Issue Thirty Seven

Editor's Note:

Welcome to Issue Thirty Seven of CSR! By now, you regular readers know my child likes stick-on ultra violet rays and hates pretentious chop sticks. It craves Budapest biscuits in its Burj Khalifa Tower and makes cute little sounds at the first sign of a severe weather watch. Baby has an uncanny ability to detect gall stones then add a tablespoon of nutmeg. We both like halos in our stamp collection. This issue inspects both UPS packages. It is filled with hybrid six-cylinder motors and tomato soup in the art. Add to that, a group of hot coal-walking poets, intriguing taxonomy tools and a deep-fried book review and you've got the possibility of a seven course meal. Trust me, when you finish this issue you'll long to kidnap Hong Kong. Or bed bugs bites. Either way, this issue will make you itch. So forget about White House crashers and get busy...

CSR: Issue 37 Contents/Contributors

Dawn DiBartolo

John Davis Jr.

Tasha Klein

Francios Bogaerts

A. D. Winans

Lisa Ortiz

Anthony Lawrence

About Art - Temenos Stucture

Micheline Hadjis

About Books

About Music - Oki Dub Ainu Band

Stefi Weisburd

Christopher Cheney

Contributors Biographies

Dawn DiBartolo


Stutter

i feel like...
i feel like, way over strung,
like a guitar string
twisted out of tune,
like...like my anxiety
is driving me super-speed
down a one-way street,
and its not where i want to go.
my thoughts are all...are all, not,
cuz p-p-prozac clouds the mind
to numb the soul.
if i don't feel
i won't hurt no more...
if i don't feel
i won't hurt no more.
this time...this time and place,
i've written before.
i seem stuck in stutter,
a poetic impediment easily
remedied by p-p-prozac
...clouds the mind
to numb the soul.
if i don't feel i won't...
i won't hurt no more.


Zodiac

ego stroke a leo.
finger-fuck a taurus.
bore us all with your diatribe,
cancer, as to why
man is morally screwed.
scale the libra,
measured not in the least,
and feast upon the scorpio.
lie to a gemini and
bind him to an aries;
perfect pair, both truth impaired.
each beast needing
of his own accord.


Solioquy

O, my kingdom...
my kingdom for
a fucking break in the line
leading me along
the path of ants,
tiny mites working
day and night,
non-stop, and for what?
no treasures glimmer
in my stockpile.
O, my kingdom
for some peace
and maybe even quiet.
riotous rebel-rousers
all demanding flesh
for my debts, as if
they've no knowledge
that my fingers are bone.
O, my kingdom...
my kingdom for a king
to take care of mighty things
that i may lie about and be...
pretty, and shiny as a trophy,
harlot of his nightly dreams.
O, my kingdom...


Commuter Train

hawaiian shirts
in boastful bright colors
study the morning news -
the sports page seems
of most interest.
business suits sway in aisles
with the motion of the train,
their attachés casually grazing
the hips of passers-by.
and the women...
my god, the women
are a special morning treat.
they smell so pretty-sweet in
their bronzed summer flesh
exposed to professionalism
and non-sensible strappy heels,
that gain the appeal
of hawaiian shirts and suits alike.
the gentlemen let the ladies slide by,
incidental contact
preying in both their eyes.
and as these splendors disembark,
gratitude for longing
embedded in all her
womanly wiles,
its her smile that imparts
"have a good day,"
as she sashays away.
and the afternoon daydreams
waft from her hips like the scent

-all poems previously published at Strange Road

John Davis Jr.
　

The Shot End

Not quite right: that green garden hose
his hardened hands carefully coiled
into place, there by the barn
when workdays ran out of steam.

Slicker models rolled downtown
in hardware stores boasted
brass fittings on both ends.

Not his: Joined solely at spigot,
and like an adopted stray cat,
had its far end chopped off―

giving the poor thing just length
to water a back flowerbed
or show all the kids how
a real farmer takes a drink.

