Through his creative energies Suárez-Araúz invites us to share his beloved Amazonian fables and stories, real and imagined. This culinary poet is both restrained and exaggerated with his culinary and poetic ingredients. He is skillful at selecting certain words and discarding others to create a graceful offering of the beauty of the things he loves, describing them with tenderness, mischief, and fantasy.

Edible Amazonia is a celebration of the palate and senses, a bouquet of language, a vision of history, an edible and mythic orchid to taste and comprehend life in the immense region the author labeled many years ago "the Amazonian green plains of amnesia."

--excerpted from Marjorie Agosín's Prologue to Edible Amazonia

CANDIED PAPAYA

Slice an average papaya,
removing the black seeds,
decayed teeth of the tropics.

Peel the papaya
and weigh it.

Add an equal amount
of sun.

From March to May place
in a mixture of water
and barrel of sky.

Remove the pieces
and place in a pot
containing a light syrup,
just enough to cover the fruit.

Place the pieces
in a sieve
and sprinkle over them
twenty thousand granulated
myths,

so that sunsets in Amazonia
will be like candied papaya,
a fragrant, cloying
and delicious treat.

What Seidman has recovered, and not by accident, is the tradition in poetry where language, its sound and most internalized meaning, has the ingenuity to render the once-feared emptiness of the page harmless and elevate the poet to a new height of consciousness. Where once the dictates of a highly rational poetry promulgated having the intent to write with purposeful meaning, purposeful phrasing, meter and rhyme as the rule rather than the exception, Seidman's work stands outside this limited approach to reality's thumbprint and instead demands attention be paid to the unexpected. At every turn, he coaxes and lures us with a music of words laid out in paths like precious stones.

--excerpted from Paul B. Roth's Introduction to On Carbon-Dating Hunger

REACHING THE STEP THAT DOESN'T CRUMBLE

Between stars and bread,
between the click of a light switch
and the bulb's white flash,
between the taste of salt
and waves folding foam on the shore,
(around the bend of a coastal hill),
between this or that, and
between the between which resounds in this chant,
the cherry ripe in the brain,
the panting of a man running in his sleep,
fishnet swollen with a catch of air,
twig-snap thundering in a canyon,
and a basement perched on the shoulder,
and an attic rumbling in the stomach,
there is a word which can be peeled,
there is an odor sweet as a dead goat,
a color blinding as a lemon,
and all that passes through my brain
as I sit at this desk is like
a breath whirling between
5 o'clock and the universe,
where clouds litter leaves,
and a rain falls up from the earth to
plant swallows on the branches of this tree.

When Steve Barfield's poetry is read, the reader should begin by cleansing his perception, as William Blake would have, of the entrenched and familiar approaches to poetry--exorcise the paraphernalia that the classroom has used to turn poetry into a trivial game, unlearn the impositions forced upon one by the advanced school system, run away from the axiologies of editors and critics, approach his poetry as a human being, a creature of emotive responses, depth perception, and a capacity for love, not as a cipher brainwashed and distorted by prior and preconceived poetic approaches and standards. Pre-established foundations must be discarded, eschewed, to find the radically singular foundation of Steve Barfield's poetic perceptions.

--excerpted from Duane Locke's introduction to Festival of Stone

THE GOLD MINE AT MOSQUITO PASS, COLORADO

Abandoned
a derelict orphan of hope.
The rusted lantern is a ghost of illumination.
Each sound has its own shadow.
At the black entrance are the newest sounds.
Stark against the lonely quiet
is the hollow sound of dripping water
into an occasional pool of concentric light.

From deeper in you will find the oldest echoes.
These antique disturbances are over 100 years old.
They are of steel on stone,
of happy surprise
and with no possible escape.

The worst noise is the groan of the timbers.
They are listening to remember
the soft drum of the rain.
These are the sun worshipers
torn from the steps of their own church
and made lattice work slaves.
A skeleton that holds back
a heavy black weight
in some kind of futile forever.

Péret sees that by man's decision to limit himself, and by man's institutionalization of smallness and dullness in society and tradition, the world has been narrowed and deformed. Man has created a thing he regards as nature which is unnatural, and a thing he calls reality which is unreal. He has deduced the laws of this artificial and perverse construction, and whatever does not obey them he scorns as magic or "miracle," the illusions of the backward. This attitude is equally arrogant to the miserable people who in their hunger for life create strange patchworks of truth and error, and to the genuine seer like Péret who stands in the light of actual nature and actual humanity, surreality and the marvelous, which somehow continue to exist elsewhere with a vitality which rebukes us.

