Michael Aro constructs a long poem from a series of individual smaller poems which calls to mind the words of Richard P. Feynman: “But if you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful—that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience—every once in a while we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.” Any excerpt would misrepresent the whole, so here is merely the first poem in a dissimilar series whose sum exceeds its parts:

High upon a promontory – yes, that’s
right, a promontory – he lies chained to
a great stone face. The chains themselves are stone.
A simple enough trick for a god. No

waving of arms or even a wink of
an eye was required but will only. A
god’s will. And it was done. Now, every
day at noon, birds come to eat his liver

without onions. My friends, I call you friends
for good reason, he will say. Were it not
for you I would have no company at
all. Speaking from experience, I have

a little advice for those times when all
seems lost. Just keep breathing, that’s the way to
do it. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Hold it. Breathe. Hold it.
Hold it. Breathe. Hold it. Hold it. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

—Michael Aro

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Dan Lewis sets us spinning with a collection of prose poems that read like the bursts of clear coming through the ether from a reporter who has just landed in a dream someone else was having. Never surreal but never quite real, either. An excerpt:

Landscape With Coin

A Mexican farmer appears on the horizon. You rummage in your pockets for meaning, but there is nothing here to be understood. The strategists—the writers of the ads and speeches—are off playing poker with the queen. Someone has kicked in the television screen; useless as a door, it sits in the ditch, gathering flies. The child is eating a bowl of marbles; he looks at you with vacant eyes. The barber, grinning, taps a razor against the red white and blue pole and utters a single word: “relevance.” Although you cannot see them, you are certain that the field is filled with crows.

—Dan Lewis

32 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

David Bond knows coal, and knows that the contradictions inherent in it cannot be properly told in prose. They require the liberties only poetry can take with language. An excerpt:

Dream

Tar-faced, tired, he rides the rubber freeway
crouched amid black shards
to daylight at shift’s end.

In summer dusk and the
lingering perfume of cookouts
he sits quietly

as synthetic sunshine clicks on
in a thousand shadowed houses
and wonders at the swampy

fern-alchemy of dinosaurs
bending their long necks like swans,
wonders how that light

could ever spring from such darkness.

—David Bond

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Amy Alexander reads more than recipes into and out of the Betty Crocker cookbook—she reads a way of life. But what savories burble beneath that flaky crust, only piercing it will reveal. An excerpt:

Setting the Table

Betty Crocker reads
in the Digest
a tale about Iceland,
more volcano than ice.
It reminds her
of her.
Shirtwaist,
hair bobbied,
bobbed,
but within,
the boil, the bubble,
toil, trouble,
volcano and steam,
rock hard,
hitting Arctic currents
and exhibiting,
for the people around her table,
cool stone,
nothing covalent or sliding,
nothing rash,
nothing to make them suspect her
of madness.
It’s the way it should be
she thinks,
it’s the way I want it.
She closes the pulp and returns to her kitchen,
where she’s testing recipes for chicken.
This bird is a noble bird,
she knows,
and so,
why does it pleasure her
to configure the perfect knot with which to tie its legs shut?

—Amy Alexander

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Tyrel Kessinger tells it like it is, and it’s only after we’re just about done admiring the clear tone of the bell that we realize the poem is telling us something else, as well. An excerpt:

Horseshit

Remember, just the other day
when we heard that song
the one with the Irish guys,
or whatever the hell they are,
and they proclaim: “I would
walk 500 miles” and then says
he’d walk 500 more just to
be the man who’d fall down
at some girl’s door? Horseshit
you said and we laughed so
hard we lost ourselves to tears.

—Tyrel Kessinger

26 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Magdalena Sørensen wonders if readers can relate to a Swedish girl growing up in the 80s, in Stockholm. Can the particular relate to the universal? Can the universal relate to the particular? Resounding yeses all around. An excerpt:

I remember my grandfather tall and pale. His marble desk was green, as was his sweater and the box of Läkerol.

I remember my rabbit, Simon. He was black and died from running in circles. A dog was involved.