As older grandchildren, they'd learn:
There was only so much
a single-jointed hose could do,
yet on his land, his time,
it did so irreplaceably.


Where Our Tunnels Went

We liked to glamorize
those two metal culverts
supporting the road into town
as “tunnels” replete with treasure:
buried pirates’ gold and reptiles.

We ventured into those holes
closest home almost daily,
swapping off routes and dirt
like so many battered favorite
toys used and loved by us both.

Returning from a day’s plunder,
we had to compare to brag―
bottle caps to squirrel skulls,
pebbles to marbles,
buccaneer booty for certain.

One day, we just reached the end:
we found the city waiting
with vehicles, jobs, and girlfriends
sucking us out of separate,
mutual, childhood adventures.

Yet I never drive over
abridged road portions without
wondering: what boys could be
swapping tales underneath
while my car passes above.


Upon My Son’s Naptime

I contemplate my greatest uncle,
whose speed bump knuckles dug trenches
in Nazi landscape, foreheads, and faces
throughout the era of World War II.

An 82nd Airborne Ranger, holding
a knife was one of the tricks he used
to stay alert while standing guard―its metal
clang, if dropped, would keep him awake.

Bearing his name, you fight against sleep,
clutching my finger like government-issued
security: your digits and palm grasp hard
that first joint, not quite the hilt of my hand.

I know you’ve arrived at your dreams when,
with a sigh, you allow the release
of my unscarred, academic appendage,
exchanging it for your own closed fist.

-all poems previously published at Frigg Magazine

Tasha Klein
　

Somewhere

we wake
on this charming
scratchy blanket
sticky again
your face between
my thighs
a star stuck in your hair
pretty & glittering

i think my heart
has turned
into some sort of
white blossom

i think that is your red shoe
stuck up in that tree


Forgetting the Point

the tea gets cold

as the bird dancers

turn

their feathery arms
the saddest blue

i want to rip them
off

but i can't move


Spring Apocalypse

I could throw up
running from
overdeveloped hearts

type words in cackles
the font crusher
full

but
I only want the one with the waltz hair glowing

I want the one with the bombed eyes
and the century's erection

the one with the whales
swimming inside


Snowed in at O’Hare

I pull the wires that spin snowflakes
in the half-light of your round table eyes.
On them a flower breathes
its breath song.

Oh, unroll the linen star chart,
pull the sky down to touch it too;
the language of velvet & night
fills all space around us.

And we spin, spin, spin!
Faces bursting through hair only for flashes,
sculpturing our features together.

Far across the ocean
dusk falls behind gargoyles
waiting on a roof above the square.

-all poems from her blog, Goodvibrations 1

Photography by Frnacois Bogaerts

A. D. Winans


Bill

He keeps a photograph tucked away
Inside his meager belongings
Three soldiers smiling smoking cigarettes
A Viet Cong in black pajamas
Hanging upside down from a pole
Gutted like a fish
Flesh nailed to wood Jesus like
Needs no caption

Guilt shadows him in doorways
And under freeways where
He now makes his home
Incoming artillery tears at his nerves
Pieces of flesh stuck to bamboo
Like a piece of meat thrust into
A tiger’s cage
Vietnamese peasants
Suspected Cong haunt his dreams
Like a faceless Santa Clause leaving
Behind a bag of body parts


Poem For My Father

On weekends my father worked
For Luke Morley
At the corner grocery store
Not for money but for conversation
He never had with my mother
Staying there until late at night
Stacking shelves with canned goods
Coming home with his reward
A pack or two of Pall Mall cigarettes
Sitting alone in the livingroom
Staring out the window
Blowing smoke rings in the air
The ashes falling into the ashtray
Like bits of pieces of his life


Approaching 70

the words come harder
set their own pace s
ometimes the turtle
sometimes the hare
always stripped bare

bukowski told me in a letter
you seem like a man
who knows where it's at
didn't then don't now
just hanging around
with words that dangle
like an outlaw's neck stretched
at the end of a rope


