I should have mentioned this before, but got a little sidetracked. If you live in the LA area and want to be the first to see the new summer issue of RATTLE, hot off the presses, stop by the Church in Ocean Park this Saturday. We’ll be selling copies at a discount as part of the annual SoCal small press fair. I’ll also be reading a few poems from the issue at 11:15 AM. Here are the details:

The Church in Ocean Park hosts an expansive day of writers, poets, and publishers, and finding out about new releases from over 25 small presses.

Saturday, May 10, 2008 10:30-5:00 pm

Publishers will be selling books throughout the whole day. Every hour will begin with a short period of poetry and spoken word readings hosted by Peggy Dobreer.

Presses and writers taking part in the Book Fair Readings include:

Veronica Lane Books: Etan Boritzer—11:00
Lynne Bronstein: 11:05
Cahuenga Press: Harry Northup, Holly Prado : 11:10
Rattle : Tim Green 11:15
Heart Press: C. Natale Perdito: 12:00
Conflux Press: FrancEye: 12:05
Split Shift Press: Roger Taus : 12:10
Petroglyph Books: Jeff Green, Ruth Nolan 12:15
Penelope Barnes Thompson: 1:00
Noble Swine Press: Corrie Greathouse, Saria Idana 1:05
John Harris: 1:10
Akashic Books: Karen Harryman 1:15
Free Venice Beachhead: Rex Butters 2:00
TcCreative Press: Theresa Antonia 2:05
Cherry Grove Collections: Julia Stein: 2:10
Siglio Press: Lisa Pearson 2:15
Gentle Strings Quarterly: Leilani Squire 3:00
Beyond Baroque Press 3:05
Patrice Karst 3:10
Askew: Phil Taggart 3:15
DeAnn Jordan 4:00
Writ Largh Press: 4:05

Also represented: Santa Monica Review, DVD Video: Alexis Krasilovsly, Poetry Flash. More presses and writers to be announced.

Admission by donation at the door.

Church in Ocean Park

235 Hill Street on the northeast corner of Hill & 2nd in Santa Monica

The Church is wheelchair accessible. Bus accessible by the MTA #33 & Big Blue Bus #s 1, 2, & 8. The church has a small parking lot on the north side of the street between 2nd & 3rd Sts.

Meter parking, 1/4 block west of Main St., $.75/hr to 10 hours & free parking from 4th St. east

Contact Fred Whitlock at 310-828-3951 for more information.

While we still have plenty of reviews ready to go up online, but we haven’t been getting as many book requests lately and my shelf is filling up. It won’t be too long before I have to start giving up on some of these books.

Below is a list of review copies we’ve received in just the last month or so. If any of them sound interesting, email me with your address, and I’ll send them to you. All you have to do is write a little review, maybe a page or so, and the book is yours.

The full list is here. I’ve also added CDs, DVDs, and literary journals for the first time. Enjoy!

Books Available (updated 5/7/08, latest additions on top):

* Elaine Sexton – Causeway
* Mike Maggio – deMOCKracy
* Sandra Kohler – The Country of Women
* Joe Larkin – Outside the Frame
* Peggy Munson – Pathogenesis
* Christian Ward – Slippage #
* Jane Pupek – Forms of Intercession
* Naomi Levine – Songs of an Aging Optimist
* Linda Pastan – Queen of Rainy Country
* Peter Krok – Looking for an EYE
* Polis Is This – Ferrini & Riaf (DVD)
* Janet Sarbanes – Army of One
* Language for a New Century: Poetry From the Middle East, Asia and Beyond
* Eric Greinke – Wild Strawberries
* Lawrence Kessenich – Strange News #
* Ralph-Michael Chiaia – Ten Poems About East Asia
* Lyn Lifshin – 92 Rapple Drive
* Dragan Dragojlovic – Death’s Homeland
* Can You Stay Forever – A. Molotkov (CD)
* Next on the Mic: The Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam (CD)
* Wind and Waves – Le Pham Le (CD)
* Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words – Krapf & Herzig (CD)
* J. Reuben Appelman – Make Loneliness
* Michele Fabbri – Apocalisse 23
* Ellaraine Lockie – Blue Ribbons at the County Fair
* Philip Ramp – Keen
* Ellen Peckham – Ticket Stubs
* Myronn Hardy – The Headless Saints
* Louis Daniel Brodsky – Still Wandering in the Wilderness
* David Alpaugh – Heavy Lifting
* David James – Trembling in Someone’s Palm
* Home: Anthology – ed. by Anne Brudevold
* Christopher William Purdom – too many chairs on the green hill*
* Llyn Clague – Confessions
* Van G. Garrett – Songs in Blue Negritude
* Kathleen Tyler – My Florida
* Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry
* Matt Mason – Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

* = chapbook
# = proof
CD = CD

Literary Journals Available for Review (current issues):

* New England Review
* Denver Quarterly
* Iconoclast
* Hiram Poetry Review
* Prairie Schooner

This blog is supposed to be more than just a place for announcements, but I’ve been too busy to live up to my end of the bargain, and sometimes there are just things worth announcing. So here it is, this spring’s free online supplement.

61 pages of art, poetry, and essays. Our two book features are each outstanding for entirely different reasons — John Amen’s More of Me Disappears and Diane Lockward’s What Feeds Us. As if on cue after the last couple posts, David James writes about the joy of inventing new poetic forms. Then Gary Lehmann asks, Is Poetry Fiction?, and trust me, he knows the answer. The art spread is five hand-colored photographs by Dianne Carroll Burdick, from which the cover above is drawn.

As always, a fun quick read — something to whet the appetite before the big issue in June. Click here to download the PDF (1.6 MB).

I just hope I wasn’t too gloomy at the end of the introduction. I mention a great anthology I just read, Seeds of Fire (Smokestack Books, 2008), edited by former Rattle contributor and Curbstone author, Jon Andersen. The book was an uplifting reminder for me that so many people see this war industry for what it is, and while real change operates at a glacial pace, it’s worth it to keep plugging away, to keep standing together and speaking out. But you can’t explain being uplifted without mentioning what you’re being lifted from.

I’m starting to feel like the existence of a poetry community is more important than the poetry itself. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for an editor to say.

I was at the office until just after 2am last night, or this morning, or whatever, putting the new issue together. This is what they call “in-sourcing” — we used to pay someone a few thousand dollars to turn our easy-to-manage Word file into a pretty PDF via Quark. Instead, we save that money, and I work 23 hours in one weekend, twice a year. If we had stockholders, I’d say, “It’s worth it to the stockholders.”

But the surprising thing for me, coming at this as poetry person with a science background, is that graphic design and desktop publishing is really fun. Reading submissions can be exciting, or it can be brutal, depending on your mood and where the wheel spins, but working on design has probably become my favorite part of the job. And I have no idea what I’m doing. One of my high school teachers always said, it doesn’t matter what you learn in school, because everything you need you have to learn on the fly.

The summer issue has a special Visual Poetry feature, which includes 38 images — collages, poem paintings, comics, graphic poems, concrete poems. The biggest challenge yet, but well worth it. Wild, varied, random. You’ll see in a few months. And I updated the layout just a touch, for the first time in 10 years — cleaner, and a little more elegant.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m posting this, but I promised myself I’d get into the habit of using the blog more often.