nowrite.doc

by John Pass

at a push
writing-against-not-writing
entries, entrances at domesticity’s margins—
garden edge, lake edge, kitchen counter, rooftop—

famine

by john sweet

and i consider myself
a lucky man as i drive west
into the bluegreen twilight sky
i consider the need
for faith by any name
wife/child/beauty/oxygen
and the list continues to unroll

Masks

a selection edited by Patrick Lane

"The poems in this small book are masks. A poem can say, 'I started writing at breakfast, eggs, sunny-side up,' and go to a place where other words have lives, ones like, 'you are trying to write a poem while imagination / opens itself like legs and you no longer care.'”

Briefly Perfect

a selection edited by Patrick Lane.

"The poem of today is not the poem of yesterday or tomorrow and our parents, that mother and father who lay down in the sweet grass and coupled, made another out of their desire. This is the strange fiction where we find we love after all."

Letters We Never Sent

a selection edited by Patrick Lane

"The poems here are epistles, not letters ... They say there is something sacred here. “Please wash / your sister’s blood and return it to her.” Lines like that hurt me. So do the lines, “I’d been fooled by fireworks as a boy, / staked between bonfire and effigy.” ... Make no mistake, poets write because they have to. Sometimes it takes years."

Thirty-Three Thousand Shades of Green

by John B. Lee

"... the people of the city suffered both the conflagration and the lie. Children were dying while we made popcorn and listened to the shake-and-bake pundits blather on and on
as if there were something glorious and heroic, rather than something sordid and tragic and oleaginous and
truly CRUDE."

Coming Home (An Old Love Story)

by Susan Ioannou

Could she forget that precipice
—his voice—and how he broke inside her ear,
drew her breathless down the darkened slope,
rolled her open in the moon’s full light?