Chris Tonelli's The So & So Series ended its run in Boston with a bang - Dorthea Lasky, Dara Weir, and James Tate. While there, a friend gave me a picture he'd found in his private stash (Not gonna post it). It was a picture of me and some others friends from four years ago. My face looked like a chum bucket. I'm gonna hold onto this picture through the idle times of winter as an inspiration to jog and to pass on another beer. Thanks Chad.



This new issue of Sixth Finch is pretty great. I've gone back to it multiple times now.




I don't know how I was included into this behemoth, but I was. Fine by me. I kind of like what I ended up with. I'd post it, but the site is currently not working. Click here to download the issue.

A round table discussion about chapbooks featured on Emerging Writers Network starring Carl? Yes. Notice he is just listed as just "Carl." Basically I believe in everything Carl says about aesthetics. He is my Sarah Palin. You betcha.



Below is a poem from Guernica by Mark Yak-kick

What, Friends, Is A Life?
by Mark Yakich

for Gabe Gudding

Killing a chicken for dinner always prompted
A quarrel about who had to do it. Today

You can take tours of virtual slave ships.
Many people are drawn to the dead

On their holidays. Because of its abundance
A large section of Birkenau was named Canada.

You could get good boots there & sometimes
A silk shawl or a jar of pickled herring. But it was

In America that fake birds were first made
To attract native fowl. The most familiar kinds

Of camouflage make one thing appear to be two,
Two things one & so on. Camouflage artists

Make it an arduous challenge to see a figure
On a ground (blending) or to distinguish one

Category of object from another (mimicry).
Less familiar but far more effective is dazzle

Camouflage in which a single thing appears
To be a hodgepodge of disparate components.

At Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the actors say
The audience always pays better attention

When it’s raining. Mother loved the sun,
She said, because its rays felt like ink to her

Fingers. Honestly I don’t understand many
People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying

By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing
Is simply another way of marking time.

Mark Yakich's new poetry collection is The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin Poets 2008). He lives in New Orleans. His website is www.markyakich.com

Poet Rauan Klassnik now has a blog. He also has some real quality poems just up at Babel Fruit. You can listen to Rauan reading the poems. I like Rauan's effort have his work not only read, but heard.