I remember reading in the summer. The hammock between the trees and I wore a check skirt.

I remember skin burning in the night and ice-cream with blueberry pie. I remember Sue Ellen having a drink and her lips shivering. JR was bad.

I remember mother’s aunt in her chair. I remember her extra metallic arm, the cigarette and the worn playing cards. There was a scary room behind her and a red note book got lost.

I remember the barking dogs in her village. The ones on the first farm would start and then the rest followed down the road.

I remember the same aunt getting us into the car when thunder came. I remember her driving slower than people walked.

—Magdalena Sørensen

36 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Julia Klatt Singer reminds us that the lyric narrative poem is alive and kicking (like a horse); those of you who thought it was dead need to stop looking in the university towns and the big cities. An excerpt:

Steer Towards Danger, He Says

I think of cliffs to drive
over, horses I've tried to ride,
sailing at night in winds too strong
to hold our course, dogs
at the gate ears up and panting
eyes glassy and lit from within,
strays of any kind, that baby smell of newness &
endless possibility, infinite love,
men I was attracted to
for their long legs &
slow smiles, their teeth
white and gleaming behind
lopsided grins, the way
their jeans hung low on their hips,
how their elbows unhinged me.

I think about that moment when
a moth flies into the light,
a tree limb drops, the sound of it
tearing away, straining until
it gives way to the obvious.

One more step and I'm in
over my head, one more minute
and it's pouring, one more kiss
and I'm not going home.

—Julia Klatt Singer

36 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

B. Mason pulls off with aplomb and panache that sleight of word, that gesture of tone, that craft so careful it comes across as effortless. An excerpt:

Static

Poor Romeo and Juliet, she said.
They’d have lived if only
they’d had cell phones.

Love is in the contact,
and they had so little.

I hear my man by the hour,
provided the reception is good,
and it’s after eight and he’s not roaming,
and not in a crowd where
people can’t control their voices.

Then he has to yell and I don’t know
if he’s mad or if he hates me.
And when I ask him he’s annoyed, like
‘Of course I love you.’

And what does he mean ‘Of course,’
when I’m only trying to tell him
to call me back when
he can talk to me normally,
like people do,
like Romeo and Juliet did.

They loved each other,
and so do we.

Because he always calls me back—
unless I call him first.

—B. Mason

27 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Michael Leong puts the oooh! into Oulipo in this constraint-based suite of pieces. He says in the introduction, “in the spirit of poetic constraint, I chose to write in a form called a beau présent or ‘beautiful in-law’: it is, according to the Oulipo Compendium, a poem dedicated to a person that only employs letters found in that person’s name.” An excerpt:

Ahab’s Harp
     for Patrick Bahls

I cask black salt —
I chart a past scar, a para-haptic
star trail —

Rapt, I clasp a brackish altar —

I bait astral backlash —
I trap lack, I part arctic air —

I shall scalp a shark —
I shall char it —

I shall tack a brash ship —
I shall hiss sap that rasps —

I, alpha patriarch, stark tsar,
shall spit a lisp that splits asphalt —

—Michael Leong

16 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Karl Young considers this essay to be a “warhorse”, for how often it has been reprinted. To which we say, “Hear here!” There is no one consistently reliable metric for quality in this world (sorry, you have to do the hard work of acquiring a discriminating taste yourself), but there are a few reasonable indicators that anyone seriously interested in improving their own efficiency in separating the wheat from the chaff. One of these is, and should be, how many publishers are willing to publish and re-publish a piece. Especially when those opportunities take place over wide swathes of time. Here is an opportunity for you to read it again, if you know it. Or, the opportunity to read for the first time an essay that most who have read it would call “required reading”. An excerpt from the Introduction:

     In this essay, I will sketch the early development of the design of the Roman letters, the manner of book production that went with it, and the nature of reading in the first centuries of its use — roughly from the second century B.C. through the fourth century A.D. We cannot date developments in the alphabet very precisely for this period, but we can point out two inventions that profoundly affected western civilization: the design of the Roman alphabet and the ascendancy of books with separate leaves bound along a spine. The first was an outgrowth of the tools available to the Roman writer, though it’s hard to imagine how the results could have been improved with better or more modern equipment. The second was achieved by the identification of a bookform with the rise of Christianity.

