About Abe Hinako, the translator Hiroaki Sato writes “'Born in Samarkand , Uzbek,' she once said of her life, 'I moved south through China during the Cultural Revolution and reached Japan toward the end of the 60s. I wrote my first book of poems, Shokumin-shi no Chikei (Topography of a Colonial City), in 1989, to show how much I had achieved in my study of the Japanese language in the ensuing twenty years.'
        Actually, Abe was born in Tokyo and has worked as a proofreader since graduating from high school. Her first book won the Rekitei New Face prize. In 2001, her third book, Umiyôbi no Onna-tachi (Women on Seaday) won the Takami Jun Prize." 

Carlos A. Aguilera (Havana, Cuba, 1970). Writer and codirector from 1997 to 2002 of the alternative magazine Diáspora(s), in Havana. He has published Retrato de A. Hooper y su esposa (Poesía, Cuba, 1996), Das Kapital (Textos, Cuba, 1997), Portrait de A. Hooper et son épouse suivi de Mao (Poesía, París, 2000) and Die Chinamaschine (Relatos, Austria, 2004) . He has published in such athologies as Memorias de la clase muerta. Antología de poesía cubana 1988-2001 (Editorial Aldus, México, 2002), Die leere Utopie. Intellektuellen und Staat in Kuba. (Leykam Verlag, Austria, 2005), and Pobuna Bolesnih. Kubanske Kratke Price (20 Cuban Stories from the 20th Century. Naklada Profil, Zagreb, Croacia, 2005). His essays and texts have appeared in such magazines as Letras libres, Diario de Poesía, Crítica, Revista de occidente, Manuskripte, Boundary 2, Tsé tsé, Encuentro de la cultura cubana, Lichtungen, Mandorla, and in newspapers such as the Frankfurter Rundschau and The Miami Herald. At present he is a recipient of a creative scholarship from the Sächsischer Kulturstiftung and the Dresdner Bank. He currently lives in Dresden and Graz.

Andrés Ajens: most recent dispatches: no insista, carajo (2004), Más íntimas mistura (1998) and Alberto Caeiro: Poemas inconjuntos y otros poemas (translipped from Portuguese, 1996). Among other irksome business, discoordinated the conferences Poesíalteridad (Córdoba, Argentina, 2002) and Surescrituras (La Paz, Bolivia, 2004), and has for many years collaborated inactively with Lenguandina (punto.org). Was born, obviously, in La Concepción, "Chile," in 1961 and now lives in Santiago, where Rosal crosses Victoria Subercaseaux.

Ammiel Alcalay's books include: from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002); After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the cairo noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999). His translations include Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) and Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996). A co-translation (with Oz Shelach) of Shimon Ballas's Outcast is due out from City Lights in 2006, and Beyond Baroque will be publishing a book of new essays, A little history, and a translation from Arabic (with the New York Translation Collective) of Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar's Selected Poems.

Ece Ayhan (1931-2002). Murate Nemet-Nejat writes, "One of the pivotal figures in 20 th century Turkish poetry, of whom one can say that what came after is not the same as what came before. Through his work a substratum of culture previously invisible--non-Islamic minorities, gays, transvestites, hustlers--enter Turkish poetry, never to leave it ever since. Paradoxically, the power of Ayhan's work is not revelation but bafflement. The revelation is not a linear progress but discontinuous gestures of language, surrounded by gaps. It is a language which hides as much as it reveals. The result is a continuous allure, which is never quite answered, like a long, unrequited love affair through language.
      Two of Ece Ayhan's books appeared in English as The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1997). Unfortunately the book is out of print. Translations from his first book, Miss Kinar's Waters, appear in the anthology Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House, Jersey City, 2003)."

Thomas Basbøll was born in Denmark and grew up in Canada. He now teaches philosophy and technical writing at the Copenhagen Business School. He keeps a weblog on philosophy and poetics at www.pangrammaticon.blogspot.com.

Anny Ballardini was born on July 24, 1956, and lives in Bolzano, Italy. She is a teacher, translator, and journalist, editor of the Poets' Corner, and her blog is Narcissus' Works.Among her numerous translations: In_Ri by Henry Gould; On the trail of words by Larry Jaffe (illustrated by Ballardini); Smokestacks Allegro by Rita Cominolli; Metaphysical Reference by Kenneth Hirst; from English into Italian; and from Italian into English: The Renaissance of the Self and the Notebook of Positano by Arturo Onofri.

Shimon Ballas was born in Baghdad in 1930 and emigrated to Israel in 1951. A major novelist, Ballas has published more than fifteen works of fiction, several important studies on contemporary Arabic literature, and numerous translations from Arabic. Although he began his career in Arabic, Ballas switched to Hebrew in the mid 1960's. Since then, Ballas, perhaps more than any other Israeli writer, has opened a window onto the political and psychological life of the contemporary Arab world, both at home and in exile. His works consistently defy categorization, from the first Israeli novel to depict life amongst the Arab Jewish immigrants of the 1950's (The Transit Camp, 1964) or the portrayal of a Palestinian architect returning home for a visit after years in Europe (A Locked Room, 1980), to the depiction of a community of Middle Eastern political exiles in Paris (Last Winter , 1984) or the ruminations of a Jewish historian converted to Islam in Baghdad of the 1980's (Outcast , 1991). Other books by Ballas include: Facing the Wall (1969), Esav from Baghdad (1970), Clarification (1972), Downtown (1979), The Heir (1987), Not in Her Place (1994), Solo (1998), and Tel Aviv East (1998). His important study, Arab Literature Under the Shadow of War, which had begun as his doctoral thesis for the Sorbonne, appeared in 1978. He continues to write critical works in Arabic, the most recent of which, Secular Trends in Arabic Literature, appeared with the Iraqi exile publishing house al-Kamel Verlag, in Cologne, Germany. Ballas retired from the Department of Arabic Literature at Haifa University and now spends part of the year in Paris where he does much of his writing.

Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Verse Press) as well as a new chapbook, Something Else The Music Was (Braincase Press). His poems have appeared in Hambone, Verse, 26, Conjunctions Web, and other journals.

"Edna Sarah Beardsley's The Word is a sterling example of homegrown linguistic conjecture. We have been unable to find any information about her, nor have we come across a single reference to her book, discovered by chance in a San Francisco bookstore, the city in which it was printed in 1958. No publisher is indicated, so we surmise that The Word was produced by its author." (Quoted from Imagining Language: An Anthology (MIT Press 1998) edited by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery.)

David Berridge lives in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England. Poems and sequences are published and forthcoming in Fire, Island, Shearsman, and online at Word For/Word and Great Works. Career Choices, a chapbook, will be published by Furniture Press. An ongoing exploration of connections between ecology, natural history and poetry takes various forms including talks, workshops, field trips, and readings.

Carla Billitteri teaches Critical Theory and Poetics at the University of Maine. Her translations have previously appeared in Boundary2 and How2.

Daniel Borzutzky's Arbitrary Tales, was published by Triple Press in 2005. His translations of Chilean poet Jaime Luis Huenun appear in Circumference; they will be also be used as part of the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program and will be hung on buses in Los Angeles. His work has been published in many journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Antennae, Blaze Vox, Bridge, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Mississippi Review and many others.

Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published a number of poetry books, including Peces de Piel Fugaz (1977); El Ser Que Va a Morir (1982); Bajo el Destello Liquido (1988), which gathers her first two collections; Tierra de Entraña Ardiente (1992), a collaboration with the artist Irma Palacios; and the volume of her collected poetry Huellas de Luz (1994). She was awarded the Aguascalientes Poetry Prize in 1981 and, more recently, a grant from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores in Mexico. Her book, La Voluntad del Ámbar, was published by Editorial Era in 1998.

John Bradley speaks only one language, and at times cannot manage that too well. He is the author of Love-In-Idleness: The Poetry of Roberto Zingarello. He has two books forthcoming: Terrestrial Music (Curbstone) and War on Words (BlazeVox). He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

Mary Burger is the author of Sonny (Leon Works, 2005) and co-editor of Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books, 2004).  She edits Second Story Books, featuring cross-genre narrative works. Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, nocturnes, and Five Fingers Review.  Earlier books inlcude Bleeding Optimist (Xurban) and Thin Straw I Suck Life Through (Melodeon). She lives in Oakland.

Salvatore Camilleri was born in Catania in 1922 and is a scholar of the Sicilian language as well as a dialect poet. “Quattru Còppuli” comes from Antigruppo '73 , a massive two-volume anthology of populist avant-garde writing, mostly from Sicily, edited by Santo Cali' as an answer to the mostly northern Gruppo '63, which was avant-garde and elitist.

Dino Campana (August 20, 1885 - March 1, 1932), the forerunner of the Italian modern poetry, was finally recognized in the ‘60s as one of its leading representatives. A scholar of Nietzsche whom he studied on the original German texts, he could speak and read also French, Spanish, and English.

Ana Cristina Cesar was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1952. Besides writing poetry, she was actively engaged in journalism and translation. She lived in England from 1979 to 1981, where she attended the University of Essex in order to pursue a master's degree in translation studies. She translated writing by Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Katherine Mansfield, among other authors. She is associated with the Brazilian counterculture of the seventies, and with poets such as Francisco Alvim and Armando Freitas Filho, was part of the Poesia Marginal movement. These poets established their own publishing and distribution channels, given Brazil 's military dictatorship. They organized readings and street happenings, and their poetry was quotidian, playful and at the same time, highly critical. During her lifetime, Cesar published four volumes of poetry and prose: Cenas de Abril, Correspondencia completa, Luvas de pelica and A teus pés. She committed suicide in 1983. A posthumous collection, Inéditos e Dispersos, gathers her unpublished work.

Wayne Chambliss is a poet and translator of poetry, prose, and criticism from sources in several languages, including Italian, Russian, and Ancient Greek. His work has appeared recently in Fence, jubilat, Drunken Boat, Octopus, and a number of other literary journals. He lives in New York City.

Adam Clay lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His poems are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, CutBank, Iowa Review, LIT, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.

Peter Cole is the author of two collections of poetry, Rift (Station Hill) and Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow), and has published nine books of translation from Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose. Cole has received numerous awards for his poetry and translation, including the Modern Language Association-Scaglione Translation Prize for Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (Princeton University Press) and the Times Literary Supplement-Porjes Hebrew Translation Prize for Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Princeton). He has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Cole, who makes his living as a translator and editor, has been visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Middlebury College. He lives in Jerusalem.

Brent Cunningham was born in Wisconsin and grew up in North Carolina and California. Since 1999 he has worked for Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of their "Poets Theater Jamboree," a now-annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. Recently he was named SPT's treasurer, i.e. the one who guards the treasure. His poetry, fiction, plays, vagaries and reviews have appeared in Radical Society, Chain, Rain Taxi, 580 Split, Kenning and elsewhere. His first book, Bird & Forest, was published in June of 2005 by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn.
         "Theater of No Feeling" was first performed February 7, 2003, at the Timken Lecture Hall in the California College of Arts, San Francisco. The original cast was composed of Colin Dingler (Niles), Suzanne Stein (voice), and Alan Bernheimer (Giles).

