Wendel Scutti brings us a short story which begins with a positive pregnancy test and ends with, well, what sort of a teaser would this be if we told you where it ends? This is an exploration of the dichotomy of singularity and connection, and a story that worries out the complications of a single thread. An excerpt:

Now Nancy pauses, listens to the droning sound of passing cars and inhales the faint scent of exhaust fumes. There is an entire generation lost to this city, Nancy thinks: Aborted children of women like me. Former suburban girls who arrive by bus with a few hundred dollars and vague artistic aspirations. Twenty-somethings who find the only thing they can afford is a studio apartment in some marginal, really dangerous neighborhood. Childish women who just barely survive but who are too stubborn to give up and leave. Girls who feel lonely and drink too much and miss their periods then calculate days and dollars, knowing they will be unable to rely on the casual friend or boyfriend who is too focused on his own struggles to help in any real way.

—Wendel Scutti

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

endwar has put together a collection of ultra-minimalist poems that don’t just look at language, they catch language in the act of looking back at us. And then they wink. It is impossible to apply one single term to the range of work in this collection. It is at times concrete, at times typoem, at times visual poem, at times conceptual poem, at times typewriter poem, but at all times it is poetry at its finest. An example:

(
my
hand
remembers
 
the shape
of your
hand
)

     —endwar

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Neil Ellman brings us a collection of Ekphrastic poems written in response to and in furtherance of the surreal in art. Titles refer interested readers to the works the poems responded to, but the poems stand firmly on their own and can be appreciated by all readers regardless of familiarity with the art invoked. An excerpt:

Love Parade
(Francis Picabia, oil on canvas, 1917)

When machines fall in love
There are few complaints
Only the wonder that their circuits spark.

There are no questions
Of polarity or cultural class
Mechanical differences so slight
That they cannot be engineered
Or how they would raise their young.

They take a vow
Like the rest of us-
I do take thee to be my mate
To have and to hold
In sickness and in health
Till death do us part
Knowing that death is rust
As it is with the rest of us.

They raise families, go to church
Where they worship an electrical god
Who gave them life
And the promise of not being
Stripped, disassembled and junked.

They work and seldom sleep
Devote their lives to the greater good
Face the usual dilemmas of their kind
And ours.

They grow old and their armatures creak
And then they die
Just like the rest of us.

—Neil Ellman

28 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Kellar Wilson doesn’t bend language, and he doesn’t break it. He refashions it, reforges it, reforms it, and in the process strengthens its ability to communicate. An excerpt:

In Sane Relations And Showers II

What an incredible advance it would be
                                 to be
                            able to
               at a glance tell
if the psychosis of [the thing]
was compatible with your own.
 
Attractions gaining momentum
in all their dynamic senses
the closer one gets
    /to a decision/.
 
Glossing over (in this rush) non-trivial details
and thus, upon entering (that first time)
[things] ripple cold
(with papers signed
                     /unclothed and revealed/
two seconds too late)
 
/just after
(that crucial) nick of time/

—Kellar Wilson

60 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Carol Clark Williams takes as her starting point the limberness of language and the obstacle course of the daily. By working, working, working at the knots, she is able to carefully unravel them without breaking the silver links. An excerpt:

Too Far Off to See the Wizard

A half life spent
hiding under windows
so no one can see
she holds long imaginary dialogues
with therapists her husband says
they can't afford to see
her skin draws thin over hollowing
wrist bone like the knob on the shift
in a Chevy where he ran his hands over
her shrinking body down below
the car windows she crouches
on the kitchen floor in the corner
so no one can see
she's home in the mean time
he puts his shoulder to the wheel
drives himself to work hands over
his paycheck accidentally
loses the mortgage payment
somewhere along the pavement
the key to owning their home
has tread marks on the envelope
the postage stamp in the corner
frays and flaps finally detaches
is whisked away in widening circles
on a listless wind as she is as he is
as time snaps like a high strung little dog
yapping at their run-down heels

—Carol Clark Williams

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Candace Kaucher takes the line, the thread of a thought, and teases out all individual microfibers that can come loose, dips each end in the stuff that turns metal rods into sparklers, then lights them all and writes down the song the sizzle makes. An excerpt:

Some days you are trapped.
Some days you are not.
All the days are the same.
So are you but you're too stupid
to know the difference.
Relativity equalizes grandiosity.
Anomalies are all local events,
All the songs on the radio
say the same thing:
whatever you are feeling.
Injustice started in grade school
when I crossed the street against the rules.
All hurt has been the same
ever since.

—Candace Kaucher

56 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Jennifer Hill has performed a tour de force of incomparable compactness. 36 Holiday Fictions (one for each of the possible plots in all of literature) in 140 characters each, in which the letter L never appears. Twisted and wrong and completely delightful all rolled together in red velvet trimmed in white. The perfect book for anyone who loves or hates the holidays. An excerpt:

Sacrifice of Loved Ones

The daughter recovered from her Christmas fever. “Nutter has to go,” her mother said as she washed the barf from the stuffed chipmunk’s ear.

—Jennifer Hill

40 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Eileen R. Tabios brings us a numbered sequence of prosepoem Synopses that strike the mind’s eye like an oil-filled kaleidoscope. Patterns merge and emerge in shifting repetitions that succeed in what all poetry attempts: to cover more ground than they should have been able. An excerpt:

from Synopsis #7

It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

—Eileen R. Tabios

16 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.

Michael Aro’s poems speak with the voice of authority that is the natural by-product of a learning that runs both deep and wide. To read his writing is to understand that language is, indeed, the software which runs on the wetware of our brains. An excerpt:

5.

I shave him each day with shaving cream and a
Safety razor, cutting carefully around the
Surgical tape that holds the oxygen
Against his face. His face is fallen and his skin
Is wrinkled but very soft. I am careful not to cut him.
That is not to say I never cut him.
Love is not perfect.
I pull the skin tight under his neck and sometimes
Shave him twice, hoping it will help make him
Comfortable in his deep dream of life.
At other times I sit in the chair beside his bed
And read to him.
I have no mother, husband or children
To take away my time.
I have a job I need to keep.
It may only be for a few more days I am told
And then they will unplug him.
He will gather up his soul around him like a coat
And smiling to himself at his own simple humor
Leave without saying a single word,
As if that were the point of everything.

—Michael Aro

58 pages. $10, includes standard shipping within the Continental USA.