Daniela Olszewska held residency last week at No Tell Motel, and I forgot to mention it. Damn. Go backwards in time to check out her new work, which is stunning. Start here, I guess.

Here are whole collections of poems by Frank Stanford that are available online.

This story by René Georg Vasicek up at Wigleaf is brilliant.

SIR! is solidified at Duotrope which means it is now a real venture.

Contributors currently include Blake Butler, Brandon Hobson, Nicolle Elizabeth, Mike Young, Juliet Cook, Spencer Troxell, William Walsh, Chad Reynolds, Peter Berhoef, The Pines, Shane Jones, Sean Kilpatrick, Charles Lennox, Ryan Walsh, Logan Ryan Smith, and collaborations between Zach Schomburg & Emily Kendall Frey. I may have forgotten somebody. A bunch more are on the way as well. It's kind of a sausage party at the moment, so women, please send your poems!

I received my "Bush Buys You Out in 2008" cheque the other day. I have paid $300 in credit card bills. What shall I spend the other 300 on? Please list suggestions.



It is time to talk about Joshua Beckman. A few weeks ago Emily went to New York and brought me back this book. Emily has been influential in giving me books that matter. She was the first person to turn me onto Russell Edson. Now she has give me Beckman.
Your Time Has Come was put out by WAVE books ins 2004. There is more than 150 short, haiku like lyric poems about summertime city living. They can be crushing, funny, diffident - all completely affecting, even when mundane.

For it's efforts and objective, this book is perfect. It words feel like thumb prints. When reading YTHC, anxieties disappears. The lyricism is colloquial, the situations familiar (particularly to a writer) but the work belongs to Beckman. Its accessibility, its rhetoric and candor will call forth constant visits. The packaging is also of note, a small six inch long book shaped to fit into your pocket. Classic.

Beckman has a collaboration with Mathew Rohrer, Nice Hat. Thanks, whose writing is very similar. I have been reading a lot of Mathew Rohrer lately. As a writer, I don't have much success with the "I". Creating situations comes more naturally. But Beckman and Rohrer leave a blueprint for what I think is a successful attempt at self reference. Today I am glad they exist.

Today I am glad I exist.

I am going to New Hampshire tomorrow night. I am going hiking because gas is expensive.