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Mental Ground - by Esther Tellerman...
...translated from the French by Keith Waldrop. Burning Deck, 17 Elmgrove Avenue, Providence, RI, 02906. 2002. 80 pages. $10.00.

I read, on page 49, Nothing will be disclosed/ but stone to dissolve/ at the border…. And it was then at that point that I had to return to poem one and begin reading again to be within the poetry which was my car, I within it, parked by a lake and geese overhead. And with my next breath moist on the window, it is now cold in Buffalo, I was released again, as I am by great poetry to travel within my life. To knock away the dirty dishes and the rising gas prices and the upcoming Bush war, such pleasure to dissolve the stone. And it was only two in the afternoon and I had pleasantly the rest of the half day and full night the do without borders and the meaning of the gas bill and again be, as I was when I was a boy, and first that poetry, poems like these, allowed people like me, and you, access, free and open, to other real realms.

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Essays - by Luc Fierens...
...with introduction by Tom Hibbard. Structum Press. 2002. Tom Hibbard, 31390 Hill Road, Hartland, WI 53029. $5.00. Ask Tom about the others books he is now publishing: thib@prodigy.net

Luc Fierens lives in Belgium where he is centrally networked with the vast web of European mail-artists, (which extends into the USA), contemporary Flux artists, neo-dadaists, performance and sound poets and visual poets working in the area of collage writing. Like us here, in the vast dumbness of an America that allows George W. Bush to hold the title President, Luc Fierens is brilliant, creative and unknown. So, here is your chance, you meta-poets, visualists, mail-artists, and contrary thinkers and creators, to be most pleasantly influenced by a host of insight comments into the creative passion and person of Luc Fierens. In this small text I think is reveled the true nature of the artist, which is in each moment creatively rules. And for the visual artist the collage is an endless collage and all everything becomes the material of the grand collage of living and each day adds to it and essays are just another form in which to exercise collage, visual writing. Here are collages and juxtaposed diary entries and critical comment and an introduction by Tom Hibbard to place it all in a context. A joy. Hey, you avant-gourd! (yes it is supposed to be that spelling - be creative) Are any of you out there? Check this out! Contact Hibbard. And then contact Fierens: Luc.Fierens@overtoom.be

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Small World - by Jonathan L. Roses.
Ibbetson Street Press, Doug and Dianne Holder, 25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143. 16 pages. $5.00

A pleasant surprise to find these poems in this book in the mail. And when I read the poem Snail, in which the poet's father cooks a snail to brew a snail broth, I knew, yes, the broth of memory brewed with poetry was in the cup of my hand. The steam of these, the perfume, the poet is in the world.

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Downwind From the Fires of Nothingness - by Tom Kryss.
Kirpin Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, Washington 98668-2943. $15. Plus $2.00 shipping and handling. Make checks payable to A. Horvath. Also available: Falling Through the Cracks by Tom Kryss.

Poems of sparrows and rainy urban streets with scraps of paper stuck to the pavement of the imagination, so Kryss moves about in poetry as a alchemist, "…with a knowledge that guides… the artisans transform common materials/ into small objects of wonder." He reaches out in these tight lines, with these crafted lines like a baseball player from one of his poems, to catch, to reach for IT! IT the space between the real that is then the poem and the poetry comes up through the fissures in humanity from everywhere and we are all angels and sparrows. The IT of poetry is everywhere in the poems of Tom Kryss. He finds IT in the face of Jane Goodall, in an old black man in a wheelchair, in midgets, in a children's librarian. What I like in the poems of T. Kryss is that they opened in me the notion that poetry does not just belong to small circle of masturbating precious poodles but is in fact all places at all times and one needs only to engage IT. There IT is. Here IT is. Here is a book of poems by Tom Kryss, a ring of keys.

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Window: 9/11 - by Eve Packer + Noah Howard. CD. Altsax Records.
For more information, price etc. contact: Altsax Records, Northcountry Cadence Bldg. Redwood, New York 13679. or evebpacker&aol.com

     HERE! Hear. Here is a single CD response to the horrors of 9/11 New York resident poet Eve Packer opening heart open ears hear here recordings of her poem about incident terror as they occurred and reoccur in memory, 9/11 continue to be unforgettable 9/11 hear her poem as there were no birds in south Manhattan but Eve is a bird, 9/11 bird's still sing song with the heart, with heart pumping blood south of 14th and at the White Horse she is song, song still and song alive with action and flying and merge with New York horn sound without the twin towers still Noah Howard horns Amazing Grace and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. New York is still. New York is still alive. And there still are birds.

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