Chris Daniels, an utterly godless anti-capitalist, was born in NYC in 1956, dropped out of high school to become a dishwasher, never bothered with college, and now lives as a very proud and intermittently outspoken fellow traveler in the San Francisco Bay Area. He passed the GED test and received a highschool diploma in 1996. His translations of Lusophone poetry have appeared all over the place. In 2003, Manifest Press published his On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids, poems by Josely Vianna Baptista, with artwork by Francisco Faria.

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), and two books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003) and American Tatts (Chax 2004). He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2005).

Joseph Donahue is the author of three full length collections of poetry, Before Creation, World Well Broken, and most recently, Incidental Eclipse. He has also published three poem sequences in chapbooks, Monitions of the Approach, Terra Lucida, and Terra Lucida XXI-XL. In addition, Donahue has co-edited the anthology Primary Trouble, and the collection of essays on contemporary American poetry, The World In Space and Time. He has lived in New York City and Seattle, and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

A native of Jones County, Miss., Buck Downs lives and works in Washington DC. He distributes his poetry primarily in the form of postcards, available through free subscription. Write to Buck at Box 53318, Washington, DC 20009.

Ariane Dreyfus was born in 1958 and has published 10 collections, from L'Amour (1993) to L'inhabitable (2005). Her entire work is governed by the patient, undeclarative empathies suggested by the (anglophonic) title, Immense Respect, in a recent book. Though her work makes considerable play with the imagery of nineteenth century märchen and contes, and shows great affinity with the work of Eluard, poetic transformation for her is always the product of human labour rather than supernatural caprice: it exists on the far side of any romantic-surrealist appeals to love-as-reconciliation. In this she has some some affinities with the neglected mid-century ethical and musical thinker Vladimir Jankelevitch, though with Ariane Dreyfus, scepticism is the verso of surrender and devotion, suggesting that her closest affinity may be with the writing of her compatriot, Edith Stein.

Du Fu (712 – 770) was greatly overlooked as a poet during his own lifetime in the Tang Dynasty, but following generations of poets and scholars raised him to the level of highest canonicity. They granted his generation the title of “High Tang”—the only periodic distinction in Chinese history to contain a value judgment in its name—and called Du Fu the Poet Sage, in company with the Poet Buddha Wang Wei (698 – 759) and Poet Immortal Li Bai (701 – 762). These appellations are especially simplistic in Du Fu's case, as he was one of the most diverse and prolific talents of poetry anywhere; his poetry is serious in its devotion to history, autobiography, government, morality, society, nature, formalism, and experiment. The An Lushan rebellion (755 – 763), which nearly ruined the Tang and Du Fu's own life, may also have contributed to the lasting intensity of his poems. Countries break, Du Fu's poetry tells us, but his words, like the mountains and rivers, remain.

Kristin Dykstra's translation of The Winter Garden Photograph, an edition of Reina Maria Rodríguez' La foto del invernadero, is forthcoming from Green Integer.  Previously she co-translated Violet Island and Other Poems with Nancy Gates Madsen.  Translations appear in Circumference, boundary 2, A.BACUS, How2: Non-traditional Directions in Poetry and Scholarship by Women, The New Review of Literature, The Island of My Hunger:  Cuban Poetry Today ( forthcoming from City Lights), MiPoesias.com, & other journals and anthologies. 

Jeffrey Encke received his PhD in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University , where he served as writer-in-residence in the Program in Narrative Medicine in 2002. A literary critic and poet, he has recently published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, a deck of playing cards featuring excerpts of love letters he wrote to Saddam Hussein and other war criminals, available at www.matlub.net . His poetry has recently appeared in Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Octopus Magazine, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky, and 3rd Bed. Encke translated and analyzed the first act of Paolo Baglione for his doctoral dissertation, Manifestos: A Social History of Proclamation.

Mikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Born in Moscow, he moved to the USA in 1990.  His research interests include critical theory, the history of Russian literature and philosophy, Western and Russian postmodernism, and new methods and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. He is the author of 17 books and about 500 essays and articles, translated into 14 languages. His books in English include: After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture; Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication; and Cries in the New Wilderness: from the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism.

Clayton Eshleman's most recent books are Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), My Devotion (Black Sparrow Books, 2004) and Conductors of the Pit (Soft Skull Press, 2005, reviewed in this issue of Fascicle). A selection of new poems by Eshleman is available on the Ygdrasil website: http://www.synapse.net/kgerken/. Eshleman is a professor emeritas from Eastern Michigan University; he continues to live in Ypsilanti with his wife Caryl; sponsored by the Ringling School of Art and Design, they continue to lead yearly tours to the Ice Age caves in southwestern France.

Murate Nemet-Nejat writes, "Bedri Rahmi Eyüboglu (1913-1975) was mostly known as a painter, achieving a professorship during his life. From what I understand, his paintings fetch a lot of money. In my last visit to Turkey this July, I visited the Turkish Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul which had just opened. I saw a few Eyüboglu paintings there. They were competent, proficient imitations of Western art movements, for me, the worst kind of art there is.
     On the other hand, Eyüboglu is a superb poet, belonging to that group I call arabesque. In his work sexual obsession, through up your face, baroque gestures of language, transforms itself into a spiritual essence."

