Contributors' Notes

Carrie Olivia Adams lives and works in Chicago, where she also serves as poetry editor for Black Ocean. Her poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as Backwards City Review, Cranky, DIAGRAM, Lilies and Cannonballs Review , and Verse . She is the author of the chapbook, “A Useless Window,” and her first full-length collection of poems, Intervening Absence is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press.

 

Kismet Al-Hussaini is pursuing an MFA at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing, DIAGRAM, Coconut, and in other journals. She also likes to play and teach violin.

 

Jim Andrews is a poet, programmer, and audio guy. He has written and published vispo.com since 1995.

 

Carlyle Baker

 

C. Mehrl Bennett has published her poetry through numerous presses, including Luna Bisonte Prods. Her photography books include Photos from the Junk Heap and Photos from the Rock Heap (with poems by John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich and Thomas L. Taylor). Her work has recently appeared in Otoliths, and was exhibited in the April, 2006 VISPO show in Cleveland, OH.

 

John M. Bennett has published over 200 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. Among the most recent are rOlling COMBers (Potes & Poets Press, 2001), MAILER LEAVES HAM (Pantograph Press, 1999), LOOSE WATCH (Invisible Press, 1999), CHAC PROSTIBULARIO (with Ivan Arguelles; Pavement Saw Press, 2001), HISTORIETAS ALFABETICAS (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2003), PUBLIC CUBE (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2003), THE PEEL (Anabasis Press, 2004), GLUE (xPress(ed), 2004), LAP GUN CUT (with F. A. Nettelbeck; Luna Bisonte Prods, 2006), INSTRUCTION BOOK (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2006), la M al (Blue Lion Books, 2006), CANTAR DEL HUFF (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2006), SOUND DIRT (with Jim Leftwich; Luna Bisonte Prods, 2006), and BACKWORDS (Blue Lion Books, 2007). He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of Lost and Found Times (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. More information, and an archive of his work, is available at www.johnmbennett.net.

 

Thierry Brunet lives in Antibes, on the French Riviera. He began writing short-films while working as an assistant director in Paris. His interviews with writers and musicians, and music reviews have published in Spike and Chronic'art. His poems and illustrated texts have appeared or are forthcoming in Mathematical Poetry, Cricket Online Review, La page blanche, La revue x, T.A.P.I.N. He also created Nova Cookie and Frozen Hell, an experimental journal publishing only very short stories in six words, in any language. His chapbook, Codex Beauty, is available from BlazeVOX.

 

David-Baptiste Chirot was born Lafayette, Indiana, grew up in Vermont, and has lived in Gottingen, Germany, Arles and Paris, France, Hastveda, Sweden, Wroclaw, Poland, Boston and currently Milwaukee. His books include Anarkeyology (Runaway Spoon), Offender Handbook and Zada (Reflections, Chicago/Kiev), HUNG ER (Neotrope), found rubBEings (Xerolage 32), and Zero Poem (Traverse). His work has appeared in the anthologies Word Score Utterance Choreography (ed. Bob Cobbing, London) and Loose Watch (ed. John M. Bennett, London). His work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Crayon , Score, O!!zone, Nedge, Mass Ave, Otoliths, Kairan, Vortex, Pintado El Verde, Radikales Libros, Lost and Found Times, Pavement Saw, Big Bridge, Traverse, and Unarmed Journa . More of his own work, plus an ongoing assembly of new visual poetry by other artists, can be found at davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com.

 

David Doran is an MFA student at Colorado State University.

 

Tim Earley is the author of Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005). He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he serves as the away game mascot for the Lucifer Poetics Group and coordinates the Trobar Ric Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Colorado Review, jubilat, Fascicle, apocryphaltext, Typo, and Chicago Review.

 

Christopher Eaton is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has an M.A. from the University of Buffalo's Poetics Program. His work has been published in Cannibal, 5_Trope, Cricket Online Review, Moria, and 'can we have our ball back?' His poem “In causis sortilegiarum” is from the manuscript Micologie: or, Thee lachrymose habits align so.

 

Jill Alexander Essbaum's work has recently appeared in Coconut, No Tell Motel, Image, and The National Poetry Review.  Her book Harlot was published by No Tell Books in 2007. Her new book, Necropolis, is forthcoming from neoNuma Arts.

