Delirious adventskalender 2009

Each evening through the 24th, a new audio poem will be added. Click on that day's numbered box in the kalendar to listen. More info on the poets appear in posts below.

(Best viewed in any browser other than Firefox. If you do not see the image below, please click here to go to Dusie.org.)

Day 25: Mel Nichols

Mel Nichols is the author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (National Poetry Series finalist), Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha 2008), The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6 (Edge 2007), and Day Poems (Edge 2005). Recent journal publications include Poetry, New Ohio Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Van Gogh’s Ear, and Westwind Review. She curates the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series at Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center and teaches at George Mason University.

Day 25: Jill Alexander Essbaum

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several books of poetry, including The Devestation (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009).

Day 25: Sarah Rosenthal

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) and the chapbooks How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000) and not-chicago (Melodeon, 1998). Her writing has been anthologized in Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2005) and hinge (Crack, 2002). Her collection of interviews, A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive.

Day 25: Lee Ann Browne

Lee Ann Brown is the author of Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything, and collaborations such as Nascent Toolbox with Laynie Browne, and Sop Doll! A Jack Tale Noh with Tony Torn. She teaches poetry at St. John's University in New York City and is starting a performance and workshop space, The French Broad Institute of Time & the River in Marshall, NC."I wrote this poem in 5th grade at the request of my teacher Mrs. Elrod to accompany a bulletin board display of white paper snowflakes in the halls of Bruns Avenue Elementary School in Charlotte NC. Accompanying me in this recording some 35 years later is my daughter, Miranda, age seven who made up the new ending. She also suggests you listen to it backwards for what sounds like the word 'salami.'"

Day 24: Divya Victor

Divya Victor has lived and learned in India, Singapore, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Seattle. She has an M.A. from Temple University and is currently working towards her Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo. Her work has appeared in ambit, XConnect, The Ixnay Reader, dusie, President’s Choice, P-QUEUE, and Drunken Boat. Her chapbook SUTURES was just published by Little Red Leaves.

Day 23: Catherine Daly

Catherine Daly is author of eight books, most recently VAUXHALL (Shearsman, 2008), which is in many ways the lyrical/sonic successor of her book Locket (Tupelo, 2005), from which these poems are translated. Catherine Daly lived in the same apartment building as Kris Petersen in New York, and they last worked together on The Last Canto (Duration Press, 1999), which originally included two translations into Italian as well as the translations from Italian.

Day 22: Mairéad Byrne

MAIRÉAD BYRNE’s The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (an early blog book) is due out from Adam Robinson’s Publishing Genius Press in Spring 2010. Other collections include Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions 2007), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press 2003). Chapbooks include State House Calendar (Dusie Kollektiv/watersign press/ Calendar Girls Books 2008) and An Educated Heart (Palm Press 2005).

Mairéad is an Associate Professor of Poetry+Poetics at Rhode Island School of Design.

Day 21: Danielle Pafunda

Danielle Pafunda is the author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press forthcoming this winter), My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and a fourth collection Manhater slated for Dusie Press Books. She is a member of the WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) Advisory Board, and assistant professor of gender & women's studies and English at the University of Wyoming. She has just received a grant to travel to New Orleans and take the most lurid vampire tours the city has to offer.

Day 20: Kate Durbin and Amaranth Borsuk

Kate Durbin is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat/Akashic 2009), and the chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot (Dancing Girl Press 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Action Yes. She lives in Whittier, CA, 17 miles, as the crow flies, from Pasadena, CA, where Amaranth Borsuk lives and pursues her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from USC. Amaranth's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in FIELD, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Pool, and ZYZZYVVA. Collaborative translations of Paul Braffort’s Hypertropes (with Gabriela Jauregui) appear in New American Writing and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.

Day 19: Elizabeth Bryant

Elizabeth Bryant is the author of a long serial piece called (nevertheless enjoyment, forthcoming from Quale Press, January 2010. Two other projects forthcoming are a chapbook called No Subject (Dusie 2010), and a second book, Reality Visits the Land of Illusion (Black Radish Books, 2010). She edits the intermittent experimental writing project, Defeffable, and co-curates the Bard Roving Reading Series in Annandale, NY.

Day 18: Kaia Sand

Kaia Sand is the author of a Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010), interval (Edge Books 2004), and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008), and she has created several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. Her poems lotto and tiny arctic ice comprise the text of two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008). She lives in Portland, Oregon, with Jules Boykoff and their daughter, Jessica.