     Since the Roman period there have been seven other major developments:  the combined usage of different letter forms to make meaningful and useful code with the distinctions between what we call, following the usage of relatively recent printers, “upper” and “lower case” letters; consistent separation of individual words by adding blank space, and further reading cues in the form of punctuation; the replacement of vellum and papyrus by rag paper and later by paper made from inexpensive wood pulp; the successful adaptation of printing from movable types; the development of photographic printing techniques; the interaction between written or printed language and computers; and the successive shifts away from reading aloud to silent reading and speedreading. None but the first of these could have happened without an alphabet like that of the Romans.

—Karl Young

52 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Richard Kahn is part philosopher, part social worker, part architect, part surgeon, and all poet. In taking apart the bird bones, dust and light of daily experience he’s learned to re-assemble the pieces into eggshells which we hold carefully for their apparent fragility but which we couldn’t crush with all our might if we tried. An excerpt:

Trust, Two

If we dare name it, we might call it
trust: When we deliver our child to the school bus
that whispers a hydraulic, “trust” as its yellow, bi
fold door shuts....
Or that we hand him over to the school at all
to be fed a lunch of boneless beast and the invisible
germ of a little knowledge. But there are laws
we do not follow, but which rather
push us from behind, that make the apples drop
on a teacher’s desk with a thump
and a bruise, yet we trust
that no wrong will befall him and the worst
that can happen, is a stronger immune system.

Or as I sit by your side while you drive,
we share black coffee in a styrofoam cup
and this trust that the road will not end
around the curve, though beyond
the headlights, black gauze stretched
across the abyss, the night still waits in his mask.

We lift our chins and are dazzled
by the sky or look down into this boy's bright eyes. I say,
“trust,” but my tone betrays a wheedling,
a pilgrim with a swagger acting as if
I could just as easily strut as ride
with a white cane instead of the headlights poking the dark.

Or, like a king’s dwarf, get fat tasting every bite
of the beast for poison, as if father is dwarf to the child.
Or that every morning at the bus stop, I truly see
God’s yellow mouth swallowing
my son and my silent acquiescence.

But knowing that ain’t the word.

Arms outstretched in the dark, you find trust
only if it follows a long
pause and, before that, doubt. I lay
my love at your feet:
I have paused, and I have doubted.
And you can do only one of two things: trample it
or remove your shearling boots so I can admire and desire
the arcs of your foot, your calf, your inner thigh

And you do the third thing:

You offer me your neck.
I kiss it. You raise your chin a little higher.

—Richard Kahn

56 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jennifer Diskin is as real as it gets, unrelenting and unapologetic. Her world is beautiful in all its ugliness and grace, its sinners and saints, its joy and its anguish. By the time you reach the end of this flawless collection you’ll have learned that grace can be ugly, ugly attain grace; that all saints are sinners and all sinners saints; and you will have experienced both the joy of anguish and the anguish of joy. An excerpt:

Flowers For Jennifer

My lymph nodes bloom
As plentiful as backyard peonies.
Each bulb bigger than the other.

Not Kennedy roses
In their quiet repose.
I let the medical doctor

Germinate me
In a greenhouse
Of biopsies and mourning light.

This planting season
Is very long.
Oh, lymphoma, you are perennial.

Three syllables beautiful
A white hybrid
All my own.