Writer’s Block

I stare into silence
Empty space has no vision
Restless ghosts eat
My words

-all previously published at Strange Road

Lisa Ortiz
　

Ivory Bill

It's an afternoon of sorting socks,
folding sheets, a meeting
that needs an agenda, a chairperson,
an e-mail that must be composed and here
are your daughters and two friends
second-graders and four-year-olds
at the kitchen table
and with a list in your mouth, you cut apples,
pull a steaming bag of popcorn from the microwave
and the water bill, the situation
with the lawyer
but also the smell of salt and butter
Jonathan apples in August, and at your hip
the damp fuzz of braids, pony tails
light rain outside, a pile at the door
of boots and backpacks.

And why think now about
the ivory bill woodpecker, extinct
and then some hiker
who knew what to listen for
heard its horn-like call, the distinctive double rap
how there are whole clubs of birders now
who walk into the woods searching
for a once ruined thing, return with stories
of echoes and shadows, how one man caught
on camera an image: a ghost of white
in scrubby trees, and how
ornithologists with headphones
in some tiny room
listen so hopefully
to the deep call, the tap, tap.

Things extinguish here
that later you will search for
you will be an old woman, a hiker in the woods
covered in deet and with binoculars heavy on your neck
you will look for skittish shadows:
requests for milk, the swing of braids
the beat of so many hearts like hidden wings
or a small plate of red apple skins
the white part
all chewed out by tiny teeth

-previously published at Litertary Mamma


Satan Is Overcome By Nonresistant Suffering

There have been other martyrs
St. Ludmilla, strangled by a veil
St Medilia with her breasts removed
beheaded saints and saints crucified
upside-down, the way St. Urith's blood
sprang up in flowers.
　
And for me [ . . . ]

-previously published at The Dirty Napkin


The Spring

I don’t know about the force
that drives the green but it seems that spring
comes as it does like a slap or a cheap gift
a rhyming verse in a glittered card

seems it would lose for me
its methamphetamine rush, its childish tune
for God’s sake I’m a grown woman
here gone weak for a blue fist of delphiniums

or round the corner in the forest
purple flax bursting in a pool of amber light—
should be nothing to me
I should spit or swear

duct tape on the windows
let the answering machine pick it up
knowing the way I know
it all washes down the storm drain

all splashes to the ashy caverns
of a November night and the earth turns cankered
seeds all eaten by beasts the whole thing
tractored over

and so what
that a bunch of buttercups punch up
that the finches are on again in song.
Well, I’ve seen most of this before.

-previously published at ZYZZYVA: The Last Word


Half Moon

Out at dawn to feed the horse
I note in iron light why no poet chooses to write
about the half moon— the moon that grins and waits
rocks coquettishly on her back—she moves me not.

Oh, the full moon, now she is something––
pregnant with metaphor, a crowned huntress
riding o’er the benighted world for love,
the backside of a nymph bathing in an onyx pool,
a poet’s iron discus heart candescent
at the far end of the universe—or—ha—
a sliver of a moon, such an ode to hope,
a crescent so like a lover’s smile, a hook
upon which we may hang a rumpled image
and where it hangs elegant as linen––and

of course a new moon
blinding poet eyes, so we can tramp sightless
and admire in the spiteful dark
our lovely tea-light souls.

But let us write not of this half moon this
early middle age moon, this size 12 moon, an easy moon,
a moon that abides the way I abide, a moon that tarries
the way I tarry here above you in the dawn, half-lit
to see if you will wake and love me still.

-first published in Pictures And Words Magazine

Anthony Lawrence


In Berlin

where pigeons take flight
and circle the square in Alexanderplatz,
a car alarm does not sound
like the released pressure of the blood
in the head of someone called Isats
who, it's now known, was a man
that walked and talked backwards
through his life, emotionally and historically,
even through the letters of his name -
and of his long poem
about revealing the missing "in"
from the word "former",
there are many who still believe
it sounds like another kind of alarm,
or at least the memory of one -
the kind that Isats might have raised,
in some other time, in East Berlin.