--excerpted from Albert Frank Morritz's Introduction to Children of the Quadrilateral

THE ANIMAL OF THE UNKNOWN

The wind the voice of insects
caresses the cheek of a dying melomaniac
One of them larger than the others
jumps from one illusion to the other
with a mute laugh
that chills the livid bones of madmen
They too are dying
and they laugh because the laugh is their last round
and they want to kill an eternal sigh
But they are dying
and their death changes the shape of human desires
A pale young man
whose electric eyes are the signal lights of forests
gathers their dust
He smears it on his forehead which becomes a terrible cannon
aimed at the destiny of everyone

And it's over
the sky's tired clouds are fallen on the earth
which manages to cough up its last animals

Silvia Scheibli was born in 1946 in Hamburg, West Germany, and wrote these poems from her experience of living in the 1970's in California's Mojave Desert, whose jagged peaks, salt flats, dunes and washes seem the ultimate in desolation. Before her isolation, she studied literature at the University of Tampa, and was on the staff of Duane Locke's Poetry Review,along with Gerard Robinson, Alan Britt, Steve Barfield, Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz, and Paul B. Roth. Her early expression of the Immanentist vision can be seen in her first book, Silent Feet on Boarded Fountains; since then her poetic vision has ever more strongly been immersed in that subtle yet hypnotic nature of the Mojave Desert.

--from the back cover of The Moon Rises in the Rattlesnake's Mouth

BEYOND THE TRI-FORKED YUCCA

Beyond the tri-forked yucca
pants the mountain lion.
Behind rhyolite rockfalls
waits the rancher.
Clatter of cactus wrens in chollas.
From a special window the moon
draws one shadow and picks all others
up in his lips.
The rancher is blinded as by a searchlight.
Two coyotes circle.
The lion in the skin of silence
turns night into a river
and floats far above
blue piñon pines, where he rests
to lick the snow.

---

Infinite Days
by Alan Britt ($16.00)

The imagery in Britt's poems connects itself to an idea and is, therefore, deeper and more meaningful than embellishment or decoration. In this manner, a linguistic experience is born, one that is palpable to the five senses. No accent pieces needed-Britt does more than get close to the bone-he gets to the heart of the thing itself and makes it resonate with something deeper than exactitude. His images are painted as if vibrating, as if his letters were tuning forks. Britt's imagery, therefore, evokes a mood and meaning simultaneously.

--excerpted from Dr. Maura Gage's introduction to Infinite Days

THE EARTH PASSES

The earth passes above me,
or below me, as the case might be.

Blue skin,
completely silent.

Soundless,
it passes like so many earths,

so many planets, thousands,
...orange, yellow, purple

worlds that float endlessly.
These neighbors, within light years

of each other, are eyeballs
of infinity, vital organs

perhaps, to one or several alien beings,
while we frolic like germs

on the decks of yachts.
During long, misty days,

or on routine flights,
aliens no doubt discuss our white canvas shoes

& floppy straw hats with silk ribbons
billowing behind our olive heads

wrapped so tightly around
our tiny wooden brains.

---

Teaching Bones to Fly
by Christine Boyka Kluge ($14.00)

These poems pay attention. In them breathes a fierce passion for the world that configures the body, the body that transfigures the world. Here is a voice capable of informing the landscape of the familiar -- She dreams of flowers, like hundreds of crimson mouths, parting their lips among cactus thorns -- and re-visioning the surreal -- she's the blind bride / who describes my wedding night --all with deft and supple grace. This gifted translator of experience teaches us how to listen with our bones. Aware of the poet's duty to risk everything, she brings us to a place where Not one shivering thought / wears a life vest...

--Jeffrey Levine's remark after reading Teaching Bones to Fly

THE ABSENCE OF A HEART LEAVES AN HOURGLASS SHAPE*

Overnight, she is different.
Now she breathes only sand and salt,
clouds of talcum and dust.
Her chest is a hole
dug in a desert dune.
She inhales to fill it,
exhaling only shadows.
The absence of a heart
leaves an hourglass shape.
It takes so much time
to replace the missing weight.

Tears spent, she ignores thirst.
She doesn't remember food.
She closes tight as a seed,
storing herself for later.
She no longer craves even air.
But, oh --
the possibility of lightning,
like a crack in the purple-black sky,
the sweet chance of rain!
She dreams of flowers
like hundreds of crimson mouths,
parting their lips
among cactus thorns.

