EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have 104 NEW POETRY REVIEWS this issue!

Such reviews include "50 POEMS IN 50 BOOKS IN 50 DAYS," by John Bloomberg-Rissman -- a fabulous section featuring a review of a poem from 50 books written over, mas o menos, fifty days. While each review can be read on a stand-alone basis, I actually think there's another layer that surfaces from reading all 50 poem-engagements in one sitting (as regards subjectivity, always relevant to criticism) -- try it, why not!  Then there's an "Afterword" where John presents an essay from his notes during his reading process -- a process perhaps made possible only by his retirement from being a SUPER-LIBRARIAN!  (Perhaps the process was possible partly because he was a librarian!)  Thanks to John for his generosity, and Happy Retirement!   

Poetry has enhanced my love of lists so here are GR's latest poetry-lovin' stats!

Issue 1: 27 new reviews

Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)

Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)

Issue 7: 51 new reviews

Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 9: 65 new reviews

Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)

Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)

Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)

Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)

Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)

Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)

Issue 16: 73 new reviews (2 projects were reviewed twice)

Issue 17: 108 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)

Issue 18: 104 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)

******

As of Issue No. 18, we are pleased to report that GR has provided 1,133 publications with new reviews (covering 437 publishers in 17 countries so far) and 72 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print or first published in now-defunct online sites). With this issue, we increased our coverage of poetry publishers by 25 to 437 publishers. This is important as I feel that much of the ground-breaking poetry work is being published by independent and/or relatively small presses who (by the nature of their work) are not always as well-known as they deserve to be.

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review -- note that because we believe in Poetry's immortality, GR does not limit reviews to just "recent" poetry publications. And, obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is Nov. 11, 2012.

Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to GR:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews

Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews

Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews

Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews

Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews

Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews

Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews

Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews

Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews

Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews

Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews

Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews

Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews

Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews

Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews

Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews

Issue 17: 73 out of 108 new reviews
Issue 18: 84 out of 104 new reviews

 *****

Among this issue's offerings is "By Way of Introduction: W.H. Auden vs. the M.F.A." from a forthcoming memoir by this issue's Featured Poet Sandy McIntosh.  Entitled A Hole In the Ocean: A Writer's Apprenticeship in the Hamptons," the memoir looks to be a good read and GR is pleased to provide a supportive boost in spreading the word about it.  Sandy will be blogging-the-writing of his memoir at his new blog at http://hamptonsapprenticeship.blogspot.com/.

*****

Among the reviews in this issue is one first written as a college class assignment. Emily Geris is a sophomore studying Creative Writing and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Her review of torch song tango choir by Julie Sophia Paegle is her first poetry review, completed as a final project for poet-professor Kristin Naca's Latina/o Poetics class. This isn't the first time GR has published a review by a young writer -- we also have a review by college junior Graham Sutherland on Long Distance by Steven Cordova; part of GR's vision is to encourage the rise of more writers interested enough to engage with poetry.  If you are a teacher, feel free to email me at GalateaTEN@aol.com if you see a possibility of GR offering encouragement-through-publication of your students' critical writings. 

*****

As I've said before, your Editor is blind, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi at GalateaTEN@aol.com or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).


*****

All of us at Galatea hope you enjoy the issue!

With much love, poetry, vino and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
May 30, 2012

SOME MATH by BILL LUOMA and GLOWBALL by STEVEN FARMER

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

Glowball by Steven Farmer

(theenk, Palmyra, New York, 2010)

and

Some Math by Bill Luoma

(Kenning Editions, 2011)

Both of these books had me thinking of the wit and wisdom of my 4-yr-old grandson Brendan. That’s a compliment from Grampa Tom, a high one with happy laughter sprinkled all over it. B-Boy likes to shift contexts by adding words to word strings and sometimes non-words too. He says, “Cookie batter” for instance. I say “Cookie batter Orestes ‘Minnie’ Minoso,” and he says “Cookie batter Minnie Mouse Minoso flopgully”; so I add “in today’s trading,” and we collapse together in laughter because even he has heard that phrase from the TV. It’s a way of getting to know each other and sharing a little joke on the world.

