WhimsyLand

I just noticed Tony R. has a book coming out from pi-lot books. 

I spent the afternoon with Jeffrey Lee, poetry editor and co-director of MMM.  He reminds me to remind you:

• Volume VII, No. 1 is now out and available for purchase.
• The Volume VII Release Party will be held in Boulder on January 26th.  Details here.
• Anne-Marie Cusak, winner of our 2006 book contest for Silkie, will be at the MMM table at the AWP book fair, signing books. 
• The MMM Poetry Book Contest is open for manuscript submission, details here.
• MMM submissions can now be made via snailmail or online.

I actually read every page of Ploughshares, including the fiction (some of which was excellent).  The army of Names was impressive, including Frank Bidart, Dan Chiasson, Henri Cole, Peter Cooley, W. S. Di Piero, Landis Everson, Brendan Galvin, Linda Gergerson, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, John Hollander, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Colette Inez, Jennifer L. Knox, Jeffrey Levine, W.S. Merwin, Linda Pastan, Ed Pavlic, Robert Pinsky, J. Allyn Rosser, Mark Rudman, Tomaz Salamun, Elizabeth Spires, Mark Strands, Charles Wright, and Franz Wright, among others.  Surprisingly (at least to me), I liked Hirshfield's Critique of Pure Reason, and J. Allyn Rosser's China Map, and Fanny Howe's Back Then, and Pinksy's El burro es un animal, and Amy Scattergood's The Secrecy of Animals (but partly, I think,  because of her wonderful name).    Here's a few more that made the cut for me:

Michael Hofmann, Idyll:  "even more elaborate spiders' webs will sheet off the corners; / rust stains and mildew and rot will spread chromatically"
Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Cage:  "See the green-bottle flies over the giant catfish rotting on a rock, / General Armstrong's hoofed men swarming down a hillside with smoke."
Ed Ochester, with the zany Pasta: "and orzo and penne and rigatoni and / of course gay bow-tie farfalle which / makes me think of my favorite restaurant"
Joyce Peseroff, Brownfield Sonnets:  "3.  Whose Woods These Are / I think I know the guy who backpacks up / to Patton's tract, tending his dope.  He plants / between slash piles on paper company land,"
 
This from Maxine Chernoff's He Picked Up His Pen in Her Defense, in the recent Verse:  "She had done a great wrong.  Over a dozen people suffered. // She was said to sweat literature. // Marriage suited her better than nakedness. // His fingers curled around the bone of his hip."

See you tomorrow.