*To view this poem in a living fashion with both the art of Rick Mullarky and the accompanying music by composer Kala Pierson, you can visit Born Magazine's on-line site for this collaboration by clicking HERE

---

TRAVEL OVER WATER
by Ye Chun ($14.00)

YE CHUN , a native of China, writes poetry in Chinese and English, has studied at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is currently in the MFA Program at the University of Virginia. This is her first book. She was a featured poet in The Bitter Oleander's spring 2005 issue (Volume 11; Number 1)

PASSING A STUMP-COVERED HILLSIDE BETWEEN ZHONGDIAN AND DALI, YUNNAN

Back then I couldn't lift an ax,
still dreamt of the year two thousand,
communism, chicken and fish
for every meal.

You stick out all over the hill
like acne, you old stumps,
bodies taken to build
the megalomaniac's beds, along with my
fathers, and after forty years
have finally alchemized yourselves
into the hardness of stones.

My fathers once carried you
on their shoulders, caroling a labor song
or leaned on you weeping.
Those who died
had neither stone nor tomb.

As we drive on
to admire more mountains, rivers
and cultural must-sees of our homeland,
the dust splashed up by the wheels
falls back.
I feel we are nothing
but leaves pressed between four seasons,
when we can't love
the height, we'll have to love
the earth that swallows us.

---

Here's what's being said about
TRAVEL OVER WATER

The theme of journeys dominates this lovely collection of poems‹many of them image-filled and cryptic. Journeys across and between landscapes that are sometimes physical, sometimes metaphysical, but one that is always haunted and illuminated by a rich imagination and a questing intelligence

--Gregory Orr

Startling, confident, erotic, Ye Chun's gorgeous collection Travel Over Water gathers us into a universe both mythic and failiar. On the wings of her poems we are carried across the oceans of dream

--Michelle Boisseau

You can't read these poems without feeling you've lost something that Ye Chun has found for you. You may not even realize you've lost anything, yet you can't deny that cell on fire in your brain is her having found it for you

--Paul B. Roth

---

WHERE THIRSTS INTERSECT
by Anthony Seidman ($16.00)

Anthony Seidman completed his B.A. in English & Textual Studies, & Spanish & Spanish American Literature at Syracuse University, before going on to the University of Texas at El Paso where he completed an M.F.A. in the bilingual creative writing program. While completing his M.F.A., he lived for several years in Ciudad Juarez; he worked as an English instructor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. His first book, On Carbon-Dating Hunger, was published in 2000 by The Bitter Oleander Press.

---

THE HYACINTH GIRL SPEAKS

There are shards on which we step
when the glass dome shatters and we see
lucidly
that there is a last-
ditch chance to set our lands in order,
to splurge the wage
and buy a silver locket that gleams,
to fold the news,
and have faith enough
to glimpse the slowed light
fall
through the drizzle
while picking hyacinths.

Though the years ensuing
are blank as the pearl eyes of a drowned sailor,
though in our hearts
the Great Crab scratches, scratches,
and though we fear death by
any manner,
for a breath's pause
we are golden
in the throbbing silence,
the heart of light brims over,my arms are heavy with flower,
Milady spreads her embrace over us in
holie matrimonie,
while my eyes fail and
a wind blows us over the tropics
& ice-caps,
though time clicks like train wheels,
though the bridge will fall down,
and a dried root snaps
in the jaws of the black hound.

---

Here's what's being said about
WHERE THIRSTS INTERSECT

Journeying to Juarez, to the chthonic landscapes of his Latin American poetic forebears, Seidman poignantly takes us across borders of consciousness and returns us to new yet familiar places deep inside the psyche.

--George Kalamaras

Anthony Seidman is the creator of a poetic cosmos where guavas burn, where blood collects as powder and ignites. His is a carnivourous imagery, an imagery empowered by poetic solar friction, like a "sphere of blue air and smoking water." his poems seem to accrue in a psychic Juarez where wandering and drought, and tension, collect on a curious double level where the sigil intersects with revelation. Thus, the poems imprint the mind by means of ravenous suggestion.

