chalk, “Looking / at blackboards / how many Ways?” Skepticism — “Advancement / is a kind / of ____.” If poetry is prayer, to paraphrase, prayer is programming in thought that’s overexposed and torn. To get beyond the conundrum of prayer, programming, etc., the art dealers work on each other and together. Beckett’s Eileen accommodates the torn thought idea on a ripped page and settles prayer down with a vapor of slants, blank lines, and empty boxes that enforce a silence. Tabios’s Tom returns, though, with a new quiet streak, “A / poetry of questions / (one answer).” To clarify, he qualifies, “When / I was / a young man.” Next page, “When / I was / a little girl.”