Day 17: Rachel Levitsky

Rachel Levitsky's second book, NEIGHBOR, is published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2009). Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books. She’s released five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. With Jan Lauwereyns she is currently guest editing DWB, the 2010 issue of the Dutch language magazine, subtitled “The Empire of Women.” She was the founder and is now a collective member of Belladonna* a multi-faceted feminist avant-garde writing confluence. Currently, she is teaching literature and comp courses for the Bard Prison Initiative and Eugene Lang College at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in southern Staten Island.

Day 16: Kate Greenstreet

Kate Greenstreet's second book, The Last 4 Things, is new from Ahsahta Press and includes a DVD containing two short films based on the two sections of the book. Ahsahta published Greenstreet's case sensitive in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Find her poems in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, VOLT, the Denver Quarterly, Fence, Court Green, and other journals. Visit her online at kickingwind.com.

Day 15: Emily Critchley

Emily Critchley

There in reversible relation are more fields- consciousness permits. Grounds for ill-feeling, due to closeness. The heroine of a book mirroring a complex (disconcerting!) You’re due certain erasures, and for courage read luck.
from who handles one over the backlash?

*a collaborative audio recording with Caroline Bergvall.

Day 14: Wanda Phipps

Wanda Phipps is a writer/performer living in NYC, the author of Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX[books]), Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press), Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets (Situations), Lunch Poems (Boog Literature), Silent Pictures Recognize the World (Dusie Press), Rose Window or Prosettes (Dusie Press), the Faux Press issued e-chapbook After the Mishap and the CD-Rom Zither Mood. Her poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including the anthologies Verses that Hurt: Pleasure and Pain From the Poemfone Poets (St. Martin's Press) and The Boog Reader (Boog Lit) and has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Bangla and Galician. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Meet the Composer/International Creative Collaborations Program, Agni Journal, the National Theater Translation Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Siberia, as well as in New York City at La MaMa, E.T.C. She’s also curated several reading and performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church as well as other NYC venues and written about the arts for Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and About.com.

Day 13: Shanna Compton

Shanna Compton's books include Down Spooky, GAMERS, For Girls (& Others), and several chapbooks. A new chapbook is forthcoming in January as part of the Dusie Kollektiv.

Day 12: Cara Benson

Cara Benson edited the interdisciplinary book Predictions for ChainLinks and author of the forthcoming books (made) with BookThug and Protean Parade with Black Radish. Other work is included in: Belladonna Elders Series #7 with Anne Waldman and Jayne Cortez, NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books), and Imaginary Syllabi (Palm Press). Spell/ing ( ) Bound, a tri-partite art objet with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Kathrin Schaeppi (ellectrique press), and Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (BookThug), which won the 2008 bpNichol Prize, will always be two of her favs. Benson edits the online Sous Rature and is a proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv.

Day 11: Susana Gardner

Susana Gardner is an American poet who has lived in Switzerland for several years. Her first full-length collection, (lapsed insel weary) was published by The Tangent Press, OR in 2008. Herso, An Heirship in Waves is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in early 2010.

Day 10: Jenn McCreary

Jenn McCreary is the author of :ab ovo:, published by Dusie Press in the spring of 2009. She is also the author of two chapbooks: errata stigmata (Potes & Poets Press), and four o’clock pocket chiming (Beautiful Swimmer Press); the e-chapbook :Maps & Legends: (Scantily Clad Press) and a doctrine of signatures (Singing Horse Press).

Day 9: Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner's new book, My New Job, is just out from Fence Books. Her other books are Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001; both Fence). A selection from her new project, an epic romance, appears in the fall issue of Verse; recent chapbooks include Articulate How(Big Game Books/Dusie, 2008), Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha, 2008) and Bornt (Dusie, 2009). She is permanent faculty in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she lives car-free with her six-year-old son Ambrose.

December 8: Suzanne Nixon

Suzanne Nixon

dyer. spinner. knitter of lace.

reader. thinker. writer. of poems

as yet unpublished in print

but poetry blogging at

http://suzannagig.wordpress.com

Day 7: Dana Teen Lomax

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press), Room (a+bend press), and the co-editor of Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). Her documentary poetics manuscript Disclosure is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in2010. Her work has most recently appeared inUbuWeb, Jacket, Poets & Writers, The Bay Poetics Anthology and will be included in Against Expression(Northwestern University Press, 2010). She is working on a book of poems entitled Shhh! Lullabies for a Tired Nation, editing a Small Press Traffic-related project, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children, and teaching writing at San Francisco State University and Marin Juvenile Hall.