Steve Farmer and Bill Luoma have known each other since at least those days at UCSD when Ron Silliman came to town and shifted quite a few perspectives. Steve Farmer was the first poet I ever heard to claim “post language” status. Luoma was off and running already in that direction. These two most recent books of theirs show many directions post-Language concerns can take or make to share a little serious joking.

Substitution of nouns is one old move they use, but here it has a new focus of social critique in a metaphoric humor: e.g. on page 18 of Some Math, “the panel snake is working its way through the insulation of the enterprise.” That book has, in poems like “The Concept of Mass,” another level of substitutions or switching out. The languages/dictions/vocabularies of science, baseball, sports-talk, politics, parenting, and sex are flipped into and out of one another. This is not merely for amusement, though it is funny; they actually reveal something about each other and the personhood we think of as “voice.” Its relation to frames of reference as realities conferring a reality upon that personhood become both the joke of this switcheroo and its point. Mixing and crossing frameworks is the calculated move here. On page 36, is a poem of Time with both a scientific and a baseball meaning. In the next bit on pages 37-38, there’s a baseball scene to be imaged from an announcer’s voice asking us to see an impossibility that is almost science fiction: a player passes through the fence, but knowing as we do that fences in today’s multipurpose stadiums are often flimsy walls artificially placed inside the harder ones we know it could happen. Shifts of person in announcer play-by-play are common, and Luoma uses that too to play with and investigate person and voice.

The poem “Alystyre Julian Certified Orient Minimal Clothing” has another kind of fun. Words get made up, and words get a new make-up from having to create their own context with our help. My favorite bits are the words that pop up among what seems just made up and so they seem made up, but then you see they’re real—real words, I mean. Part of the trick here too is about voice because to really read this poem you have to let go and just see the letters. Atop page 47, we have “and standing to probe domain walls of shiny dog he spoke forth / thereby increasing the glittering coercivity of mortal free layer / / ram horn upsidedown cat meaty shorthair cherry barb / avis blimpie hepcat come and eat moe tiny size” and make sense of it by supplying references word by word and by grammar. Chomsky’s other side told us about that back in the 70s. One context for the string is that it is in this poem, another that it “come from” the world of objects and coerced commodifications around us. Both work here.

Bill’s got a knack for that, always has had. These poems trump non-referentiality with the pluri-referentiality of everything. As Freud proved in Der Witz, jokes help as a way of staying fun and funny while letting something serious poke through the veil of all the ways being serious as we get it. There’s a little problem with that, though. What Kerouac called “goofing” leaves a great portion of the audience who might not be focused on the same questions just laughing. Just as jokes don’t always liberate the listener but may bind her to a desire to repeat, these poems could become monster replicant DNA in the movie called the poetry scene. “How fuck with that?,” asks our philosophy.

Well, I’d say “Seuss it.” The poem “nogo” takes the makey-up aspect on into a 1, 2, 3, 4, / 5, 6, 7  kid’s-rhyme rhythm and into rhyme. “Swoon Rocket” continues this with the seven syllables across one line:

intense x-ray youvie earth

sword obliquely micro birth

fisko solene cesium dew

big dog chester fly out too

                                    (79)

The tones of all those dictions listed above are in that stanza still. And the sexy bits fit the poem’s title in making a love tone too.

           

There are many poets of the love poem, but Luoma has the corner on the “of” poem; it’s called “When the Pathogenic Wind Comes” when it appears twice in this book. Steinian in its diction, perhaps, its quintessential bit appears on page 60 with an opening line of “Pouring itself of Of” that is concluded with

            of the contiguous one for one half

of of and the splice

of the yin of Of

of the three navel of of

of of of of of great pouring.

That’s pretty whacky but it does sound great. The serious side of this effort peeks through on page 54 with “They of evils of head of diseases of eye of the traditional ones of the side and the midline / of of indications of of.” Zukofsky said it was all about prepositions, and taking one in turns as the noun for itself shows another kind of laugh mastery here.

