Keith Waldrop's recent books of poetry include The Real Subject (Omnidawn), The House Seen from Nowhere (Litmus Press), Haunt (Instance Press), and the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of the Bridge (America Award, 1997) and Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec Books). He has translated the French poets Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Dominique Fourcade, Pascal Quignard, and Jean Grosjean. His translation of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil is just out from Wesleyan UP. He teaches at Brown University and is co-editor of Burning Deck Press.

A native of France where she was trained as a dancer, Brigitte Byrd is the author of Fence above the Sea (Ahsahta Press, 2005), her debut collection of prose poems.  Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Shade 2006 (Four Way Books), Like Thunder, and American Diaspora (both from U of Iowa Press), and in literary magazines including Mississippi Review, WSQ (Women Studies Quarterly), Bitter Oleander, Denver Quarterly, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Spoon River Poetry Review, Laurel Review, New Orleans Review, New American Writing, and Bayou, among others.  Brigitte received a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and currently teaches Creative Writing at Clayton State University.  She is also a board member editor for Circumference: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies.

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati and an echocardiographer. Her chapbook The Small Anything City recently won the Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Contest and will come out in 2007. Her work has or will appear in Prairie Schooner, No Tell Motel, Pilot Poetry, Hotel Amerika, and Court Green. She writes, "These poems are about impasses, tiring of emotions, and tiring of the neighbors' loud parties to the point of falling asleep."

Loretta Clodfelter is an Oakland-based writer and managing editor of There (http://www.therejournal.com). She was poetry editor of 580 Split Issue No. 8 and a founding editor of VEX. Clodfelter was a recipient of the Mary Merritt Henry Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Walrus, Pom 2, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Deep South, and Crux. Her project Valley/Ridge is online at http://www.valley-ridge.net.

Jennifer L. Knox was born and raised in Lancaster, California, where absolutely anything can be made into a bong. She is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry series, and her first book, A Gringo Like Me, is available from Softskull Press. About the poems, she writes, "The closer I get to my own voice, the more I have to screw with syntax. I'm shy."

Marie Buck is from South Carolina but now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.  You can find more of her work online at GlitterPony, Shampoo, How2, and forthcoming in Aught.  "Correspondances" and "Ses Purs Ongles" steal their forms from Mallarme and Baudelaire and their language from My Space.  

Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica and Alaskaphrenia, which recently won Small Press Traffic's Best Book of the Year Award. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University. She writes, "'Her Night Lamb' is an erasure of a chapbook essay on witches by Charles Lamb, and was 'composed' entirely during my daughter's naps last winter."

Laurie Soslow is a 1998 graduate of the Boston University Creative Writing Program. She has spent most of the last eight years providing IT and management consulting services to nonprofit organizations. Laurie’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Plainsongs, Mad Poets Review, Eclectica, Boxcar Poetry Review, and HiNgE. "Taught Not to Fly" doubles as a love letter to the defunct Oceanaire Motel in Ventnor, NJ. Laurie resides in Philadelphia with her husband and two cats.

Eva Jane Peck lives with her daughter in Brooklyn, NY. She works at the City & Country School in Greenwich Village, where Jackson Pollock was the janitor. Another published poem can be found in Fence Vol. 7, No. 2.

William Gallien lives in Portland, Oregon, where he monitors the burgeoning home organization industry. His work has recently appeared in Dusie, Pom 2, Snow Monkey, and Elimae. He writes, "'i thought i would sail around & see the watery part of the world' was written in airports and hotels while traveling on business. It owes a great debt to the poems/fictions of S. Burgess and Amber Nelson, and the following books: Moby Dick, Petroleum Hat, Shake, Doubled Flowering, Reader's Block, and the wholesale approach."

Brian Henry's work in this issue is from his next book, The Stripping Point, forthcoming from Counterpath Press in March 2007. "More Dangerous Than Dying" takes place at a paper mill in the 1990s.

Rodney Koeneke is the author of Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX Books, 2006), Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and an improbable monograph on I.A. Richards in China. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife, Lesley Poirier, and their young son Auden. About the poems: I wrote these poems as part of an effort to wean myself from Google as a compositional device. I can't remember exactly, but I don't think any of them use lines from search engine results—if they do it's not as many as their 'feel' might suggest. That's not especially relevant to their success or failure as poems but it seemed important to me at the time.