Tremor

There's been a lot said about this -
in the frames of movies when you slow them down,
inside the waves of radios,
in the distress calls metal fillings receive,
in the idle talk wind translates
and then makes personal,
and how it's not the sea you hear
inside a shell, but the passage of your blood -
a whistling speleologist
descending below the spiral of your ear.

-both poems previously published at MiPOesias


Your Letters

I can’t smell the oil-stained deck ropes
on the last boat leaving
the last town of the Cinque Terra,
or see the highlights in your hair
as you pass the Roman wall in Lucca,
but I can see you’re in a hurry –
the broken flourishes of your thinking
as you run for a train, the word because
reduced to bc in all your correspondence.
I can’t see you there, in that postcard
version of your dreaming, overseas
or when you returned to a life
doubled by keeping your options open
like a wound gone septic from neglect.
Today I see your name on my calendar.
Your birthday will come and go,
untroubled by gift or word, though under-
scored by this certainty: lost in the poor
terrain of your grammar, you worked
a moulting brush through muddy pigments
to abbreviate me.


The Sound of a Life

In frames of elapsed time
and contractions of deep sea light,
an open water dance
between science and bivalve
is bloodflow and the muted sound
of a life hinged and weighted
to its own design.
Behind the shelled meniscus
of a marine biologist’s faceplate,
where assessments of fact and beauty
play across her eyes, under pressure
she hears the blue mazurka
of loss and non-attachment
and she outbreathes what remains
in her tank to understand it

-both poems previously published at Mascara Literary Review

About Art - Temenos Structure

It's been perhaps farily described as looking like a Femidom, a pair of tights, and even a tennis net. It's fair to say local people have been fairly flummoxed as to what ..exactly..Temenos..is?

It's one of five enormous pieces of public art costing £15 million that are to be built in Teesside and County Durham in the UK- they'll be called Tees Valley Giants. The first one, Temenos, will be built on the North East corner of Middlehaven Dock.

Temenos is a sculpture by international artist Anish Kapur. He says that while some people may feel the money could be better spent on hospital beds, artwork also has an important role to play when it comes to healing both people and society. "Art has other ways of infiltrating our consciousness and bringing things socially that are just as important as hospital beds".

The name comes from the Greek and means "a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land dedicated to a god". So there you go. Joe Doherty is Chief Executive of Tees Valley Regeneration. He says “The first of the Tees Valley Giants revealed today is Temenos - which will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Transporter Bridge as a landmark for future generations.”

The multi-million pound cost, while the country stalls in the midst of a credit crunch, has caused more than a few raised eyebrows. It has been commissioned as part of the Tees Valley Giants initiative. Sculptures will also be installed at Stockton, Hartlepool, Darlington and Redcar and Cleveland, adding up to the biggest public art project anywhere in the world. The Middlehaven Dock structure was unveiled on July 22, 2008. Find out more about this project at: http://www.visitmiddlesbrough.com/site/whats-new/news/2008/7/22/world-class-sculpture-unveiled-a100

Artwork by Micheline Hadji

About Books:

Title: The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street
Author: Tony Williams

Description: Elegant, intelligent, charming and memorable, these poems reinvent the pastoral for dark times, crossing the contemporary English landscape from the city to provincial towns and villages. Their stylish and original treatments of the dreamy, the nightmarish and the absurd are both accessible and striking, both serious and very funny. They peddle dreams and nightmares, hollow laughter, elegy and joy, and use a spectrum of forms and tones from the prosaic to the metrical, from wry cynicism to high rhetoric. 　

Product Details:

Printed: 216mm x 140mm, 65 pagesISBN: 9781844715176Copyright: 2009
Language: English
Country: UK
Publisher’s Link: http://www.saltpublishing.com/

About Music - Oki Dub Ainu Band

OKI is an Ainu Japanese musician. His real name is Oki Kanō (加納 沖, Kanō Oki) and he is from Kanagawa Prefecture. He studied industrial arts at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. His father, Bikki Sunazawa, was a renowned wood sculptor. Oki uses the tonkori in his performances and mixes traditional Ainu music with reggae, dub and other styles of world music.