—Jennifer Diskin

56 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

John Martone feels the world around him intensely. Sometimes he uses words to share the intensity of that feeling. Sometimes he uses images. Sometimes he uses combinations of words and image and actual pieces of the world around him. With this collection you'll be able to feel the world around him as if it were the world around you. An excerpt:

—John Martone

24 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jessica Breheny turns the life of myth inside out by stepping inside and then stretching not just the mind’s eye, but the mind’s arms around what is found there—the myth of life. An excerpt, from WHAT IS WRONG:

The first doctor said it was a virus and the second said it was a parasite. The third said it was bacteria and the fourth said it was inflammatory. All agreed there was a secret hidden inside her body. The secret was so deep that even she didn't know it was there, and the doctors' hands could not press, prod, or palpate it. Only the MRI machine could catch just the greywhite mothwing shadow of it. There were treatments and surgeries the doctors could provide, pills made from the urine of horses, vitamins, tubes. The secret, the doctors said, might eventually have to come out.

—Jessica Breheny

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Steve Giasson delivers an amazing document comprising all of the comments to a YouTube posting of the classic shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho. At times hilarious and at times terrifying. Nothing short of a snapshot of everything wrong with the internet, and possibly humanity in general. An excerpt:

kthevsd Lame movies ? Kid I like all movies, old films, new films, etc. How is this classic lame ? Have you even ever watched it ? What would some 16 year old teenybopper know about cinema ? You probably have never even heard of Kurosawa and I bet you have never even seen a Daniel Day Lewis or Meryl Streep movie in your life. No wonder everyone laughs at your generations taste in films. 4 days ago markymark93 actually i have seen this movie, and i have seen movies with daniel day lewis AND meryl streep.....so i wouldnt be so quick to judge. how can you say you "like new films" if you've been bashing my generation's movies the whole time? 3 days ago kthevsd @markymark93 If you have seen it than how can you find it lame ? It's an iconic movie. A masterpiece. Everyone bashes the movies of today, some are good(Scorsese movies) but most are mindless(like transformers). If you understand cinema you have to admit the quality of films had drastically gone down. 3 days ago XxINCHAINSxX @markymark93 And whos obsessing over their opinion on youtube? Hmmm...

—Steve Giasson

44 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Carlos Colón breaks this New and Selected collection up into four parts: Haiku, Eyeku, Structured Poetry, and Free Verse Poetry, taking us on an extended inventory of the different kinds of arrows, darts, bolts, and flechettes that should be in every poet’s bandolier. An excerpt:

Where I Wake Up

A dark room
except for the white light
shining on me
on the operating table.

Across
the school yard,
over the fence,
through someone's house
and out the front door . . .
Whoever is chasing me
has lost the trail.

No shackles
on my ankles,
no more hound dogs
howling after me,
no memories
of prison-yard baseball
or selling secrets
for cigarettes.

The funny thing,
the funny thing
about it all
is the dream,
the dream
I never have,
the one where I wake up
from this nightmare.

—Carlos Colón

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Peter G Res writes right out on the edge of sense, where hanging on to a thought too too long might leave blisters, where it becomes more important to follow the glint and the glimmer of where the thought leads rather than force it into a predictable furrow. When poetry works, it makes sense in ways that logic will never follow. An excerpt:

So Meditate In Traffic

So I met the kid once
at a porch party

the day I decided to skip class
for coffee he stood
to offer me a free drink

hot black with soy
a small table
stained newspapers
cars and laptops crushed
into oblivion

I dance with my cell phone
call Alexis to break every promise

I won’t be coming back

—Peter G Res

20 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Felino A. Soriano does with words what Jazz does with music. Lines stray, explore, steer, turn, twist, and change but always, always, when you think the way has been lost, aha!, there’s the path we were on, right under our feet. An excerpt:

—after Sam Rivers’ Tranquility

Of inexistence.

Reflection rendered
down into evaporating
blossoms of musicless
aromas. Mostly
as dawn opens into
unwinding scarcity of
philosophic colors, movement
hides and denotes disability,
that of an otherness self-
defined by impressionistic
focus, splayed into directional
mourning, past, purity
absent most relevant now as
topical adulation.

—Felino A. Soriano

47 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jenny Hill builds a lattice-work from the status updates of her Facebook friends, and constructs a cycle of poems which respond to each as if it were a prompt. The dynamic that results creates a flux-field where the details of the everyday don’t merely gain significance, they earn it. An excerpt:

Ron: I delivered a fucking BABY tonight! Yep, a fucking BABY!!!!!!!!! what did u do today? Nursing school is AWESOME!!!!!!!