Laine Cathryn writes poems that journey across America as much as the American Heritage Dictionary.  These four poems take place between boldface guidewords paired at the top of pages in the dictionary, and are informed by the definition of "definition": to make clear and distinct, and the root of the word "barbarian": to babble. The poems hope to overflow boundaries of definition, to babble distinctly about self, sex, family, fluidity, control, confusion, knowledge, nothing, love, and lucidity.  Laine is from Maine.  Currently she is settled and unsettled in Oakland, California.

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Her first collection of poetry, Derivative of the Moving Image, is forthcoming in November 2007 from the University of New Mexico Press. She is the editor of Saint Elizabeth Street: A Journal for Poetry, and she maintains a blog at saintelizabethstreet.blogspot.com. "The Field Guide to Flying" is a selection from Bartlett's second manuscript, (a) lullaby without any music.

Thomas Fink is the author of four books of poetry, most recently No Appointment Necessary (Moria Poetry, 2006) and the e-chapbook, Staccato Landmark (Beard of Bees, 2006). He has also written two books of criticism, and he is the co-editor (with Joseph Lease) of a critical anthology on David Shapiro that will appear in Fall 2007 from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Fink's paintings hang in various collections. "Bad Blue" and "Folk Church Idol" are part of a series of poems that feature patterns of persistent alliteration and consonance. "Nonce Sonnet 2" is part of a series of poems that sprinkle the rhyme patterns of Petrarchan sonnets in odd places in a line.

Tao Lin is the author of a poetry collection, you are a little bit happier than i am (Action Books, 2006), a story collection, Bed (Melville House, 2007), and a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House, 2007). His blog is Reader of Depressing Books. His press with Ellen Kennedy is Ass Hi Books.

Lisa Jarnot is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003), and Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan is forthcoming from University of California Press and she recently completed a novel called Promise X.

Shane Allison is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, I Want to Fuck a Redneck being his most recent. He has had poems published in Mississippi Review, Spork, juked, Velvet Mafia, Suspect Thoughts, New Delta Review, and work forthcoming in New York Quarterly. He is the editor of Hot Cops: Gay Erotic Stories.

Chad Sweeney's fourth chapbook, A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer, is just out on Tarpaulin Sky Press.  He edits Parthenon West Review with David Holler, and teaches poetry workshops in the San Francisco WritersCorps.  Recent or forthcoming poems in Verse, Slope, New American Writing, Denver Qrtly, Forklift, 5FR, Black Warrior, Pool, The Tiny, Shampoo, e.ratio, bird dog, and elsewhere.  Chad lives in San Francisco with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney. About the poems, he writes, "I loosely call the style of these poems, 'lyric ventriloquism,' as each narrator's posture and circumstance are responsible for the poem's invention. I was getting bored with myself, so I started letting these characters write their own poems."

Del Ray Cross lives in San Francisco, edits SHAMPOO, and has a new book out by Pressed Wafer called Lub Luffly. More of these Anachronizms can be found at www.anachronizms.blogspot.com.

Anne Gorrick's work has appeared in: American Letters and Commentary, the Cortland Review, Dislocate, Fence, Gutcult, Hunger Magazine, MiPOesias, No Tell Motel, the Seneca Review, Sulfur and word for/word.  Collaborating with artist Cynthia Winika, she recently produced a limited edition artists’ book called “Swans, the ice,” she said through the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.  In addition to being a bookmaker, she also works in encaustic, printmaking and traditional Japanese papermaking.  She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, and curates the poetry series Cadmium Text.

Lauren Levin grew up in New Orleans and now lives in Oakland, CA. Her collaborative chapbook 'In Fortune' (dusi/e chaps), written with Jared Stanley and Catherine Theis, is part of the dusie kollektiv project. Her poems can or will be found in GutCult, Shampoo, Word/For Word, MiPOesias, Mrs. Maybe, and the tiny. About the poems, she writes, "I think a lot about structures and spaces that get filled in with texture—(texture aka ideas, events, moods about ideas and events). The concept of the future or past, and what a mind decides to put in it. 'Note' is something of an ornery, mixed feelings version. For 'the object present,' anyone born in New Orleans will probably eventually be someone who's seen lots of parades."

 

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