--Will Alexander

---

VERMILION
by Alan Britt ($16.00)

Alan Britt teaches English at Towson University. His recent books are Infinite Days(The Bitter Oleander Press: 2003), Amnesia Tango (Cedar Hill Publications: 1998), and Bodies of Lightning (Cypress Books: 1995). Essays and poems have recently appeared in Arsonand Clay Palm Review. Interviews along with his poetry have also recently been featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review, and Poet's Market. Other poems have appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Confrontation, English Journal, Spoch, Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Puerto del Sol, Queen's Quarterly (Canada), Revista Solar (Mexico), Sou'wester, Square Lake, plus the anthologies, Fathers: Poems About Fathers (St. Martin's Press: 1998) and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy (Ediciones El Santa Oficio. Peru, 2003.

---

APRIL NIGHT

Cicadas, invisible, almost atonal,
mine the stone darkness
with their humid choir.

Syncopated, they pause.

Theirs is the blood flow
of alien sensibility.

The tips of their drills
cut stars.

They create an entire village
beneath cool, thick clover.

Remember, they are not so much
romantic crooners
for our pleasure
as they are philosophers
for dreaming ants.

---

Here's what's being said about
VERMILION

Images are the key to what is serious in life: lying, as such, but the great and only occasion to understand what is truth.
I enjoy poets like Alan britt who know where to look for truth.

--Yves Bonnefoy

Vermilion,the new volume of poetry by Alan Britt, is a concise but very humane piece of poetry. Two moods flood this volume-a mystic mood, and then a contemplative mood. The first one is not canonic, because if one can talk about a mystic feeling, this suggests the construction of each poem as embodying a sort of mantra. Eagles, white pelicans and above all the snow leopard are savior-animals and symbols not only for the sacrifice, but also for the pilgrimage that all of us, as interior monks, must undertake in our lives.

--Ruxandra Cesereanu

---

A CAGE OF TRANSPARENT WORDS
Una jaula de palabras transparentes

by Alberto Blanco ($20.00)

A Bilingual Edition of Poems
by
ALBERTO BLANCO

Translated from the Spanish
by

Judith Infante
Joan Lundgren
Elise Miller
Edgardo Moctezuma
Gustavo V. Segade
Anthony Seidman
John Oliver Simon
Kathleen Snodgrass

---

What's being said about

A Cage of Transparent Words

Alberto Blanco's poems, over several decades, have revealed with precision and delicacy an original imaginative landscape, in language and imagery that are at once intimate, spacious, and rooted in the rich ground of Mexican poetry. There should certainly be a bilingual selection that represents his full range.

--W.S. Merwin

This is a substantial volume, 140 some pages of poems presented in both Spanish and English. It's a seclection of Blanco's work from nine books and booklets, done by eight translators. Transparency, "trans-parents," and questions (lyrics) of insubstantiality / reality / are spun out on the foundational line "The birthright of being is suffering." The first section is surreal prose poems, the rest are personal modern lyrics. It is all done with great sureness, making a surprising bridge from the inconclusive and mysterious to a dry and faintly whimsical patience. Somehow these poems help you get loose.

--Gary Snyder

Alberto Blanco is the master of bright, clear, and sudden awarenesses that are the flesh and light so special to his poetry...

--Michael McClure

---

Alberto Blanco was born in Mexico City in 1951. He has published more than twenty books, including collections of poetry, translations of other poets' works into Spanish, and children's books. His education spans a study of Philosophy at the University of Mexico, Mexico City; a Chemistry graduate with Honorable Mention from Universidad Ibero-Americana, Mexico City and he earned his Master's in Oriental Studies at the Colegio de México, Mexico City, in the area of Chinese Studies. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant where he residenced at the University of California, Irvine; a Grant for Creative Intellectuals and Artists from Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico; a Grant from Cultural Trust, established by the Rockefeller Foundation, Fundación Cultural Bancomer and FNCA, Mexico; and a Grant for Artistic Creators as full member of the Creators National System, Secretaria de Educación Pública and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico. His awards include the Carlos Pellicer Poetry Prize, awarded by the National Institute of Fine Arts for his book Cromos, the José Fuentes Mares National Literary Prize, awarded by the autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez for his book Canto a la sombra de los animales, and an "IBBY Honor List" Diploma was awarded in Holland to his children's book También los insectos son perfectos, which was considered the best publication for children in Mexico between 1994 and 1996. The "Fideicomiso para la Cultura" gave a grant for the publication of the bilingual anthology of his poems, Dawn of the Senses, in City Lights, San Francisco, to Juvenal Acosta as its editor in 1994. A Prickly Pear Award was awarded by The Public Libraries System of El Paso, Texas for his book La sirena del desierto / The Desert Mermaid, voted most popular book for children in the area, 1995. A brief summary of his publications includes twelve books of poetry, a book of essays on the visual arts, two plaquettes, three portfolios, seven children's books, four illustrated books, nine volumes of poetry in translation, over five hundred publications in magazines, newspapers and literary supplements, and inclusion in thirty anthologies. He lives between Mexico City and San Diego with his wife Patricia Revah and their two children, Dana and Andrés.