In 2005 OKI and his Dub Ainu Band burst onto the UK world music scene with a storming performance at WOMAD, taking the traditional North Japanese folk melodies played on the tonkori (a long, flat, unfretted guitar) and beefing them up with vocals, electric bass, percussion and occasional electric guitar to produce an exhilarating sound ranging from rock to dub to funk, without quite being exactly any of those things. It was all a thrilling surprise for those of us who were already aware of the outfit’s appealingly abstract but slightly uneven album that had just been released — the largely instrumental (and teasingly brief) Dub Ainu. Matters were made even more confusing towards the end of 2006 with the far more satisfying (but defiantly more considered and rootsy) team-up with Irish folkies Kila, which coincided with the return to our shores of that rocking concert line-up.

With OKI and fellow tonkori-player Ikabe Futoshi pulling some surprisingly varied rhythms out of this three-to-five-stringed instrument, their songs are pushed and pulled in all sorts of interesting directions by funky bass and percussion, and either filtered through subtle studio enhancement (mostly dub) or kept in its original raw but always melodic state.

Highlights of their latest album include a rousing version of Topattumi (which also appears on the Kila album) that is surely heading for anthem status amongst OKI fans, and the reggae-tinged Iyomante Upopo, which features some masterful electric guitar from Hirohisa, sounding like a dubbed up version of Mali’s Super Rail Band. The opener, East of Kunashiri, is probably the best overall embodiment yet of the OKI sound, being anchored in his native Ainu province by the distinctive tonkori twang but shot through with a resonant, other-worldly, dubby atmosphere. Find out more about him at: http://www.tonkori.com/

Stefi Weisburd
　

Little God Origami

The number of corners in the soul can't
compare with the universe's dimensions folded
neatly into swans. In the soul's
space, one word on a thousand pieces
of paper the size of cookie fortunes falls
from the heavens. At last, the oracular
answer, you cry, pawing at the scraps that twirl
like seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window
to your soul needs a good scrubbing, so
the letters doodle into indecipherables just
like every answer that has rained
down through history, and you realize, in
your little smog of thought that death
will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand
cranes unfolding themselves and returning to the trees.


Mittelschmerz near Menopause

Lumbering though the day’s
dregs accruing in the pelvic

pit, I want to drown
in bed, birth the damn cabbages

with their hot breath. I want to haul
ache off bone like taffy. Peacocks

strut in the gut. Journey,
be done with me. Can’t you pass

without dragging your spurs
through the scenery? Awe

grows by the river, but it is a
bitter flower. Such heavy

machinery for a mere nit,
a pinpoint of gel spit from

this month’s anemone.
Two weeks later: an opera.

Love’s sad fortune drains
down my legs, staining

the white tile in wild roses.

-both poems previously published at Poetry Foundation


Mountain Stream

even in July
the stones
huddle
in green shawls of algae

the pussy willows
are busy knitting mittens

water glitters
with a blizzard of light

my body is sweltering with summer
but even in July
my icy feet know
the mountainis thinking snow

-From Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet (Wordsong, 2008)


The Bull

Picasso's lithograph series, 1945-1946

In the beginning, he enjoyed volume
and meat, his hide twitched
with texture, bulked up on shadows
and light. Head down, rutting,
tail flipped forward for flies
or lust, cocky in his thickset
hooves. Six days later, his skin
is less generous. It spans
cartilage like bat wings.
The nostrils flare, but the eye
already knows what's lost.
By December, the tail hangs,
an impotent whip. The face
abdicates, the testicles dangle, rot.
The body is butchered
by triangles and arcs. This linest
ands for stomach, that,
a proxy for shoulders.
The eye comes and goes.
In early January, the legs confuse
themselves. The penis is straw.
Geometry continues its land grab
for rump and guts. In the end,
contour relinquishes
the interior; haunches, belly, gorge,
all confessed and obliterated.
Like the beasts at Lascaux,
the brute is tamed
by paint & palm-sized line,
brawn stewed down
to the sinew of symbol until
what's left is a name
that passes through lips
& barely stirs the air.