The title poem deserves some particular attention not only because it’s the title poem but because it folds in some “foreign language” as a chatter domain. The game of chatter domain slippage is that one I learned from my grandson; I strongly suspect Bill has received such teachings too. They are full of silly truths. Here “Some Math” demonstrates the conscious and unconscious manipulations party to this game. The energy of syntax creates a sense of composition while surprise words and wanna-be words are thrown in: “the meep of that of that the used one of bent ramificarsi” says it all except what the next line adds in “outside of elasticity comes the question” (92).

That is the outside angle we are involved with here. It shows off the elastic qualities of paying attention to language while following the urge to pay attention through language. As much as we wanna get it, we are gonna get it. And like little Brendan, we share a joke along the way. A poem may be threaded around references that hang together like the one on page 99, where “Fourier” and “UN” and “Torrance” and “retarded argument of the delay” and “unilateral withdrawal from stolen land” all say something about political history; however, the urge to think stops in the face of

            Começ of fa socket

of that of the case of Only fa

hand of one of address of memory its fa estaçion

fa is the data of Someone’s fa port

                                                            (107)

“Fa” is “do” in Italian; “fa” is also the fourth of “do” in the harmonic scale. “Fa” is what we make of it, among other things. The other things here are words or the things Brendan might make up as words, the way we all did historically in making these “fa”-king languages. You can’t help but notice and maybe even feel all that in Some Math.

A little further out along those lines and pushing the outside further out is Glowball’s piece called “PARTS/DIN.” There we have fragments of words that come through either with the enough hint of the word’s whole look or as sound patterns of a choked diction:

                        ga   tewa   ay

                                                            l   st   th

                                    t o

                                                                        ar     eas

We make sense of them with our eye’s leaps and our parsimonious principles of reading (see Silliman’s The New Sentence 115). These are words that were

                                                            po   si

                                                e   in

                        on   c                            tion

                                                                                    (Glowball 44)

And then a poem like “Saturate” seems over-saturated with sense as we “come back” to sentence units like “These elements unaware of their relationship to the module, governed by a diction they can’t know” (59) make more sense than ever. The dictions here include a hardboiled one we recognize as an import from maybe Chandler: “I said the chronicle of a fall from grace with limited wardrobe options will suit me fine” (68). As we put that together with lines like “flowering kale / bank cabbage, cinderblocks of a dentist’s life” (68) portraying the substrate of suburban homes and gardens, we get the haunting quality of “the properties file in the source code tree contains the correct connect string” (69) and its place in a mystery with a smoothed over surface on which everything is programmed properly. The sad ending of “I fell asleep in a slow wind that held suspicion and misplaced need, telling myself the automated generation of reports feature made things seem more palatable” (72) mockingly echoes Marlowe working in a “dentist’s” world.

“Metacity” closes Glowball in a fiercer mix of dictions. It doesn’t take long for two domains to intersect sharply here: “bases of operation” is probably the first phrase, at line 6 in the poem, to reflect both the spheres of war and business. This mix has been in the air since the cover showing “US bombing, Iraq Invasion, 2003” led us on toward the epigraph from Secretary Rumsfeld saying “Test ideas in the marketplace” (7). When we get to the third portion of “Metacity,”

            how vested       possible to

            know in an

instant (from

a Radisson cell)

the markup

defines a

portal to trade

sleep for

                        (77),

the image of that hotel business world is clearly embodied with words like “cell” layering in multiple domains at once It means something in terms of body, imprisonment, communication, monasticism, and more. On the next page, one phrase presents the image from the cover: “firing into a cloud, & down to havoc upon a city” right along with the ostensible innocence of lines like “the desktop must be ubiquitous as if it had always existed” (78).