---

AT THE PRICE OF SILENCE

The nights are heavy in the harbor,
the world turns around the wharf...
an axle of columns, in concrete
says: gold is a voyage too.

To the eye, the lights that return
from throwing their nets in the dark sea
dissolve the ear's terror
when they watch the one who watches them.

This is the sea at last, this is the sky,
the approaching engine repeats it
breaking across an apex of blues,
filthy rags of foam and gasoline.

--translated by John Oliver Simon

---

THE THEORY OF FRACTALS

In nature there are only two kinds of beings:
the large and the small.

The large ones always are what they are.
The small ones are symbols.

Of course one must know
large in relation to what...
and small in relation to what...

All beings are large in relation to something
and all are small in relation to something else.

In other words:
all beings are large and small at the same time.

They are what they are
-we are what we are-
and always and ever will be, symbols.

--translated by Gustavo V. Segade

---

STIRRING THE MIRROR
prose poems

by Christine Boyka Kluge ($16.00)

What's being said about

Stirring the Mirror

In Stirring the Mirror, Christine Boyka Kluge displays a mastery of metaphor, gliding effortlessly between myth and reality until these two states are indistinguishable. Her focus is on the paradoxical nature of our lives, which seem alternately fueled by loss and possibility. In one poem she writes that the "heart [is] the part that refus[es] to settle down" --a perfect description of the engine guiding Stirring the Mirror, a book characterized by wit, craft, but, most of all, heart.

--Peter Johnson

Stirring the Mirror is a collection of contemporary myths to live by. Traversing the boundaries between poetry and prose with her usual grace, Christine Boyka Kluge generously invites us to reflect on what makes us human. Her vibrant language and unfettered narratives, her cast of archetypal and everyday characters, her wit and wisdom--all delightfully combine to create a book of immense pleasure.

--Mary A. Koncel

As a poet of the earth and the imagination, Christine Boyka Kluge returns these gifts of creation through poems that redefine what it means to be in the world. These poems involve a private sense of vision and exploration as they encompass the outer existence of human understanding. To read this book is to know that Christine Boyka Kluge is writing poetry that touches us all.

--Ray Gonzalez

---

Christine Boyka Kluge is the author of Teaching Bones to Fly (Bitter Oleander Press, 2003) and Domestic Weather (2004), winner of the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest. Her writing is anthologized in No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press); (Some from) Diagram: a Print Anthology (Del Sol Press); Sudden Stories: The Mammoth Book of Miniscule Fiction (Mammoth Books); Graphic Poetry (Victionary); PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books); Text: UR -- The New Book of Masks (Raw Dog Screaming Press); and Online Writing: The First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press, forthcoming). Her writing has appeared widely in print and online journals.

Honors include winning the 1999 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award, the 2006 Hotel Amerika Poetry Contest, and the 2003 Creative NonQuiction Contest, and co-winning The MacGuffin's 1998 Short Short Competition. Her writing has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Christine has created interactive online collaborations with artist/designer Rick Mullarky and composer Kala Pierson. In 2005, one appeared in "Help Wanted: Collaborations in Art," a show by Born Magazine at Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. One of her prose poems was used as text for an experimental opera by Kala Pierson, part of the 2003 Composers and the Voice Series sponsored by American Opera Projects. Several of her poems have been broadcast on "The Naturalist's Datebook," a program on Martha Stewart Living Radio.

Also a visual artist, Christine lives with her family in North Salem, NY.

---

A JAR OF BEES

He stored his anger like a swarm of killer bees in a baby food jar, then hid the jar in the musty dumbwaiter at his core. The passageway under his ribs was dark and drafty, echoing with a warning buzz. Black static surrounded the space once occupied by an incandescent heart. Keeping his secret forced him to press his lips together in a chapped white line. Hives spread over his narrow chest in crimson Braille. Although his fingertips constantly traced the raised words beneath his shirt, he was afraid to decipher their furious message.