Someone asks if it was slimy, another wants
the placenta, most are stumped
at how to comment
on all your exclamation marks.

Your hands are a blueprint,
lines mark where life and love dwell
even though you have a habit
of laughing off the diagnostics
of your own pains and accomplishment.

This morning was a full round
of desertion in the hallways,
like an international festival
of mime and puppetry, white coats
coupled around you, disciplined
in their notes and nods.

Then, democrazy seized the moment,
and you were arrowed
into a deserted tunnel of duty:
Deliver a baby. Hold a child in your hands.
This is not childish, this is the hook,
the page in a book that will gauge
your honor, make you wiser.

—Jenny Hill

48 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Tantra Bensko produces texts which skim along the liminal, stitching together scrims of the thin business of the daily. This book is a blend of fiction, poetry, and photographs working together to contain both the reality of the surreal and the surreality of the real. This book was reviewed by Kyle Muntz at Calliope Nerve, by Lynn Alexander at Full of Crow, by Alex Thornber at The Short Review and by Bebe Barefoot at Alabama Writers’ Forum. An excerpt:

from The Terrace Steps

The rest of the story shall go unexplained, but the steps were the first token of my affection for the birds, and we shall end there. They became being. Nothing else really mattered at the time, and the steps were the most beautiful rocks I could find in the quarries of the imagination, the shapes being suggestive of alterations in the seamless. The rocks never spoke to me directly, but they called to me in another time, and often their names were apparent in a kind of transparent liquid sensation that would take me over each time I discovered a name I couldn't understand in words.

—Tantra Bensko

52 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Matthew Hinton takes us ten rounds with two titans who could have, possibly should have, but actually never did fight: Norman Mailer and Chet Baker. A play that is a must read for anyone who loves to imagine “What if?” An excerpt:

(Lights up on an intimate jazz scene: small table/bar near center. BARKEEP hands a seated NM a drink. A fight bell is struck twice, and BARKEEP, a well dressed referee, struts across stage with a card that reads "Round 1". Bell sounds once. A trumpet solo can be heard ending offstage, followed by applause. Enter CB with his horn. BARKEEP presents CB with a drink.)

                    NM

CB.

(CB doesn’t react.)

                    NM

I say, CB!

(CB remains silent.)

                    NM

Tough crowd tonight? Hey! It's me ... NM?

                    CB

Are you talking to me? That ain't my name.

                    NM

Yeah, I've been calling you. I've said "CB, CB!" at least two, maybe three times.

                    CB

That's not my name.

                    NM

Ten times, at least. Is my voice off tonight or something?

                    CB

But that ain't me, babe.

                    NM

(The word "babe" startles him - he eyes CB. Beat.)

Me neither.

                    CB

What about the crowd?

                    NM

Tough. A tough bunch of gangsters. Regular hoods.

                    CB

Oh, I didn't realize -

                    NM

Good company. Comrades. Familia Cosanostra. Fellow hoods.

                    CB

You're a hood?

                    NM

You'd better believe it, baby.

                    CB

Cute.

                    NM

The hell it is! This is serious! Here, CB ... imagine I'm a shylock and gaze upon my baubles, baby.

(NM produces several empty gun shells.)

                    CB

Where'd you get those, NM.

                    NM

Guess.

                    CB

Sounds like footsie with the devil.

(NM slugs CB. Teeth pour out of CB's mouth - landing in drink glasses, on both men, the floor, etc. Fight bell rings. CB exits as BARKEEP walks with sign that reads "ROUND 2". Bell. Same offstage trumpet, audience applause. Enter CB.)