Graham Foust is the author of two books: As in Every Deafness (Flood Editions, 2003) and Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2003).

Benjamin Friedlander teaches American Studies and Poetics at the University of Maine. His books include Simulcast: Four experiments in Criticism (2004) and the forthcoming collection of poems The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes.

Forrest Gander is the author of five books of poetry, including Torn Awake and Science and Steepleflower, both from New Directions, Gander also writes literary criticism (The Nation, Boston Book Review, The Providence Journal, et al) and translates. His most recent translations are No Shelter: The Selected Poems of Pura López-Colomé (Graywolf Press) and, with Kent Johnson, Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (The University of California).

Rodrigo Garcia Lopes (poet, translator, musician, songwriter, singer, bandleader, journalist, polemicist) was born in 1965 in Londrina, Paraná, Brasil. He has published 4 books of poems, the latest of which has just been short-listed for the Prêmio Jabuti, one of Brasil's most prestigious literary awards. His friends are crossing their fingers for him. He is an indefatigable translator, most recently of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Mina Loy and Kent Johnson. His translation of the first edition of Leaves of Grass is just about to be published in São Paulo. Poems of his (translated by Chris Daniels and others) were published in Rattapallax #9.

Elizabeth Giancola is working on a translation of Esta Novela Azul by the Mexican poet Valerie Mejer. 

Alan Gilbert's writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety of publications, as have his poems. A collection of critical writings entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight will be published in the spring of 2006 by Wesleyan University Press.

Lara Glenum's first book of poetry, The Hounds of No, is due out from Action Books in the Fall of 2005. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Fence, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is one of some hundred poets who will be featured in Jerome Rothenberg's nineteenth-century prequel to Poems for the Millennium, co-edited in this instance with Jeffrey Robinson. Goethe's Venetian Epigrams, many of them suppressed during his lifetime, are among his most transgressive works, moving into areas of frank sexuality and anti-Christian rant. He is also a key figure in erasing the boundaries between poetry and science, or, to paraphrase Marcel Duchamp, putting poetry again at the service of mind.

Adam Good lives outside of Washington, DC, where he co-curates, with Tom Orange and Cathy Eisenhower, the In Your Ear reading series. He is also the poetry editor for Your Black Eye, so go there next. His work is in various stages of "appearing." He likes cutting up poems from the New Yorker, which yielded the pieces in this issue.

Judith Goldman is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), which won a "Book of the Year" award from Small Press Traffic in 2002; a new book will be out from O Books in early 2006.  She served on the editorial board of Krupskaya Books from 2002-2004 and recently co-edited War and Peace 2 with Leslie Scalapino.  And she hopes to finish her doctorate this damn school year.

Johannes Göranssen writes: "I teach at the Univeristy of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and I'm the co-founder of Action Books, which is publishing my translations of Swedish poet Aase Berg this fall."

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003) and The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004) as well as numerous chapbooks, reviews, collaborations & other itinerant writings. Recent work can be found in Your Black Eye and Weird Deer. After a decade in Massachusetts, he has recently relocated to Denver, CO. Find his links here.

Gabriel Gudding is the author of two books, A Defense of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series, 2002) and rhode island notebook (forthcoming, 2006), the latter being a book he wrote entirely in his car during 25 roundtrips on the highways between Providence, RI and Normal, IL. His work appears in journals such as New American Writing, LIT, Fence, American Poetry Review, Sentence, Jacket, and in such anthologies as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He practices Vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin, has begun two creative writing programs in prisons, maintains a blog, Conchology, and "Gudding" rhymes with pudding [Gabe would like to thank Kristin Dykstra, Carlos Aguilera, and Jasper Bernes for their help with some of Aguilera's language].

Baby, Carla Harryman's twelfth book and most recent challenge to the separation of literary genres features the sensual world and critical perspectives of a maverick baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt.” ( http://www.adventuresinpoetry.com/index_books.html ). Recent works for performance include Mirror Play and Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World (www.performingobjects.com ). She is currently co-editing a volume on the writings of Kathy Acker, which is forthcoming from Verso Press. She is on the faculty of the Department of English at Wayne State University in Detroit and is a recipient of a 2004 award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts.

Matthew Henriksen lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Katy, and teaches at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Harlem. His poems appear (or will appear) in 42Opus, Dirt, H_NGM_N, horse less review, Indiana Review, Octopus, and storySouth. He co-edits Typo and curates the Burning Chair Reading Series.

A leading translator of Japanese poetry into English, Hiroaki Sato, with Burton Watson, won the 1982 PEN American Center Translation Prize for From the Country of Eight Islands: Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Anchor Books, 1981). He also won the 1999 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikô (Columbia, 1997). Among his prose translations are Legends of the Samurai (Overlook, 1995) and My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima (Columbia University Press, 2002). Among his forthcoming books are Hagiwara Sakutaro (Green Integer) and Miyazawa Kenji (University of California Press). He writes a monthly column, "The View from New York," for The Japan Times.

Hosea Hirata is Associate Professor of Japanese at Tufts University. His publications include: The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburô: Modernism in Translation (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature (Harvard University Press, 2005).