In a few more sparse pages, we get “if not that, then virgins etc sitting at the right hand of no sacrifice too great” along with “businessman, straight in the eye and can be done in a deal” (81). There are other such references in the lines of this poem parsed out widespread on its slowly building pages, but the interweaving of business calculation and war meet in a sense of danger hovering like that in Philip Marlowe’s L.A. As the elements here move forward, they cross and mix and get mixed up: “Its pop surge bypassed his district how science did, a once vessel powerful in the globe suburban vehicle” (82). That reads like a bad Google translator translation or a kid trying to say what he can’t get his words around. The poems pushes the diction domains closer together to get patches like “highway target / storm hanging methane vents, Delilah” (89). There we are in the midst of war, oil extraction, the Bible, and pop culture—perhaps even hearing the great Tom Jones sing.

Then “Metacity” seems to actually use bad Google translation in a penultimate stretch where stanzas are given in English and then poor Latin. The churchy sound and look of this confirms the sense thast the poem is working with belief and the unbelievable results of what we give our credence to and what it gives back.

            even joy

thought of as

joey even no such

thing as

postwar anymore

            atque spectare

            Joey quod Joey

            atque nullem eadem

            est post bellum

            amplius

                                    (94)

You could say “Cano bellum perenne” with Pound off Vergil. A line like “accessories really matter” (93) now can’t help but present to us our own guilt as accessories to war or at least the sense that all our accessories helping us to access the life we let ourselves believe in are not just a fashion but an apparatus. The translation reads “apparatus est moneti” or “the apparatus is of the moment”—a bad translation that reveals the greater truth.

           

The apparatuses of this poem, of this book, are of our moment. They deliver, without preaching, a clear revelation of complicities. That is the metastasis,\ in the metacity where everything has gone Glo(w)bal(l). Thank theenk for this book.

*****

T.C. Marshall is busy occupying his life, seriously supporting movement actions on the Cabrillo College campus where he teaches and in the S.F. and Monterey Bay areas where he lives. He has been writing and publishing poetry since first grade, literary criticism since his college days in the U.S. and Canada, and nature writing here and there. His latest publications include online essays and reviews as well as poems online and on paper in magazines. His next project is a set of poems incorporating photos to be published on a blog, all of which were originally posted on FaceBook. They are called Post Language.

AS IF IT FELL FROM THE SUN: AN ETHERDOME ANTHOLOGY, Co-Eds. COLLEEN LOOKINGBILL & ELIZABETH ROBINSON

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

AS IF IT FELL FROM THE SUN: An Etherdome Anthology: Ten Years of Women's Writing, Edited by Colleen Lookingbill & Elizabeth Robinson

(EtherDome Chapbooks/Instance, San Francisco & Boulder, 2012)

AS IF IT FELL FROM THE SUN is an anthology that presents a group of poems from poets previously published through an EtherDome chapbook -- each grouping is generous, making each illuminating about each individual poet.  EtherDome, started in 2000 by co-editors Colleen Lookingbill & Elizabeth Robinson, was intended to present a chap by a female poet without a previously published chap or book.  What this means, in part, is that the anthology does not just offer poems but also a manifestation of Lookingbill's and Robinson's vision in creating the EtherDome project -- a vision purely (as "pure" as is possible) based on the two editor's aesthetics with little mediation by poets' prior reputations.

This notion of presenting a publisher's vision is important but difficult to accomplish; I know it as a publisher moiself of a small press which I founded in 2001.  I know how difficult it is -- and particularly as a small press with numerous constraints -- to be able to enact sufficiently what one intended to do through publishing.  In fact, I would say that, to date, I have failed with my press in sufficiently presenting my underlying publishing vision even as each individual book project has been, if I may say so, stellar.  But such stellarness has more to do with the individual poet's prowess rather than with my stellar activities as publisher.  This makes all the more admirable the achievement of these two editor-publishers in offering such a strong sense of what they wanted to achieve with Etherdome, a feat even more laudable when their searching process through the years was fluid enough to remain open to possibilities and, yes, even disagreements on (initial) choices by the other.