Day 6: Karen Hannah

Karen Hannah is originally from Santa Maria, California. She has lived in Philadelphia, where she received her MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Temple University, and has recently returned from Seoul, South Korea, where she worked as an editor for nearly three years, making curricula books and working on a manuscript entitled when you and I are understood. She's now happily residing back in the land of San Francisco, after having sadly left it seven years ago. She is excited to begin taking letterpress classes for a documentary she wants to make on existing letterpresses in the United States, and to brave biking up as many hills as possible. Her work can be found in 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, vol.1 of the online journal zbzz, Fulcrum Annual, Small Brushes, and Thought Magazine.

Day 5: Nicole Mauro

Nicole Mauro is the author of one book, The Contortions (Dusie, 2009), and four chapbooks. Her second book, Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet, Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet, is due out from Black Radish Books late 2010. She teaches rhetoric and writing at the University of San Francisco, and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye.

Day 4: Megan Kaminski

Megan Kaminski is the author of the chapbook Across Soft Ruins (Scantily Clad Press, 2009). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Phoebe, 6x6, Third Coast, and other fine journals. She lives in Lawrence, KS, where she teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Kansas. Previously, Megan has worked in the fields of fashion, finance, and yoga. She spent much of her early life in Virginia, and lived in Casablanca, Los Angeles, Paris, and Portland, before moving to Kansas.

Day 3: Dana Guthrie Martin

Dana Guthrie Martin has been described as akin to “watching someone eat their young only probably a lot prettier.” She and her husband share their Seattle-area home with two hermit crabs, their robot, Feldman, and their hand puppets, Princess Baby Toes and Captain Baby Pants. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, and her chapbook The Spare Room is forthcoming from Blood Pudding Press. -- Dana Guthrie Martin, writer formerly known as funny: mygorgeoussomewhere.org * http://readwritepoem.org

Day 2: Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Journal, Copper Nickel and Denver Quarterly. “broken sonnet” and “Fire, 3:15AM” were written between Kinderhook and Tsatsawassa creeks at Bernadette Mayer’s writing workshop in August 2009. “Radium (Ra), or Two Reactions” is in conversation with Lori Anderson Moseman’s “Reunion” from Temporary Bunk and Kate Greenstreet’s “new units of distance” from case sensitive. For more information about Deborah, visit deborahpoe.com

Day 1: Marianne Morris

Marianne Morris was born in Toronto in 1981, and raised in London. She studied English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge and was the recipient of the Harper-Wood Studentship for Creative Writing from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 2008. She is now undertaking research for a PhD at Dartington (University College Falmouth). Together with Jow Lindsay and Jonathan Stevenson she founded Bad Press in 2002. Her published poetry includes: Tutu Muse (Fly By Night Press, 2008); A New Book From Barque Press, Which They Will Probably Not Print (Barque Press, 2006); with Bad Press: Cocteau Turquoise Turning and Fetish Poems (2004); Gathered Tongue (2003); Memento Mori (2003); Poems in Order (2002).



*click on each thumbnail to hear the audio adventskalender, click on the above image (1) to hear ART WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, by Marianne Morris, each subsequent day a new poem will be posted for your audio pleasure...happy holidays!

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like, Click Here to Enter!

Our third forum is up on Delirious Lapel, where each day this week you will find new responses.

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like



In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like. This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, we've curated This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like. We hope you'll visit, read, comment, & enjoy!

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
    & Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, & David Lau


Upcoming Forums:
December: 2009 Advent Kalendar (check out 2008's!)
January: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like, round 2

Jennifer Karmin & Bernadette Mayer on Neutrinos

Poetry and science. The etymology of the clitoris. The unnameable. The undefinable. We read our newly finished poems in the living room to Philip Good and Hector the dog. Phil took a picture.

-- Jennifer Karmin

The most difficult poetry assignment I ever envisioned is to write a 10-line poem about neutrinos with alternating lines containing a metaphor and a gerund. Here are Jennifer Karmin’s & my, Bernadette Mayer’s groundbreaking neutrino poems.

