Catherine Wagner. Hotel Faust. West House Books & Gratton Street Irregulars. 2001.

This is one of the best collections of Catherine’s work I’ve encountered. I especially like her “white man” poems:

You have to feel sorry for them
You have to feel sorry for them

But I am, I am one.
They don’t know that.
They let me drive their car.
If I was President,
NONSTOP LICKY
I’m afraid I can’t think without licky
White man wrote almost every book in that shelf
Sone nice guys
I sit with them, make healthy sonnet-juice
What are Jews are they all the way white?
The Jews spring to mind

David Rees. The London. West House books & Gratton Street Irregulars. 1997.

A poetic whirl around London with a great blurb by Roy Fisher on the back, and a signed copy too!

Here’s Grub Street:

A themed ride to make each joint leak pale
and bloodless, up the roller-ramp by sky
and cut-and-cover and full 200 to clinch the sale
of the business of the semi-permanent lie.

Philip Davenport. About Everything. Manchester: Apple Pie Editions, 2009. For more information contact philipjohndavenport[at]hotmail.com.

A beautifully produced hard-bound book of found and treated texts from the local newspapers. Each poem features a chasm in the text spanned by an increasing number of noughts. On facing pages color snapshots are montaged to create a similar feeling of disjunction. A stunning book.

Tony Trehy. Untitled, but the cover sports a circle. Hard-bound and printed in a limited edition printed for Safin, Langavegi 37, 101 Rykavik, Iceland, in 2007.

Beautifully designed. Three lines of text printed on a series of fold-out pages so that each line can be read continuously or as one of four lines framed on the page. Contiguity or linearity, take your pick, but it makes for a fascinating, recombinative read.

The latest issue of the on-line literary magazine The Pedestal Magazine features fine reviews of Age of the Demon Tools by Mark Spitzer and Eye-sensing by David Jaffen. Check the magazine and the reviews out at www.thepedestalmagazine.com. Tom Bradley’s Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me will be reviewed in the next issue.

Poetrywivenhoe. Wivenbooks, 2008. An anthology of poems from the Wivenhoe Poetry Competition selected by Joan Taylor, Pam Job, Peter Kennedy and Mike Harwood. 6 pounds. For more information contact Mike Harwood at mike.j.harwood[at]btinet.com.

My family and I spent a wonderful two days at Wivenhoe, near Colchester, as guests of the Creative Writing Department, the University of Essex. Wivenhoe is a beautiful little town situated on a river in Boudicca country.

Words Count. Mike Harwood. A collection of poems by the poet laureate of the Black Buoy Inn, Wivvenhoe. For more information contact Mike at the above e-address. Jesse

We’re still waiting for photographs of the reading on the 13th. Hope there were some taken. Thanks to Mike Heller, Don Wellman, and Amy King, too, as well as the Straddler gang. Robert Thompson set the double-hitter up for us at the Zinc Bar and moderated.

Still catching up on work here and suffering from jet lag. More soon, Jess.

Ahadada books introduced the editors of The Straddler Magazine to NYC. The reading attracted an audience of 25 people and the poets who read.

The Co-inspirator images are of Douglas Rothchild, the Zinc Bar venue director; Robert Thompson, Ahadada Books NYC reading coordinator and MC (who also read one of his poems). Readers (in order of reading) included Dan Monaco, The Straddler co-editor and fiction writer; Elizabeth Murphy, poet and co-editor at The Straddler; Greg Bennetts, fiction writer and The Stradder writer; and Rich Murphy, Ahadada Books poet.

It being a Saturday night the readers and the audience conspired well into the night and into other venues and bars. Books were sold, and a great time was by all.

Douglas Rothchild

Robert Thompson

Dan Monaco

Elizabeth Murphy

Greg Bennetts

Richard Murphy

I just returned to Japan from a week-long reading tour in the U.k. and in Prague. Shook a lot of hands and met lots of fine writers. When I came back yesterday I was surprised and saddened to see that our second Ahadada Event at the Zinc Bar, hosted by Robert Thompson and featuring Ahadada author Rich Murphy and his daughter Liz Murphy and the great on-line magazine the Straddler failed to show up on this website and was completely passed over as far as publicity on the Buf. List and other venues. This kind of neglect was not supposed to happen and it will not happen again. Fortunately, some people did show up at the Ahadada/ Straddler event and many thanks to them. The long-promised second issue of Ekleksographia is in the works and hopefully it will transform into a quarterly. We have curatorships from Vivian Shipley, Skip Fox, a special all-Prague issue in the works, and a promise of an all-Brit issue from Alan Halsey. A new addition to our team, Jonathan Penton, has the energy, enthusiasm, and the web skills that we sorely need to off-set Dan Sendecki’s increasingly busy schedule. We’re working the glitches out here, so please stand-by. Many new books and projects in the works. Jesse

Just returned to our Manchester hotel to report that the Bury text festival event was a success. Happy doesn’t quite convey the feeling. Jess