-previously published in Daily Poetry

Christopher Cheney
　

They Kissed Their Homes

They kissed their homes and they kissed people who
had been sleeping for hours and they kissed the lid of
a friend's coffin and they made their mothers cry of
happiness and they drank coffee in the early dark and
they heard hooting in the trees and they warmed their
hands inside their wadded shirts and they smelt beer
in the air and they motioned to the sky and they spilt
on their pants and they thought about sex and they
backed up their pickups and they heaved firewood over
the lip and it shook their flatbeds and jerked and they
were asleep and women kissed them and dead animals
kissed them and animals kicked them and they were asleep.
　

They Slapped Their Faces

They slapped their faces and sat on the edge of bathtubs
and ran a comb down their forearms and felt happiness
creep into their pockets and found their dogs wrapped up
in blankets and the clouds were big and yellow and firm
and in the road there is a man hitchhiking and there are
so many lovers in the supermarkets and there are those
who have bad sex and there is you who is probably getting
ready for brunch and there are those who don't know yet
of the dead and they yank their hands from scolding water
and wait.

-both poems previously published at DIAGRAM
　

They Tucked Their Heads

They tucked their heads in between the arms of another
life and they yawned into their sleeves and stacked boxes
of light bulbs to make room for their friends and salt trucks
cut them off and drifted from flowered medians and their
children clipped on earrings and preened their sideburns
and their odometers shit out and in winter they wore
skullcaps and denim and they wrestled electric blankets
from loved ones and there are big women that drink tea
and search the tablecloth for their glasses and a cloud flashes
on their strapless bodices and someone pulls their hair back.
　

They’re Flatten Their Heads

They’re flattening their hands on their inner thighs and
their condoms bare the tint of traffic lights and their
haunted faces and their crooked teeth and their friends
heave and there is no breath on their cheeks and their
dogs tunnel and sniff the night blankly aroused and there
is no breath like the breath of an animal feeding and their
clothes snag on chain link fences and they’ve pushed its
ribs in and they’ve kicked it over and it recoils like drying
pocket money and a heart beats in their lungs and they pull
out of their bodies and shake them which is their boredom.

-both poems previously published at NOO Journal

Contributors Biographies

Dawn DiBartolo

Bio: her poetry has been published in online venues including Rattlesnake Review, Song of the San Joaquin, Green Silk Journal, Poetry Now, Poet's Ink Press, and elsewhere. Her poetry collections include Love and Other Eternities (Publish America, 2005) and Blush (Rattlesnake Press, 2007). She writes because otherwise the words would ooze from her pores, and people will stare. A single mom of three, she works as an analyst for the State of California and lives in Sacramento. She currently has no website.

John Davis Jr.

Bio: he is a veteran journalist, poet, and educator whose experience includes the publication of his own book: "Growing Moon, Growing Soil." 10 years in journalism, five in education. His work has been published in literary magazines and ezines internationally. His self-published poetry collection, Growing Moon, Growing Soil, is a portrays the true Florida: its people, its places, and its heritage. He teaches English for the State of Florida School system and lives in Winter Haven and has no current website.

Tasha Klein

Bio: her poems have appeared in numerous literary publications online including Tryst3, Gumball Poetry, Triplopia, Unlikely Stories, Snakeskin Poetry, Webzine, Stirring, Locust, and elsewhere. She lives in Dekalb, IL where she puts her creative energies and old-fashion TLC into at least three poetry blogs and her fat cat, Baby. Visit one of them at: http://bookofnina.blogspot.com/