Jaime Luis Huenun is a contemporary Chilean writer. His work has appeared in English in the anthology 4 Mapuche Poets (Latin American Literary Review Press) edited by Cecilia Vicuña. Puerto Trakl was published in Chile in 2001 by Ediciones Lom; it is a book-length poem (25 pages) about an invented port and it takes its inspiration from the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Four poems from Puerto Trakl appear in the current issue of Circumference Magazine. Additionally, the Poetry Society of America has selected one translated poem from Puerto Trakl as part of its Poetry in Motion Series. 2700 copies of the poem will be placed on public buses in Los Angeles.
      Huenun was born in Valdivia, Chile in 1967. His work has appeared in several poetry anthologies published in Chile. And in translation his work appears in ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (Latin American Literary Review Press). He now lives in southern Chile; he lives in the town of Freire and works in in Temuco, where he publishes Pewma: Revista de Poesia Joven del Sur (Pewma: Review of new poetry from the south). The translated selections are from his book Puerto Trakl (Lom Ediciones, 2001).

Geof Huth has been active as a poet and visual poet for at least twenty years, during which time his work has been published and exhibited in many countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He writes frequently about visual poetry, especially on his weblog, dbqp: visualizing poetics . His chapbooks include "Analphabet," "The Dreams of the Fishwife," "ghostlight," "Peristyle," "Qage," and "wreadings." In 2004, Huth edited & 2 : an/thology of pwoermds, the first-ever anthology of one-word poems. His micropress dbqp publishes minimalist, visual, and conceptual poetry.

Amalia Iglesias was born in Menaza, in the province of Palencia, in 1962. She won the prestigious Adonais prize in 1985 for Un lugar para el fuego and has published several other books of poetry. She lives in Madrid, where she edits Revista de Libros and La Alegría de los Naufragios. Her work has been widely anthologized.

küçük Iskender, the poet of souljam, is one of the great anarchic/spiritual poems of our time. Player of the gay lover in the pop/underground Turkish movie, The Weighty Novel.

Kent Johnson is editor of the newly released Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: The English Letters of Araki Yasusada (Combo Books) and author of Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (Effing Press). Forthcoming in October is Adventures in Poetry Blogland (BlazeVox Books), which you can pre-order here: http://blazevox.org/bk-kj.htm. The three poems in this issue are from a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled Homage to the Laste Avant-Garde.

Devin Johnston is the author of two books of poetry, Aversions (Omnidawn, 2004) and Telepathy (Paper Bark Press, 2001). His book of criticism, Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, appeared from Wesleyan University Press in 2002. He currently lives in Saint Louis, Missouri, and with Michael O'Leary, he directs an independent press called Flood Editions.

Poet, translator & essayist Pierre Joris left Luxembourg at age 19 & has since lived in the U.S., Great Britain, North Africa, and France. Rain Taxi praised his collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999, for "its physical, philosophical delight in words and their reverberations." Since then he has published two chapbooks of poetry: Permanent Diaspora (Duration Press) and most recently The Rothenberg Variations (Wild Honey Press, Ireland). In 2003 Wesleyan U.P. brought out his collection of essays A Nomad Poetics. Recent translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), Lightduress by Paul Celan (Green Integer) which was awarded the PEN Translation Award for 2005, and 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour (Inconundrum Press 2002). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited the award-winning two- volume anthology Poems for the Millennium and, just out from Exact Change, Pablo Picasso, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems.

Stephen Jourdain is a French writer of spiritual texts.  At the age of 16 he experienced a heightened awareness upon encountering Descartes formula I think, therefore I am.

Daniil Kharms was the founder of OBERIU, a group of absurdist poets and writers active in Leningrad in the late 1920s. Although politicization of Soviet literature prevented Kharms's work for adults from seeing print, he was permitted to write for children's magazines until his arrest and death in a prison asylum during the blockade winter of 1941-1942. Kharms's two books in English are called Incidences (tr. Neil Cornwell) and The Man in the Black Coat (tr. George Gibian); the pieces in Fascicle are forthcoming in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (ed. Eugene Ostashevsky).

While slouching towards a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale University, Lucas Klein is a labor activist who edits the online magazine of creative translation, www.CipherJournal.com. His translations, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at CipherJournal, Frank, Manoa, Composite Translations, Palimpsest, and Big Bridge, and he regularly reviews books for Rain Taxi and other venues. He met his wife in Beijing, got married in Paris, and lives in Connecticut, but wishes he were back in Chicago.

Anise Koltz was born June 12, 1928 in Luxembourg-Eich. Founder of the “Journées de Mondorf” (Bi-annual International writers' and poets' festivals) from 1963 tom1974, and from 1995 to 1999. Member of the Académie Mallarmé in Paris, of the PEN Club of Belgium, of the Grand-Ducal Institute for Arts and Letters. Vice-President of the European Academy for Poetry. She lives in Luxembourg and writes in three languages.

José Kozer (Havana, 1940), one of the leading lights of the neobarroco movement in Latin American poetry is the son of parents who migrated to Cuba from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and the grandson of a founder of Adath Israel, Cuba's first Ashkenazi synagogue. He studied law at the University of Havana, left Cuba in 1960, and received a BA from NYU in 1965. He taught for many years at Queens College of the City University of New York, retiring as a full professor in 1997, after which he lived for two years in Spain before settling in South Florida. He is the author of over 15 collections of verse. His most recent, No buscan reflejarse (2002), a selection from past volumes, is the first poetry collection by a living Cuban exile to be published in Havana. Two small bilingual collections of his poems, The Ark Upon the Number (1982) and Prójimos / Intimates ( Barcelona , 1990), both translated by Amiel Alcalay, have been published. Stet, his own far more comprehensive selection of poems, will appear, in a bilingual edition with translations by Mark Weiss, from Junction Press in 2005. A selected poems will appear from Vizor in Spain in 2006. He coedited, with Roberto Echavarren and Jacobo Sefamí, the defining anthology of contemporary neobarroco poetry, Medusario: Muestra De Poesia Latinoamericana (1996).