And such can be proven, indeed, by this EtherDome anthology.  Its two co-editors' Introduction is useful in presenting what they intended when they began the project; in summary, they wished to expand publishing activities for women poets who, they felt, as a group were not aggressive in promoting their work into the publishing realm. Their introductory essay addresses the role of the chapbook as a response to limited funds as well as a promoter of intimacy, the difficulty of representation (as they note, most of their poets are white, middle class and heterosexual), among other factors.  As a result of this usefully honest introduction, one then can look at the poem-samples and reach certain conclusions about the two editors' visions.  The poets presented in this volume are Merle Bachman, Faith Barrett, Margaret Butterfield, Erica Carpenter, Valerie Coulton, Caroline Crumpacker, Susanne Dyckman, Kelly Everding, Renata Ewing, Amanda Field, Kate Greenstreet, Anne Heide, Brydie MPherson Kuchi, Erica Lewis, Susan Manchester, Linda Norton, Roberta Olson, Megan Pruiett, Lisa Rappoport, Sarah Suzor, and Stacy Szymaszek. Most were unknown and several since have reached visible success as measured by publications of subsequent books, e.g. Greenstreet, Lewis, Szymaszek, Coulton, Norton and Dyckman – which, if one is inclined along those lines, one can certainly read as a validation of the merit of the editors' choices.

The overwhelming impression I glean from reading this anthology --  in terms of what the poems seem to share -- is the clear evidence of pleasure.  The poems not only effect pleasure in the reader but it seems that there was much pleasure in their making, both of individual poems and their subsequent groupings into chap collections.  It's interesting to me how there is so much social-ness in Lookingbill’s and Robinson's considerations on their roles as publishers, but then the chosen poems themselves end up (to this reader anyway) mostly effecting a pleasurable admiration.  One senses the balance between authorial (and a publisher can be an author, too) social concerns and the requirements of the poem was maintained such as to effect harmony.  The anthology's opening poem, "Women's Pictures" by Merle Bachman, is a wise (partly viz lack of didacticism) and inviting example. The poem begins

                        --the way things fold-up inside her.

a velvet pocket, a locket, a poodle skirt, a flirt

the quality of April light,

a delicate abatement of worries.

the figure of a woman rises, her skin-so-soft, her

hair-so-fresh

light trapped in the slats.

a well-scrubbed infant a pot boiling a plain apron, a cigarette

burning out.

inside the woman's body, furrows, pockets, a new idea sprouting

buds of arms and legs--

and ends with

A gown burns

it must, her flesh

incandescent on a darkened deck

imagine        a body designed

for love,        the smoke    of it

a sacrifice to keep us        content

Just from the above excerpts you can feel the resonant lucid acknowledgment of life's vicissitudes but also how bitterness need not be the result -- I think this effect surfaces because of the poet's/poem persona's intelligent self-awareness as well as unblinking gaze at the world.

With that prior paragraph, I feel myself tipping into inarticulateness.  That's so because, really, the poems here need to speak for themselves. While I can share that I am intensely moved by them, anything I say would be insufficient.  What can I say about -- here I open the anthology at random for a sample poem -- the last page of Linda Norton's "Miscellaneous Opalescence"--

I walked among the Cabots and the Lodges and stopped at the grave of the botanist Asa Gray, and the yellow leaves fell upon my shoulders as if I were an heir to something. An arboretum, a library, a porch, a problem. A trellis covered with vines of Concord grape. "She does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself."

Tombstones are the covers of books, and there is no rare air, just blood and smoke and a library of bodies and souls. "Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things."

And I am like the apple I picked and ate there at Mount Auburn that October when the leaves were falling, divinity my compost.

--  when there is so much intelligence and elegy (?) within it?  Ah, but this sample does remind me to note two other characteristics -- besides pleasure -- that the poems seem to share.  Intelligence, of course.  The other would be, how to put it?, a certain weight from history.  Yes, these poets have done their research prior to putting down the first words on the page.  They, as the sun might look down upon all of the planet, have sought to see--to understand as much as they can about humanity in order to better write for and about it.