-- Bernadette Mayer



vital statistics of neutrinos

a neutrino is form and content
neutrinos enjoy exhaling the universe at 3:15am

a neutrino is ideas and solutions
neutrinos practice writing buckminster fuller poetry

a neutrino is mental ingenuity
neutrinos believe in fighting against inanimate slavery

a neutrino is a trillion trillion trillion clitorises
neutrinos escape interacting with the speed of light

a neutrino is the great experiment
neutrinos hate sniffing gravitational glue


by Jennifer Karmin



A NEUTRINO CASINO

a lepton, the neutrino is a clitoris
to us, a clit, maneuvering
past the explosion, neutrally, not neutralizing
it is a scandinavian country
taking no part in anything moving
a conscientious objector
unwilling to be party to any collision
but, a secretary of state, she has some weight
you know she has been being there
over two hundred trillion trillion trillion massless earths
are passing through the sun every second
not to speak of you, you muon monster!

p.s. if i say to my sister: i’m not me
i’m a neutrino, passing through you
is she still the same?


by Bernadette Mayer




Jennifer Karmin has published, performed, exhibited, taught, and experimented with language in many forms. During the summer of 2009, she presented a durational performance on Buckminster Fuller at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and a live improvisation of her text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice at The French Broad Institute of Time and the River. She also spent one week writing, reading, and laughing with Bernadette Mayer.

Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967, she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh, and worked as Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. She is also known for her wonderful dancing. Her latest collection of writing is titled Poetry State Forest (New Directions).

O SAY CAN YOU SEE

Nonverbal Reviews and Adaptations of Women's Poetry


Mina Loy, Surreal Scene

1. Deborah Poe birds & beads Kate Schapira
   
2. Anna Lena Phillips boots, bottles, buttons Molly Tenenbaum
   
3. Melissa Severin tucks Emma Rossi, Elizabeth Barbato, Suzanne Heyd, and Daniela Olszewska
   
4. Krista Franklin opens a window on Linda Susan Jackson
   
5. Krista Franklin gilds Ruth Ellen Kocher
   
6. Abi Stokes collages Matthea Harvey
7. Tyler Flynn Dorholt splices Sandy Florian, Joyelle McSweeney, Laura Solórzano, and Kim Hyesoon
8. Jennifer Karmin street teams Kristin Prevallet
9. Daniela Olszewska puts a bow on Chelsey Minnis
10. Christine Neacole Kanownik horses around with Jennifer Scappettone
11. Janet Snell goes Dickinson on Nanette Rayman-Rivera

Original Call for Work

What book, chapbook, performance, or poem by a woman poet published/presented in the last year or two has left you speechless? How might that speechlessness manifest itself visually, sonically, or through another nonverbal medium?

Please create a response to this piece; your response can act like a review, adaptation, homage, investigation, companion piece, Frankenstein, child, or any mash-up of the aforementioned. In September 2009, all responses submitted will be featured as part of a forum here on Delirious Hem.

Curated by K. Lorraine Graham and Becca Klaver.

Deborah Poe Birds & Beads Kate Schapira

for Kate Schapira, in response to her hand/homemade book Orientalism.

(sampled song: Ulrich Schnauss' "Between Us and Them")

DEBORAH POE is the author of the poetry collection Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008) as well as chapbooks from Furniture_Press and Stockport Flats Press. Her writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in journals such as Sidebrow, Ploughshares, Filter Literary Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and FOURSQUARE Editions and A Sing Economy. She has received several literary awards including three Pushcart Prize nominations for her poetry and the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) for her poetry and fiction. Deborah has recently joined the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat, as fiction editor. Assistant Professor of English at Pace University Westchester, she teaches creative writing, contemporary fiction and theory. For more, visit http://deborahpoe.com.

Anna Lena Phillips Boots, Bottles, Buttons Molly Tenenbaum

after Molly Tenenbaum, "I Live in a Yellow Ice Cream Truck" from Now (Bear Star Press, 2007)

ANNA LENA PHILLIPS works for American Scientist by day and is poetry editor of Fringe by night. In the scant hours between, she enjoys commuting by bike and playing oldtime banjo. The recipient of a 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for poetry, she lives in piedmont North Carolina.

Melissa Severin Tucks Rossi, Barbato, Heyd, & Olszewska

"Felt Scrap Reliquary"

Artist statement:

When a poem moves me I usually write it down a few times in a special notebook. Later, when a line spins in my head and my memory fails to conjure up book titles and poets' names, I page through the one of the notebooks. But a plain notebook rarely seems to do certain poems justice. I find myself wanting to capture them somehow, create a better space for them to inhabit.

Poems, like songs and stories, help see me through particular seasons or phases in my life; the words become part of my daydreams, I live the stories, hum a line and make it through a day. When I considered the Delirious Hem project, I just kept paging through my notebooks asking how I could respond creatively, without using my own words, to these works.