Mark Lamoureux's work has appeared in numerous literary journals online and in print. He is the author of 3 chapbooks: Film Poems (Katalanch é Press), 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer) and City/Temple (Ugly Duckling Presse). He is the managing editor of Fulcrum. The poem "Artemis" originally appeared in Circumference. 

Astrid Lampe was born in 1955 and now lives in Utrecht . She is the author of three collections: Rib ( 1997), De sok weer aan ( 2000) and De memen van Lara (Memory Traces of Lara) from which last these translations are made. Astrid Lampe's writing is exuberant, self-reflexive and densely concentrated; its playfulness with the materia of everyday motherhood, domesticity and city life are plied by a wry, very Dutch eroticism, both subtle and coarse. In a country with one of the oldest feminist traditions in Europe but where it is still commonly averred that a Dutch male will piss just about anywhere, Lampe marks out her own 'plaas' with remarkable skill. The 'Lara' of the title is the heroine of Tomb Raider rather than Doctor Zhivago or the Canzoniere and the crypts explored in this gameboy commedia dell'arte free up the pronoun-archetypes inside a continuous exchange of selves, fluids and (of course), words.

Karen Leeder is Fellow and Tutor in German at New College, Oxford. She publishes widely on modern German literature, especially poetry and has translated a number of authors, including most recently: Michael Krüger, Scenes from the Life of a Best-selling Author (London: Harvill Press, 2002; pbk. Vintage 2004); Raoul Schrott, The Desert of Lop (London: Macmillan Picador, 2004). Her translations of Evelyn Schlag, Selected Poems (Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2004) won the 2005 Schlegel-Tieck prize of the Society of Authors (UK).

Ben Lerner's first book is The Lichtenberg Figures, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copper Canyon will publish his second book, Angle of Yaw, in 2007. He co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts.

Li Shangyin (c. 810 – 858) wrote perhaps the densest and most impenetrable poems in classical Chinese literature. He was also one of the only figures to consider love a serious topic, demonstrated primarily by his untitled poems. Others of his poems, with vague or obscure titles, narrate love's travails through the guise of objects or history. The obscurity of his poetry has led many scholars to attribute allegorical or biographical readings to his poetry, tracing his allusions and linking them with details of his imagined life. The contemporary reader is perhaps better served by the poems' lush sensuality, masterful formalism, and subconscious associations.

Pamela Lu lives in Northern California and tours parking lots in her spare time.

Gherasim Luca (1913-1994) was, along with Gellu Naum, one of the principal poets of the Romanian surrealism. He moved to Paris in 1952 where he lived till 1994, when, following a great tradition of Romanian poets, he leaped in the Seine. Luca was the first to introduce the concept of "Anti-Oedipus," which was later appropriated by Deleuze and Guattari. His suicide note read: "There is no room left for the poet in this world."We hope to prove him wrong.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian national born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876, began his career as a Symbolist poet, founding and editing the journal Poesia (1905), later becoming the principal founder of Futurism, an avant-garde movement that embraced the values of simultaneity, dynamism, and speed. Best known for writing “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” published February 20, 1909 in Le Figaro, he would eventually turn to Italian nationalism and take up the cause of Mussolini Fascism.
       Paolo Baglione is the name given to an unfinished, untitled play Marinetti wrote early in his literary career, one that Günter Berghaus in Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti's Early Career and Writings, 1899-1909 (1995) describes as “quite typical of the drama Marinetti polemicized against in his Futurist period.” Encke's translation is based on an Italian version published in Teatro F. T . Marinetti (1960).

One of the greatest writers of Spanish America, José Martí is revered not only as the father of modernist poetry, but also of the Cuban independence movement.

Jonathan Mayhew, born in Boston in 1960, is a poet, translator, and specialist on Contemporary Spanish Poetry at the University of Kansas. He publishes the blog Bemsha Swing.

Aaron McCollough's third book Little Ease is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2006, and a chapbook, Vernacular Poem, is forthcoming from Effing Press. Previous collections include Double Venus (Salt, 2003) and Welkin (Ahsahta, 2002). McCollough edits GutCult. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in Kiseljak near Tuzla, in Bosnia in 1960. He is the author of five books. When the war in Bosnia began in 1992, he and his family remained as “internally displaced” persons in besieged Sarajevo. Together with friends, he started a new magazine Dani (Days), in an effort to support the spirit of democratic rule and pluralism during what soon became a systematic genocide against his compatriots. The magazine remains Bosnia's leading news and cultural venue. His articles, poems and essays have been translated and published in leading European and American newspapers and magazines, including The Village Voice, Conjunctions, Triquarterly, der Spiegel, and others. He and his family arrived in the U.S. in 1996 as political refugees and currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.