 

Kurt Folch was born in Valparaíso in 1970. He has his degree in English Literature from the Universidad de Chile. His books include Viaje Nocturno (Stratis, Santiago, 1996) and Thera (Calabaza del Diablo, Santiago, 2002), which won the Premio Municipal de Poesía 2003. Has participated in the FDE since 2004 and appears in several anthologies of contemporary Chilean poetry. He has translated David Bromige, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker and Tom Raworth.

 

Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon.  Recent work is forthcoming from New York Quarterly, Spinning Jenny and Knock.  Collaborative work with Sarah Bartlett will appear in Portland Review , Bat City Review and the horse less press anthology.  Poems from Something Should Happen at Night Outside, a collaboration with Zachary Schomburg, will appear in Pilot and Diode .

 

Richard Froude was born in London and raised in the Westcountry. He has lived in the US since 2002 and is the author of Tarnished Mirrors: Translations of Charles Baudelaire (Muffled Cry, 2004) and The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy (Catfish, 2007). Forthcoming publications include What Are Windows? (from Minus House Press) and a limited artist's edition of The History of Zero (from Candle Aria Press). Find more recent work online at Diagram, Parcel, No Tell Motel and 42opus. He lives in Denver.

 

Alan Halsey's 'inverse unverses' are radical reworkings of pieces made (but often unfinished) in the 1990s. Halsey's books include Marginalien , a collection of poems, prose works & graphics 1988-2004 (Five Seasons, 2005), and a selected poems, Not Everything Remotely (Salt, 2006).

 

Tom Hibbard reviews have appeared in numberous journals, including Big Bridge, Sidereality, Poetic Inhalation, Milk, Jacket, and elsewhere. His poetry collections include Nonexistence, Gessom, Delancey Street, Human Powers, Nocturnes, Songs of Divine Love, Enchanted Streets, and Assembly.

 

George Kalamaras is a Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. His books of poetry include Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997 , American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Hambone, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, and other periodicals. He is also the author of Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence, a scholarly work on Hindu mysticism and Western rhetoric (State University of New York Press, 1994).

 

A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he is an MFA student in Media Arts Production at the University at Buffalo. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Cranky, The Eleventh Muse, and The New Hampshire Review, as well as in the Zaoem Festival of Contemporary Poetry in Ghent, Belgium. He is the Assistant Editor of Digital, Visual, & Sound Poetry for the journal Anti-.

 

Adrian Lurssen is originally from South Africa. His work appearing in this issue uses the Oulipo recipe of analytic definitions to write about his childhood in the 1970s when, among other things, South Africa was involved in a fairly unknown but long bush war in Angola. His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Five Fingers Review, 580 Split, and elsewhere. He edits PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART.

 

Kaz Maslanka is an artist and engineer. He has been creating polyaesthetic and visual work since the early 1970s. More of his work can be found at his websites: Mathematical Poetry and The Art of Kaz Maslanka.

 

Bjørn Magnhildøen has been creating analog and digital net media for the past twenty-five years. He has worked as a systems developer and freelance programmer. More information about his work can be found at noemata.net.

 

Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze) has been a key practitioner in networked and digital writing since the early 1990s. She is the inventor of mezangelle, a hybrid language that combines diverse elements of technical code and everyday speech. Examples of her work can be found at her website.

 

Catherine Moore is originally from West Virginia. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana, where she is working on her M.F.A. She co-edits poetry for Cutbank literary magazine.

 

Gustave Morin's books include Rusted Childhood Memoirs (Runaway Spoon, 1994) Sun Kissed Oranges (with Sergio Forest, Scratch n' Sniff Ink, 1995), A Penny Dreadful (Common Ground Editions/Insomniac Press, 2003), American Psycho (with Stephen Cain, Stained Paper Archive, 2005), and The Etcetera Barbecue (Bookthug, 2006).

 

Sheila E. Murphy is the author of numerous books, including Continuations (with Douglas Barbour, The University of Alberta Press, 2006), Incessant Seeds (Pavement Saw Press, 2005), Concentricity (Pleasure Boat Studio, a Literary Press, 2004), Proof of Silhouettes (Stride Press, UK, 2004), and Letters to Unfinished J (Green Integer, 2003, winner of the 2001 Gertrude Stein Award).