Francois Bogaerts

Bio: she began photography as a hobby when she was 17 on a compact camera. After a few years of saving money she purchased her first reflex camera (Praktica). She says the next step natually was to progress to the digital world with a Canon EOS 500N and a Kodak DC20. That was around 1997. She presently uses a Canon DSLR. She works as a technician with the european company Centerparcs and is active in photoclubs like ArteLoo and ISO400. She lives in Lommel. Belgium. Visit her at: http://www.pbase.com/suske/profile

A.D. Winans

Bio: he is a poet, writer, and photographer, whose work has appeared internationally, and has been translated into eight languages. He is the author of over 45 chapbooks and books of poetry and prose, including The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and the Second Coming Revolution (Dustbooks). A collection of Selected Poems has been published by Presa Press. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University and a member of PEN. He edited and published Second Coming for seventeen years, where he met and became close friends with the late Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, and Charles Bukowski. He lives in San Francisco and can be contacted at: slowdancer2006@netzero.com

Lisa Ortiz

Bio: Lisa Ortiz is a seventh generation Californian and a fourth generation California artist. With so many people looking over her shoulder, she struggles to make poems that put on a good show. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, and her poems have appeared in Princeton Arts Review, Wolf Head Quarterly, the anthology Split Verse: Poems to Heal Your Heart and forthcoming in the online magazine Tryst3. She lives in La Honda with her husband, two daughters and a big red house. Visit her at: ortiz@coastside.net

Anthony Lawrence

Bio: he was born in 1957 and left school at 16, working first as a jackeroo and then traveling for several years before returning to New South Wales to become a teacher and writer. It was while working as a fisherman in Western Australia that he secured a literary fellowship which enabled him to devote time to writing poetry. He has published 12 books and his poems have appeared in numerous Australian and international literary magazines, including Meanjin, Overland, Poetry Australia, LiNQ, Salt and Antipodes (USA) and he is the recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Australia Council -- one of the most prestigious funding awards a writer can be accorded in that nation. He presently resides in Hobart, Tasmania. Find out more at: http://walleahpress.com.au/al.html

Mucheline Hadjis

Bio: she says that painting for her is a passion, and has been for many years. Her speciality is "exotic things" like orchids, tropical flowers and tropical fish. She paints on a fabric canvas using liquid acrylic, watercolors and sometimes ink for the backgrounds producing vibrant colors with stunning contrasts. Her work has been reviewed in several art publications including MagazinArt and has appeared in numerous exhibitions including most recently, the Expo-Art in Beaconfield, Quebec, Canada in Nov. 2008. She lives in Montreal. You can visit her at: http://www.michelinehadjis.com/

Stefi Weisburd

Bio: she is the author of two poetry collections, The Wind-Up Gods, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award and Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet (for children). Her poems have appeared in numerous literary publications including APR, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals and anthologies. She received the “Discovery”/The Nation prize in 2002 and has been a scholar at Bread Loaf and the Post-Graduate Writers’ Conference. Her collection for children, Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet, was published by Wordsong in 2008. She has worked as a policy analyst for Congress, an editor at Science News magazine and a science journalist. She lives with her family in Albuquerque where she works as an outreach coordinator for science programs at the University of New Mexico. Contact her at: weisburd@mac.com

Christopher Cheney

Bio: he is the managing editor of Slope Editions. His poems have appeared or will appear in Subtropics, Forklift Ohio, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Shampoo, and other places. His e-book They Kissed Their Homes(Blue Hour Press). It is a poetry album of everyday landscapes with a foreground of disquiet. Like warm Polaroids, the poems develop clause by clause; their subjects—the mundane, extraordinary, savage—colorize and sharpen; a nameless, faceless population pulls into focus. Together with the work of photographer Estelle Srivijittakar, his declarative snapshots gain collaborative energy, grow even more lucid. The result is a glossy catalogue of the countless small oddities of our American quotidian. Take a look at the e-book: http://issuu.com/bluehourpress/docs/theykissedtheirhome

Closing Note: The editor would like to thank the contributors for the use of their work. Each contributor reserves their original rights. Look for the next issue of CSR online on Mar. 1st. Copyright 2010 by Maurice Oliver. All Rights Reserved.


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