—Matthew S. Hinton

24 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Martha Deed goes where no poet has gone before. Combining cut-up and court transcript, oscillating deftly back and forth between textual poetry and visual poetry, adopting voice after effective voice, she brings us a gut-punch orb of truth where only the names have been changed, though the innocent remain unprotected. A video trailer for the book is at her website. A text excerpt:

Poppycock

Leave your common sense
outside the door
do not speculate
what I say is not evidence
the judge will instruct you on the law
when I shout at the murder victim's mother
do not hold it against me
or take it out on my client sitting here
in prison pallor, gray suit and tie
so you will not know he is in custody
I am only doing my job
even a dead child’s mother can lie
wouldn't you agree and her lies
could put my client behind bars
his freedom is at stake his innocence
so important I will tell you what to think
which facts you should ignore
do not speculate I say
leave your common sense
outside the door

—Martha Deed

48 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Kristen McHenry brings us a collection of poems that open up like a velvet bag of marbles. Here is a steely, here a cat’s eye, here an aggie, here a clearie, here an alley, here a princess, here a galaxy. Anyone who thinks you can’t pack both breadth and depth into a chapbook will be disproven by this collection. An excerpt:

THE GOATFISH ALPHABET

For so long they’ve pitied
our sickly alphabet—
words thick as thugs
in our throats’ brown gloaming.

They’ve felt us dumbstruck
fighting loamy bloats of lung,
page-frightened, speakfevered.

So the goatfish have toiled
with rock-teeth and fins.
They’ve eaten
miracle characters
into coral and sea stone,
weed and drowned ship.

When we are slug-muffled
half-dead with unspoke,
they will lead us
to their cryptic kingdom
and unveil the Goatfish Alphabet:

A language for the redemption
of failsay and tongue-muzzle.
Every never-said will come.

Life will be so different then—
there will be words to drizzle like silver tea,
words to pluck like fruitbells.

All will be leapspeak,
sung.

—Kristen McHenry

36 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Wendel Scutti brings us a short story which begins with a positive pregnancy test and ends with, well, what sort of a teaser would this be if we told you where it ends? This is an exploration of the dichotomy of singularity and connection, and a story that worries out the complications of a single thread. An excerpt:

Now Nancy pauses, listens to the droning sound of passing cars and inhales the faint scent of exhaust fumes. There is an entire generation lost to this city, Nancy thinks: Aborted children of women like me. Former suburban girls who arrive by bus with a few hundred dollars and vague artistic aspirations. Twenty-somethings who find the only thing they can afford is a studio apartment in some marginal, really dangerous neighborhood. Childish women who just barely survive but who are too stubborn to give up and leave. Girls who feel lonely and drink too much and miss their periods then calculate days and dollars, knowing they will be unable to rely on the casual friend or boyfriend who is too focused on his own struggles to help in any real way.

—Wendel Scutti

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

endwar has put together a collection of ultra-minimalist poems that don’t just look at language, they catch language in the act of looking back at us. And then they wink. It is impossible to apply one single term to the range of work in this collection. It is at times concrete, at times typoem, at times visual poem, at times conceptual poem, at times typewriter poem, but at all times it is poetry at its finest. A review and an example:

(
my
hand
remembers
 
the shape
of your
hand
)

     —endwar

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Neil Ellman brings us a collection of Ekphrastic poems written in response to and in furtherance of the surreal in art. Titles refer interested readers to the works the poems responded to, but the poems stand firmly on their own and can be appreciated by all readers regardless of familiarity with the art invoked. An excerpt:

Love Parade
(Francis Picabia, oil on canvas, 1917)

When machines fall in love
There are few complaints
Only the wonder that their circuits spark.

There are no questions
Of polarity or cultural class
Mechanical differences so slight
That they cannot be engineered
Or how they would raise their young.

They take a vow
Like the rest of us-
I do take thee to be my mate
To have and to hold
In sickness and in health
Till death do us part
Knowing that death is rust
As it is with the rest of us.

They raise families, go to church
Where they worship an electrical god
Who gave them life
And the promise of not being
Stripped, disassembled and junked.

They work and seldom sleep
Devote their lives to the greater good
Face the usual dilemmas of their kind
And ours.

They grow old and their armatures creak
And then they die
Just like the rest of us.