I am not a visual artist. I can't take a decent photograph. I can barely draw a line on a page. It's only by the coincidence of my sewing box being next to my bookshelves and notebooks that I even thought to make a better place to keep some of the poems. So, is a felt book a response to these poems? Perhaps not. It's more of a reliquary really--a place for poems to be folded and hidden in pockets that only I know about. They exist with images and object sewn alongside them. It's a scrapbook, a place to contextualize the poems with images that spark my own memories

I have many poems I could hide inside a book like this, but this one is devoted to particular poems:

• "Fairy Tale" by Emma Rossi, from 6x6 #15
• "Lachrymose" by Elizabeth Barbato, from Little Red Leaves 3
• "Sanguinaria" by Suzanne Heyd, from Jubliat #14
• "The Spine Grower" by Daniela Olszewska, from Columbia Poetry Review no. 20

MELISSA SEVERIN graduated from New England College with an MFA in poetry. She currently lives in Chicago whilst unemployed. But she eats her oatmeal everyday and goes jogging and says "in this economy" a lot which keep her positive. Her poems have appeared in MoonLit, 42Opus, Cultural Society, and other journals. Brute Fact, her chapbook, is available from dancing girl press.

Krista Franklin Opens a Window on Linda Susan Jackson

after Linda Susan Jackson's What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press, 2007)



KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist whose poetry and collages have been published most recently in Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, CultureServe.net, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her collages have been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of Tres Colony, an artist collective, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

Krista Franklin Gilds Ruth Ellen Kocher

Collage by Krista Frankin, after "G/gnosis II Discipline" by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

G/gnosis II Discipline
Ruth Ellen Kocher

That summer My body forgot hesitation
wandered mountains met boys

whose faces lost soft curves spirit edged
stubble Tumble into manhood I called to it

tried to become one with it but again The body
floated afternoons in birch creek pools cutoffs

soaked through legs learning skin and skin.
Mornings feet caked black with culm

the paths through waste-land woods
followed us back to the apartment My body

hid from its parents Forgot its sisters Bathed
each morning as though performing ritual

leaving My body knew before I knew
Soon like hesitation It would forget return.

KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist whose poetry and collages have been published most recently in Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, CultureServe.net, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her collages have been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of Tres Colony, an artist collective, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

Daniela Olszewska Puts a Bow on Chelsey Minnis

after Chelsey Minnis' Poemland (Wave Books, 2009)



DANIELA OLSZEWSKA is the author of two chapbooks called The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe (dancing girl press) and Resort to Humming (Scantily Clad Press). She is an Assistant Editor for Switchback Books.

Christine Neacole Kanownik Horses Around With Jennifer Scappettone

"FDQ on an image of a horse"

after Jennifer Scappettone's From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009)



CHRISTINE NEACOLE KANOWNIK lives in Brooklyn and is the CFO of Business Press. One day very soon she will own a mini-golf course called Dan's Small Golf.

Janet Snell Goes Dickinson On Nanette Rayman-Rivera

"Top of Head, Blown Off" (oils, 30" x 32")

after Nanette Rayman-Rivera's shana linda ~ pretty pretty (Scattered Light Publications, 2009)



JANET SNELL is a graduate, magna-cum-laude, of the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she studied painting with the late Ed Dugmore. She has shown her work at The Drawing Center in New York City, Strathmore Hall in DC, Asterisk Gallery in Cleveland, Summit Art Space in her hometown of Akron, and many other places. Snell is the author of two collections of art with poems: FLYTRAP (Cleveland State University Press Poetry Center) the e-book HEADS (March Street Press), and has co-authored three other poetry and art collections with her sister Cheryl: MULTIVERSE (MiPO), PRISONER’S DILEMMA (Lopside Press) and MEMENTO MORI (Scattered Light Publications). She paints comissioned portraits, and blogs at snellsisters.blogspot.com.

Abi Stokes Collages Matthea Harvey

after "You Know This Too" by Matthea Harvey, from Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007)



ABI STOKES is an undergraduate in Columbia College Chicago's Poetry program. She grew up in a forest near Portland, Oregon, and she now lives on the outskirts of Chicago with her husband and her cat. Some of her work has been published in Columbia Poetry Review, and is forthcoming in Eleven Eleven. She enjoys exploring possibilities by combining and examining poetics and visual art on her blog, fuligin ink.