Self-awareness.  Perhaps self-consciousness, too?  If only because the presence of consciousness from the idea of the poet projected by a grouping of poems seems so strong.  What I'm fumbling to say is that there is evident thinking and deep engagement here by the poets of their concerns.  And it enervates the poetic lines, making the spaces between lines, words, letters just brim with a fulsome intensity.  Here's another example which I offer from, again, just opening the anthology at random:

You never know who you will meet: landscape

previously as windowscrap goes and

grows until the noblemen standing by that

square have disappeared, been forced out

of the painting by hills and cypresses and whatever

else. Outside the frame they pace in soft pointed

shoes, displaced, complaining, looking for the way

back in

--from "Small Bed Diary" by Valerie Coulton

Not beauty, but the intensity of beauty, in the anthology's pages is why I feel the anthology is so aptly titled, by the way.  "As If It Fell From the Sun" hearkens to me such loveliness, lucidity and luminosity and much of the poems are just wonderful this way.

Okay, but what's "women" or "woman" about these poems?  Perhaps it's the delicacy that imbues so many of these lines?  Is it the ever-present hint of "sweet"-ness (a la "The sun makes sweet poets" from Kelly Everding's "THE WEATHER IN SPACE")? Perhaps it's the stepping-lightness of the words in many of the poems which often create enchantment? For such things as delicacy, sweetness and stepping light are not (well, with certain exceptions) factors I associate with "man" though that may bespeak the limits of my imagination or knowledge. There is no definitive answer except what lies in the existence of the poems and their publication. Even then, such an answer is "imprecise" (to paraphrase—and recontextualize—the title of Caroline Crumpacker’s poem, “WE EMBRACE IMPRECISION A SIDE-EFFECT OF DISTANCE”). But impreciseness inherently means existence.  So these poems exist and, for now, that may suffice in the way one can read a judiciously-excised excerpt from Crumpacker’s poem:

There being no such thing as silence                  only racket

            and no known calibration           for the elements needed

                        to make                        it          disappear

we contrive       silence              as lack of attention        lack of speaking

We want                        assurance

I was going to end there.  But, for the heck of it, I'm going to open the anthology at random again and present what I see.  Without knowing ahead of time which poem or excerpt of poem I'll be presenting, I will make a bet that the following will move you to admiration, and while I know not at the moment what you will admire, I bet it will be a quality that will be intense:

THE WEATHER IN SPACE

By Kelly Everding

We were speaking when the stars began:

a realist, you said, would consider them dead.

I wondered aloud what nebula

would call his a home--

children inching closer with sticks and shovels,

flagrant in their disregard of luminosity.

You said we inhabit a minor planet, and I thought

you meant music my god you got the chord right.

Perplexed  you spread your arms and said

The sun makes sweet poets,

despite the many suns snuffed tonight. Blink.

I mentioned an eminent meteor, or was it imminent?

It's nice by the fence, and I pose

for the satellite's camera, pinpoint light passing

through the Pleiades. You are on another

subject already, treason, and the wind

picks up, a treasonous wind relocating your words.

Select a chair, you said, when there were no chairs.

A dangerous transference, words thrown

from the mailbox--all stamped dangerous.

Do you believe in osmosis? you asked inching

closer, a coliseum blinking.

You say you're cold. In space meteors are mostly ice,

and you touch me your hands like ice.

I begin to see a pattern.

Look, the Big Dipper. We've seen it all our lives--

traveled that ancient path since we were amoebas.

Everyone has daughters bent to a loom,

weaving and unweaving, their stories a delay,

fortunes or doors.  Don't change the subject.

It is nearly dawn and we wait for shadows.

Solar plumes lick the stratosphere, curl and blacken.

How synchronistic that this anthology entitled Perhaps It Fell From The Sun opened to the poem that bears the line: "The sun makes sweet poets"-- a metaphor for this anthology that makes from the publishers' vision a radiance so matured even darkness becomes luminous.

Deeply intensely satisfying and HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

*****


Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects because she's its editor.  But she is pleased to point you elsewhere to recent reviews of her books. the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is reviewed by Susan Schultz at Jacket2 HERE, and by Amazon.com Hall of Fame reviewer Grady Harp HERE.  Another book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Thomas Fink in Press 1 and by Nicholas Spatafora in OurOwnVoice.