—Neil Ellman

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Kellar Wilson doesn’t bend language, and he doesn’t break it. He refashions it, reforges it, reforms it, and in the process strengthens its ability to communicate. An excerpt:

In Sane Relations And Showers II

What an incredible advance it would be
                                 to be
                            able to
               at a glance tell
if the psychosis of [the thing]
was compatible with your own.
 
Attractions gaining momentum
in all their dynamic senses
the closer one gets
    /to a decision/.
 
Glossing over (in this rush) non-trivial details
and thus, upon entering (that first time)
[things] ripple cold
(with papers signed
                     /unclothed and revealed/
two seconds too late)
 
/just after
(that crucial) nick of time/

—Kellar Wilson

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Carol Clark Williams takes as her starting point the limberness of language and the obstacle course of the daily. By working, working, working at the knots, she is able to carefully unravel them without breaking the silver links. An excerpt:

Too Far Off to See the Wizard

A half life spent
hiding under windows
so no one can see
she holds long imaginary dialogues
with therapists her husband says
they can't afford to see
her skin draws thin over hollowing
wrist bone like the knob on the shift
in a Chevy where he ran his hands over
her shrinking body down below
the car windows she crouches
on the kitchen floor in the corner
so no one can see
she's home in the mean time
he puts his shoulder to the wheel
drives himself to work hands over
his paycheck accidentally
loses the mortgage payment
somewhere along the pavement
the key to owning their home
has tread marks on the envelope
the postage stamp in the corner
frays and flaps finally detaches
is whisked away in widening circles
on a listless wind as she is as he is
as time snaps like a high strung little dog
yapping at their run-down heels

—Carol Clark Williams

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Candace Kaucher takes the line, the thread of a thought, and teases out all individual microfibers that can come loose, dips each end in the stuff that turns metal rods into sparklers, then lights them all and writes down the song the sizzle makes. An excerpt:

Some days you are trapped.
Some days you are not.
All the days are the same.
So are you but you're too stupid
to know the difference.
Relativity equalizes grandiosity.
Anomalies are all local events,
All the songs on the radio
say the same thing:
whatever you are feeling.
Injustice started in grade school
when I crossed the street against the rules.
All hurt has been the same
ever since.

—Candace Kaucher

56 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jennifer Hill has performed a tour de force of incomparable compactness. 36 Holiday Fictions (one for each of the possible plots in all of literature) in 140 characters each, in which the letter L never appears. Twisted and wrong and completely delightful all rolled together in red velvet trimmed in white. The perfect book for anyone who loves or hates the holidays. An excerpt:

Sacrifice of Loved Ones

The daughter recovered from her Christmas fever. “Nutter has to go,” her mother said as she washed the barf from the stuffed chipmunk’s ear.

—Jennifer Hill

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Eileen R. Tabios brings us a numbered sequence of prosepoem Synopses that strike the mind’s eye like an oil-filled kaleidoscope. Patterns merge and emerge in shifting repetitions that succeed in what all poetry attempts: to cover more ground than they should have been able. An excerpt:

from Synopsis #7

It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

—Eileen R. Tabios

16 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Michael Aro’s poems speak with the voice of authority that is the natural by-product of a learning that runs both deep and wide. To read his writing is to understand that language is, indeed, the software which runs on the wetware of our brains. An excerpt:

5.

I shave him each day with shaving cream and a
Safety razor, cutting carefully around the
Surgical tape that holds the oxygen
Against his face. His face is fallen and his skin
Is wrinkled but very soft. I am careful not to cut him.
That is not to say I never cut him.
Love is not perfect.
I pull the skin tight under his neck and sometimes
Shave him twice, hoping it will help make him
Comfortable in his deep dream of life.
At other times I sit in the chair beside his bed
And read to him.
I have no mother, husband or children
To take away my time.
I have a job I need to keep.
It may only be for a few more days I am told
And then they will unplug him.
He will gather up his soul around him like a coat
And smiling to himself at his own simple humor
Leave without saying a single word,
As if that were the point of everything.

—Michael Aro

58 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.