When his sister cried, he heard a pulley creak in his brain. He imagined frayed rope hoisting his jar up from a cellar kitchen, to be offered above like an exotic hors d'oeuvre, a quivering jar of gold caviar, both irresistible and fatal. They would unscrew the little blue dented lid, and...

He jumped up and down in front of the bathroom mirror, convinced he could shatter the jar. Squinting into fluorescent light, he searched his throat's rosy tunnel for bees, expecting them to explode from his innards like topaz shrapnel. None ever appeared; not one bee escaped. He wondered if a boy could be stung to death from the inside.

---

Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors
new poems

by George Kalamaras ($18.00)

---

What's being said about

Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors

This book is as big as India and as small as the breath it takes to pronounce one of its words. When you open the door of its cover, you enter another world which is a more vivid version of this one where George Kalamaras is shaman, interior astrologer, cartographer of fantastic spaces. Word-levitator and world-levigator. When you open this book, you enter the sensual world of "saris, kurtas, Banaras silk" while you simultaneously step into the spiritual core where Kalamaras has "Mapped an interior astrology / of ascent, altar of the spine."

His poetry is cantilevered, projected outward while reaching inward into the wonder-lured and prismatic. Like the rich Indian landscape, this poetry is erotically spiritual and spiritually erotic. Kalamaras provides a dwelling where "Something // is always burning and something / is always in heat." And ultimately the reader engages through these poems the transformative power of love/poetry, and with this comes the revelation: you cannot open this book without experiencing "the lover's tongue."

--Patrick Lawler

Stranger and inhabitant, taken by surprise, shocked by recognitions, George Kalamaras has made his India into poems. In them, a man is alive. Poetic energy runs and ripples through the text. His acute kinetic descriptions and silences flash across everyday exotic events. The excitement of discovery is cumulative.

--Marie Ponsot

The name Kalamaras means, as everyone knows, He Who Channels the Throat Songs of the Inflamed Detectives of Southern Surreality. He has more language at his command than Peter Mark Roget, but though we recognize the words, their electrifying combinations have never been heard before. Given Kalamaras's impressively penetrating knowledge of English literature, and his pendant for Asian poetry, Tantric Buddhist texts, and 20th century contemporary international poetry in translation, the delicious eclecticism of the poems and the velocity of their outrageously wide range of reference should be no surprise. But the alarming fact is: they are as surprising as they are addictive.

--Forrest Gander

---

George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of five previous books of poetry, three of which are full-length, Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series, chosen by Michael Burkard. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, Greece, India, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, including The Best American Poetry 2008 and 1997, The Bitter Oleander, Epoch, Hambone, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, Talisman, TriQuarterly, and others. He is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), and first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan). A long-time practitioner of yogic meditation, he is also the author of a 1994 scholarly book on Hindu mysticism and Western language theory from State University of New York Press, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence. During 1994, he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his wife, the writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Barney, and they often return to northern Colorado, where George and Mary Ann lived for several years in the 1980s.

---

THE CRAWL OF ASH

In the Banaras garden of your Bengali friends,
the world is fashioned from coconut shreds
and death. Life here is simple
and life takes its tone
from the sound of ash crawling
your name just a few lanes east
from the cremation grounds. At the river Ganges,
heavy iron combs keep the tongue
of a pilgrim in place. Two aniseeds
blow dark among glowing scars
of a man who, at dawn, approaches you
with a carp he's pulled from river muck.
A floating gold leaf is dulled by the scrawl
of small stones. Somewhere in your heart
its recent branch fastens the wind
around which charred remains of others
cull your molecular weight. Or
centuries of dark slags
into moist human skin. There is such a thing
as fear of loss, as your insides
shredding apart before the mirror
each morning from incarnation
to incarnation? As Bengali rice
placed before you on the plate, reflecting strains
of yourself you cannot refuse?
This, thirteen years in the past,
and every moment since is crushed Indiana
corn. This garden sprawling backward
toward river stone through threads
of raisins, cashews, and cruel coconut
milk. This ash, toward a fire of what
you might burn to become, or turn
away from time after time with what seems
a first and always brilliant birth.

---

Other Fine Books Still in Print:

• Half-Said selected poems by Paul B. Roth ($8.00)

• Surrendered Breath poems by Barry McDonald ($10.00)
  To order this or any other book from
  The Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry,
  click here

[ Home ]  [ News ]  [ From The Editor ]  [ Issues ]  [ Books ]
[ Orders ]  [ Contests ]  [ B.O.P. 2000 ]  [ Contact Us ]  [ Email ]