 

Cami Nelson is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Utah. She spent the last few years as a freelance photographer and writer and is now happy to have time to explore the bubbling undercurrents of, god forbid, her own ideas.  Her publication history includes a documentary on wild horses, a ghostwritten book on yoga, a forthcoming piece in Leonardo on VR artists Marcos Novak and Char Davies and several other no less disjunctive entries.

 

Amber Nelson is the poetry editor of alice blue. Her work has appeared in dusie, juked, order + decorum, h_ngm_n, cab/net, and elsewehre. She currently live and work in Seattle but will be heading to Boise to get her MFA. She likes blackberries.

 

Marko Niemi is a digital poet, translator, and editor of Nokturno, a Scandinavian website for digital and other experimental poetry. His work, both solo and collaborative, has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Otoliths, Logolalia.com, UnlikelyStories.org, Nypoesi.net, and The Continental Review. He lives in Espoo, Finland.

 

Michael Peters poetry, fiction, and critical writing have appeared in Spinning Jenny, Rhino, Lungful , Lost and Found Times, North of South, Sweet Portable You, World Letter, Badaboom Gramophone, Posted, Castagraf, 5'9” Assembling, Davinio Art Electronics, Generator Press, American Weddings, SleepingFish, and Xtant, among other journals. His visual poetry has appeared in numerous gallery exhibits including: The Art Academy of Cincinnati's “02txt” exhibit (2002); the OSEAO gallery in Seattle (2002); The Ohio State University's “American Avant-Garde, Second Wave” Exhibit (2002); “Wordseen” at the Diana Lowenstein gallery in Miami (2003); “Errata and Contradiction” and “Infinity” at Harvard (2004, 2005); the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (2004); the Durban-Segnini Gallery in Miami (2005); and the 308 Gallery in Minneapolis (2005), among others. Visual works and limited edition books can be found in The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Rulon-Miller Books in Minneapolis, Printed Matter in New York City, and both Avant-Garde/Special Collections Libraries at The Ohio State University and the University at Buffalo. Also a musician, most notably in Poem Rocket, Peters has released recordings on numerous independent labels, such as Atavistic—-the experimental, Chicago-based avant-jazz & rock label. Peters is also a member of the Be Blank Consort—with a CD available through Luna Bisonte Prods. He is the editor of The Little Magazine.

 

Stephen Ratcliffe's books include REAL (Avenue B, 2007), Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002), SOUND/ (system) (Green Integer, 2002). He published Listening to Reading, a book of essays on contemporary experimental poetry, wtih SUNY Press in 2000.  He lives in Bolinas with his wife and two and a half year old son and teaches at Mills College in Oakland.

"All 1000 pages of it [HUMAN / NATURE], written in 1000 consecutive days between 10.19.02 -7.14.05, works as a kind of 'essay' on the relation between things seen/observed in the world and how such things might be made ('transcribed'/'transformed') as works of written (or visual) art -- the paintings Kandinsky takes up in Concerning the Spiritual in Art for example. Every poem has ten lines in four stanzas, with the outer two stanzas recording things seen and/or heard in the world of 'nature' (the first stanza on each page 'looking' at things out the window here in Bolinas, the last stanza at things which I've seen out in the water when I go surfing), the two middle stanzas noting things seen or read/ heard about in the human world (that is, things made out of language). Thus on every page, perceptions of actual 'real' things in the natural world 'frame' what might be thought or said or written or in fact made of things in that world -- e.g., as 'works of art' or 'transcriptions' of actual, 'real' things/events/actions in the world, which I've noted and 'written down' in exactly such shapes on the page; likewise in any series of pages, the two middle stanzas on any given page, which write down or 'transcribe' facts of activity in the human world, 'frame' the perception of actual 'real' things/actions/events in the natural world."

 

e k rzepka is a scientiste-philosophe dedicated to aromatic poetics and anti-pestilental gnatwyrcing. through the archaic, spectroscopic, the new media obsolete and its embedded extensions, aki (a subsidiary of x-o-x-o-x.com) renegates the old. in addition to laboratory work, he engages in studies, plight and multimedial publishing.

