Untitled Document

Leslie Scalapino's "Avril" is a section of poems from a longer work titled The Forest is in the Euphrates River.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of Unnecessary Roughness (xPressed, 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda Press, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). She has exhibited her work at the MAC, The University of Texas at Dallas, and The Three Arts Club of Chicago. "William Hung Forever!" and "hals und beinbruch" are from a series in progress called "she was a wonton slut." "Emergency Poem" is a reflection on her former days working in healthcare administration. "Hozho" was inspired by the work of 2 abstract painters—JB Bryan and New Zealander Peter Adsett.

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse Press, 2002). Her work is included in the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry. She teaches in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago. About the poems, she says, "These poems were all written while I was pregnant with my first child, and contemplating what it means to be grown-up and also what it means to be grateful, the quality I most associate with being a successful grown-up."

Jenna Cardinale’s poems appear in recent or forthcoming issues of Court Green, Parakeet, RHINO, Typo, Dusie and MiPo, among others. This year she was awarded a BRIO grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts, which she promptly used to finance a move to Manhattan. About the work in Coconut (as well as most everything) she writes, “Here is an assembly of diverse fragments.”

Reb Livingston is the poetry editor of No Tell Motel (www.notellmotel.org). She's co-editing with Molly Arden an anthology titled The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, scheduled to be published in Fall 2005. Reb's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in MiPOesias, SOFTBLOW, Unpleasant Event Schedule, 42Opus, Kulture Vulture and The Carolina Quarterly. These poems are about disconnects, unrealistic expectations, inappropriate feelings and the unintended benefits of such sublime wreckage.

Elaine Equi is the author of many books, including Voice-Over & The Cloud of Knowable Things from Coffee House Press. Ripple Effect: New & Selcted Poems is forthcoming in 2007. About these poems: "All are part of an ongoing project of trying to do more with less. I don't always write in short, minimal forms, but I often return to this mode in order to refine my interest in clarity, precision, and humor."

Edmund Berrigan is the author of Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and most recently Your Cheatin' Heart (Furniture Press, 2004). A CD of his music is forthcoming this fall from Goodbye Better Records under the name I Feel Tractor. These poems were either written while waiting for someone at a bar or while riding the subway home after recording music.

Nate Pritts' new work can be/will be seen in print from The Southern Review, POOL, Pacific Review, Cimarron Review, & Forklift, Ohio & online at DIAGRAM, TYPO, storySouth, Unpleasant Event Schedule & horse less review. His chapbook, The Happy Seasons, is online from Swannigan & Wright. The editor & sole shareholder of H_NGM_N, an online journal of poetry, poetics, &c., Nate lives in Natchitoches, LA, where he is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. Just Us Friends is an accumulative-narrative serial-poem built around the adventures of a group of friends in a zany world. In most of the important ways, these are like any friends that any of us might have. Though some poems are more reliant on the cumulative effect of the series than others, they are all meant to stand alone -- but, as with a sitcom or comic book, the appreication you have for these characters and situations grows through exposure. Other poems from this series can be seen at storysouth & 42opus.

Laura Carter lives in Atlanta, Georgia. This poem was initiated as a shout-out of sorts, to Ambrose Bierce, a potential chronicle of thoughts. I think now, though, that the best reading of it confronts Hegel, the churning dialectic that ultimately wears one out. Listen here: http://spaceshiptumblers.blogspot.com/2004/12/laura-carter-reading-force.html.

Anselm Berrigan is author of three books of poems, most recently Some Notes On My Programming, due soon from Edge Books. Last book was Zero Star Hotel, which was recently mispronounced in public as Zero Straw Hotel. He is looking for a means of separation from administration, but probably has to gut out a couple more years. About the poems, he writes, "The first three poems are prosier in tone than usual for me. 'To K' was actually written five years ago, while 'For Lorenzo and my father' was written on July 4th this year while taking a train out of New York City just as the fireworks were starting and 'Jim Brodey' was written quite recently in a kind of homage to his Panda Heart series of poems which use names as titles. I think the last poem has something to do with being in the country and surrounded by bugs, dammit. I get guilty killing bugs, though I do it. I'd be a bad Jain."

Jessy Randall (jessyrandall@yahoo.com) is Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College. Her poems have appeared in Explosive Magazine, The Hat, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her online chapbook, Dorothy Surrenders, is at 2river.org; a paper chapbook, Slumber Party at the Aquarium, is available from Unicorn Press. Her website is personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall. About the poems, she writes: "'Don't Be Mad' and 'Forgetting Simon Perchik' came out of a conversation I had with my friend Dan Shapiro, also a poet. He suggested the title for 'Don't Be Mad' before the poem was even written."