Poet, painter, and essayist Valerie Mejer was born in 1966 in Mexico City. She has twice been the recipient of grants from FONCA (Jóvenes Creadores) and for her book De Elefante a Elefante, she was awarded the International Award “Gerardo Diego 1966” by the Spanish Government. She is also the author of the books of poetry Esta Novela Azul, (Editorial El Tucán de Virginia, México, 2004) and Ante el Ojo del Cíclope ( Editorial Tierra Adentro, México, 2000). Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies El Corazón Prestado, Antología de Poesía de Tema Prehispánico and El Manatial Latente, Muestra de poesía mexicana desde el ahora: 1986-2002. Her poems in English have appeared in England in Poetry London and in the United States in Hunger Mountain Review and in Translations.   She has translated (in collaboration with E. M. Test) Charles Wright's Apalaquia/Apalachia, Forrest Gander's Torn Awake/Arrancado del Sueño, and Pascal Petit's The Zoo Father/ El Padre Zoológico (all published by Tucan de Virginia Press). Currently she has a grant from Sistema Estatal de Creadores from the state of Guanajuato to translate the Australian poet Les Murray.

Philip Metres' poetry and translations have appeared in numerous journals and in Best American Poetry (2002). Books include Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, 2004), A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). He is an assistant professor of English at John Carroll University. Check out http://www.philipmetres.com for more information.

Giovanni Miraglia is an Italian translator from the Catalan, French, English, and Corsican, and is an organizer of cultural events in Sicily. He writes about literature for L'Isola Possibile, published as a monthly insert by the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto. His edition of Giorni di Sicilia e di Germania appeared from Il Girasole Edizioni in 2003.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books 2004), and Breathalyzer (Edge Books, forthcoming).

Erín Moure is alive and in Montreal. She mainly serves to displace air in airports and translate poetry, or write it. Her most recent book of her own work (and translations of her own work) is Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005).

Sawako Nakayasu is slowly writing an insect-based book, tentatively titled Love, Ants. Her publications include Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (forthcoming from Quale Press, 2005), So we have been given time Or , (Verse, 2004) and Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002). Recent issues of HOW2 and Aufgabe have featured her work translated in English.

Murat Nemet-Nejat is in the middle of writing a long poem, temporarily called The Structure of Escape, to discover if there is life after Eda. Or, more precisely, at what point a group of little poems becomes one single poem. Partly it is a homage to the movies he loves, partly a celebration of the dizzy freedom of having finished the work of the Eda anthology, partly a confrontation of advancing age.
       Murat's recent work includes: “Eleven Septembers Later: Readings of Benjamin Hollander's Vigilance ” (Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles, 2005); “Turkey's Mysterious Motions and Turkish Poetry” (Translation Review (University of Texas, Dallas, 2005); Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman Books, Jersey City, 2004); The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer, Los Angeles, 2003); “Steps,” (Mirage, San Francisco, 2003); “Aishe Series and Other Harbor Poems” (2002); “Pitcher” (A. Bacus, Buffalo, 2002).

Gérard de Nerval (Gérard Labrunie) was born in Paris in 1808 . Les Chimerès was written between 1841 and 1853. Nerval died by his own hand in early 1855.

Mel Nichols lives in Baltimore and teaches digital poetry at George Mason University in Virginia. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including PipLit, Forklift Ohio, Anomaly, The Tangent, and Ixnay. A chapbook, A Continuation of the Green Tree Frog, is forthcoming from Edge Books.

Alessandro Niero, born in 1968 in Verona, Italy, teaches Russian literature at the University of Bologna. He has translated many 20th Century Russian essayists, poets and other writers including Alexei Parshchikov, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubenstein, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Sigizmund Krzhanivsky. He has six volumes of his own work, the latest of which is Il cuoio della voce (Voland) published in 2004.

Nishiwaki Junzaburô (1894-1982) was one of the most important poets of Japan. He had written poetry in English, French, and Latin before he finally began publishing Japanese poems in the late 1920s. With his theoretical writings on modernist poetics, Nishiwaki became a central figure in literary modernism in Japan.

Kevin Nolan is the author of five collections of poetry and many translations. He is Director of the annual Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry.

As Ronald Johnson's literary executor, Peter O'Leary recently republished Radi os (Flood Editions). Poetry has recently appeared in Chicago Review, Gastronomica, Gam, and Conjunctions, and in a chapbook, A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure (Dos Madres). A new book of poetry, Depth Theology, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. He lives in Berwyn, on Chicago's West Side, & is a Sox fan.

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature, a book of poems published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, forthcoming from Northwestern University Presse.

Henry Parland was born in Kiev to parents of Russian, Baltic, German and English descent in 1908 and spent the first few years of his life in Russia. In 1913 his family fled to Finland. As a teenager he fell in with the Finland-Swedish Modernists and stirred up controversy with his mixture of influences from German Dada and Die Neue Sachlichkeit and Russian Cubo-Futurism (all considered symptoms of nihilism and bolshevism). In 1929 he published his first and only book, Ideals Clearance. At that point his parents had already moved him to Kaunas, Lithuania, to get him away from his high living and dubious friends (particularly the notoriously homosexual Gunnar Björling). A year later he died of Scarlet Fever at the age of 22. After his death, his family, Björling and other friends arranged for the publication of poems he had left unpublished (including all of these) and an experimental novel (Broken). However his reputation was not truly established until the 1960s when radical young Swedish poets canonized him as a new model of an engaged poet (as opposed to the mysticism of Tranströmer, Ekelöf and other predecessors). In more recent years, his novel has received a lot of attention for its postmodern sensibilities, and an annotated version was printed earlier this spring.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, novelist, and short story writer. Originally from Tobago, Philip completed a Masters degree in Political Science as well as a degree in law, both at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. She practised law for seven years in Toronto, before giving it up to devote more time to writing. Philip has published three books of poetry: She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988), Salmon Courage (1983), and Thorns (l980). She is the recipient of numerous Canada Council awards and Ontario Arts Council grants, and was the recipient of a Toronto Arts Council award in l989. In 1990, Philip was made a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, and in 1991 became a McDowell Fellow. She lives and writes in Toronto.