 

Greogry Vincent St. Thomasino is a poet, theorist, and editor of the online literary journal Eratio.

 

James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group. The APG blog is located at www.atlantapoetsgroup.blogspot.com. The group is also launching a Web-based sound poetry magazine at www.aslongasittakes.org.

 

Kate Schapira lives in Providence, where she organizes the Publicly Complex reading series. She's the author of two chapbooks, Phoenix Memory (horse less press, 2007) and The Saint's Notebook (forthcoming 2008 from the CAB/NET Chapbook Series).  Her work has recently appeared in Aufgabe, Denver Quarterly, BlazeVOX and Cultural Society.

"I took the manuscript title [of Sixty Saints for Boys] and the italicized lines in each poem from a 1947 hagiography that I found in my grandma-in-law's house in Chicago; the book's tales of martyrdom and masochism in the name of Christ and manliness, presented in a Winnie-the-Pooh tone for post-war Anglican boys, got me thinking about gender--particularly masculinity--in my husband's large, working-class, Irish Catholic extended family.  What had the men in the family been taught about how to be men?  What were they teaching their sons? What were the real stars they were living under; the damages, acts, martyrdoms, on which they were modeling their lives?  As I observed and wrote, veins of tenderness and machismo, stoicism and expectation, responsibility and sacrifice, both confirmed and startled my expectations. The poems became not just a critique of existing patterns, but a call for honesty, the acknowledgment of intentions, shortfalls and compassion in the men America is making now and the saints that some of them are trying to be."

 

Peter Schwartz is the editor of 'eye' and the associate art editor of Mad Hatters' Review. His artwork can be seen all over the Internet but specifically at: www.sitrahahra.com . His paintings have been published on such sites as HiNgE, Subtle Tea, and Mastodon Dentist. His paintings are in such journals as Orange Coast Review, Whiskey Island, and the Louisiana Review. His poery and fiction have appeared in such journals as Porcupine, Vox, and Sein und Werden, Pindeldyboz and Dogmatika. His last exhibition was through Aesthetica Magazine and featured a projection of one of his digital paintings on a busy street in York, UK. Currently he is working on paintings for an exhibit at the Amsterdam Whitney Gallery in Chelsea NYC.

 

Michael Sikkema has published poems in The Tiny, Bombay Gin, Fourteen Hills, Parthenon West Review, Shampoo, mirage #4 Period(ical), Zafusy , Temenos, Blazevox, and Xantippe. His chapbook COde Over Code was published by Lame HOuse PRess.

 

Adam Strauss lives in Vegas, a place he likes living, but wouldn't want to visit. His work has appeared in Shampoo, Kulture Vulture, the Colorado Review, and elsehwere.

 

Joshua A. Ware lives in Lincoln, NE where he teaches writing & is pursuing his PhD.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, most recently in 580 Split, Bat City Review, Front Porch, New Orleans Review, New American Writing, & Sonora Review.

 

Ted Warnell lives and works in Canada. His work is represented in publications and exhibitions including Alt-X, Electronic Literature Organization, FILE, Iowa Review Web, Nurotus, Rhizome Artbase, SUNY Electronic Poetry Center, trAce, ubuweb, and Venereal Kittens. You can learn more about Ted Warnell at his website: warnell.com, and blogs: codepo()  and mo'po.

 

Kerri Webster is the author of We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (University of Georgia Press, 2005) and the Writer in Residence at Washington University in Saint Louis. Her poems have appeared in VOLT, the Antioch Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.

 

Jared White's poems have appeared in journals such as  Barrow Street, Cannibal, Fugue, Harp and Altar, MiPOesias, Verse, and in Meridian  as runner-up for the 2007 Editor's Prize. Other work is forthcoming at Another Chicago Magazine, LVNG , and Fulcrum. His MFA is from Columbia University and he lives in Brooklyn. More writing can be found online at jaredswhite.blogspot.com.

 

Arianne Zwartjes received her MFA from the University of Arizona, and currently works as an educator for NOLS.  Her work has been published in Front Porch, Blue Fifth Review, Fireweed, Cue Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere.  Her poetry has also won the Margaret SterlingMemorial Award, judged by Claudia Rankine, and the UA Poetry CenterAward, judged by Srikanth Reddy.