Jenny Boully's The Body was published in 2002 by Slope Editions. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2002, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and The Next American Essay. She has recently completed her new manuscript, The Book of Beginnings and Endings. Excerpts have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, Boston Review, Web Conjunctions, Notre Dame Review, and MiPoesias. She is currently a Ph.D. student in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. About "[one love affair]": "I have always been interested in intertextuality, how whatever it is that we are reading suggests another narrative that, because we are who we are, imprints itself on the text. The book or poem or story then becomes two--the one we read and the one that suggests itself to us. '[one love affair]' grew out of my desire to write down the other text that suggested itself when reading various books and is one of series of such dialogues that I have been working on."

Shane Allison is the mad scientist of four books of poetry: Ceiling of Mirrors (Cynic Press), Cock and Balls (Feel Free Press), Black Vaseline (Blaze Vox Books), and Black Fag (Future Tense Books.) His fifth creation, I Want to Fuck a Redneck, is forthcoming from Scintillating Publications. He has published poems and stories in Velvet Mafia, Suspect Thoughts, Blue Food, Out of Order, juked, Mipo, Coal City Review, Best Black Gay Erotica, Mississippi Review, and Chiron Review. He has work forthcoming in Ultimate Gay Erotica 2006 and Boy Sex. He is friends with poet Jarret Keene. He says, "Lately, I haven't so much been pulling ideas for poems out of my brain, but finding inspiration for them in restaurant menus, road signs, truck stops, phone books, public restrooms, billboards etc... cuz I believe there are thousands of unwritten poems that exist in places as simple as a grocery store list. I guess you can say I'm a scavenger picking through the shit of the world looking for these very things."

Laura Solomon is the author of Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002) and a new chapbook, Letters by Which Sisters Will Know Brothers (Katalanche Press). Currently she lives in Paris. You can listen to an audio file of "Poem in the First Person" at www.weirddeer.blogspot.com.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee is currently studying Poetry and Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has most recently appeared in Skein, 580 Split, and 26. Other work is forthcoming in Chain and Xconnect. She will be teaching a course on Asian American Women this fall and is launching a chapbook series, Corollary, in September.

Tony Tost is the author of Invisible Bride (LSU 2004), as well as two forthcoming chapbooks, World Jelly (Effing Press) and "Complex Sleep" (Desert City Press). Poems from his current manuscript, rrayed, can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Hambone, Talisman, The Hat, Milk, Verse, and Damn the Caesars, among other journals. Tost lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife Leigh; he is a Ph.D. student at Duke University and a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. He edits the online journal Fascicle (http://www.fascicle.com). About the poems, he writes, "'1001 Sentences' is an in-progress project where my main goal is simply to justify the title by writing 1001 sentences. This is kind of a companion project to my other projects, just pretty much forcing myself to expose my aesthetics to myself and others, and to trouble/clarify the spaces in which I assume I compose. But hopefully less boring than that; it gets dramatic at times, with sex, violence and Roland Barthes taking turns in the spotlight, then giving way to self-righteousness, mystical speculation and the Beatles. Maybe one of the sentences says it more clearly: 'this may be a means of taking myself by the throat.'"

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves’ Latin (UIowa Press). He has new work appearing in The American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Jacket. He teaches at Emerson College. About the poems he says: "Like most of my work, each began with the title. I let the long title guide me, I let the pun in through the back door, and 'The Coast of Kansas' felt tragic, so I wrote a Shippy-size drama replete with Greeks."

Christine Scanlon was awarded the Barrow Street First Book Contest for her poetry collection A Hat on the Bed, published in 2005. She will have a poem appear in Best American Poetry 2005 and has had work published in such journals as Goodfoot, Barrow Street, and Comstock Review. In 2003 she received her MFA from the New School University and is currently pursuing further graduate studies at the City University of New York. About the poems, she writes: Both of these poems show my interest in setting up rules for myself that I end up discarding as soon as I start editing. "Witness the Taste for Verbal Continuity" was originally a completed sestina, the 6 end words (the 6 words of the title) were taken from a quote (I forgot where), but then taken apart and redone as a prose poem. "In Reasons Ear They All Rejoice" is a cento with lines taken alternately from various Surrealist and 18th century poets. The lines were only slightly edited but it is interesting that it is hard to tell which line came from which group of poets.