Omar Pérez López was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1964. His three published poetry collections are Algo de lo Sagrado (UNEAC, 1996); Oíste hablar del gato de pelea? (Letras Cubanas, 1999), and Canciones y Letanías (Extramuros, 2002). In 2000 he won Cuba 's National Critics Award in the category of the essay for La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro (Letras Cubanas, 2000). He has published a variety of translations from Italian and English into Spanish, including Shakespeare's As You Like It. His work appears in a variety of journals in Cuba and abroad: boundary 2, Mandorla, Casa de las Américas, Unión, La Gaceta de Cuba, El Caimán Barbudo, La Naranja Dulce, Revolución y Cultura, Mantis, Espiga, La Isla Infinita, Opción, Alma Mater, Diario de Poesía and more. Pérez now lives in Amsterdam, where he is working on a manuscript of multilingual poetry. In his poetry Pérez López investigates, in part, how the national subject can be readily abridged into an effect of official culture by way of institutions and a language reflective of those “functional seasons.”

Joan Perucho, born in Barcelona in 1920, was a Catalan fabulist and poet who died in 2003. One novel, Natural History (translated by David H. Rosenthal) is available in English. “Days of Sicily,” excerpted from Els dies de la Sicília i la Germània (1994), presents contemporary Sicily as the degraded shadow of its own history. Much of this history is Catalan: for six hundred years, Sicily was a Spanish colony, ruled by an aristocracy that came in part from Catalonia. The poem incorporates Italian, French, and Latin text, translated in the notes.

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. When he was six, his family moved to Durban, South Africa, where he received his primary and secondary educations. In his late teens, he returned to Lisbon to attend the university there, but dropped out very quickly. After starting a printing company that immediately failed, he made a modest living as a translator of business correspondence and wrote poetry and prose graphomaniacally in Portuguese and English (and a very little French) until his death in 1935.

Tim Peterson's chapbooks are Cumulus (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and Trinkets Mashed into a Blender (Faux Press/e). His first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming from Chax Press in the fall of 2005. He edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts.

Simon Pettet is an English poet, long-time resident in New York. His Selected Poems is available from Talisman. A new collection, More Winnowed Fragments, will be available from the same publishers in the Fall of 2005. He is also the author of two books with the film-maker/photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and edited The Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler.

Sextus Propertius was a poet of the Roman Empire, born about 48 BC to an Umbrian family. When his family estate was redistributed among veterans, Propertius left Umbria for Rome. There, he fell in love with "Cynthia," a frequent subject of his poems (whose real name may have been Hostia). The success of his first book won him the support of Maecenas, a patron to Horace and Vergil as well. Scholars have determined that his last poem was written in 16 BC and assume he died shortly thereafter. Four books of his love elegies survive.

These poems by Reina María Rodríguez will appear in her collection Coger y dejar.  Other recent books include Bosque negro (2005), Otras cartas a Milena (2004), Violet Island and Other Poems (bilingual anthology, Green Integer Press, 2004), Te daré de comer como a los pájaros (2000), and La foto del invernadero (1998).  Rodríguez recently won the Italo Calvino award for her first novel, which is currently being translated into Italian, and she is a two-time winner of the Casa de las Américas prize for poetry.  She co-edits the magazine Azoteas in Havana with Antón Arrufat.

Martha Ronk's most recent publications include In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn 2004 ) and Why/Why Not (University of California Press 2003).

Poet and critic Norman Finklestein writes of David Rosenberg: "What do we mean when we speak of visionary poetry? David Rosenberg's trajectory has led him through all the “sublime disguises” that the visionary must assume in order to speak his gnosis. . Beyond the illusion of schools and styles, Rosenberg knows that poets are the ecologists of Paradise." Rosenberg is the author of many books of poetry, criticism and translation, including See What You Think: Essays for the Next Avant-Garde, The Lost Book of Paradise, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, and (with Harold Bloom) The Book of J.

Jerome Rothenberg's most recent books of poetry, all published in 2004, include Writing Through: Translations & Variations (Wesleyan University Press), 25 Caprichos, after Goya, with Spanish translations by Heriberto Yépez (Kadle Books, Tenerife), A Book of Concealments (Chax Press, Tucson), and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems by Pablo Picasso, co-edited with Pierre Joris (Exact Change, Cambridge, Mass.)  A Book of Witness, his twelfth book of poems from New Directions, appeared in 2003.  He is also the author of several assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium.

Born in 1947, Lev Rubinstein worked as a librarian while he took part in the Russian literary underground, a job that at least partly inspired his use of the note card as poetic medium. Rubinshtein's central importance to the Russian avant-garde, and his artistic affinities with the American “language school” poetics, make him an essential figure both to Russian and to world poetry; that he has been translated into German, French, Swedish, Polish, and English indicates the already-existing regard for his achievements. He has emerged as a foremost avant-garde poet, and has been widely published, and anthologized in The Third Wave (1992), New Russian Writing (1995) and Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry (2000).
       Rubinshtein's poetic texts are written on a series of note cards, often mirroring or distorting the various discourses of language. His poetic texts read “at times like an realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them. This genre is, in essence, an ‘inter-genre,' combining poetry, prose, drama, visual art, and performance.” In translating Rubinshtein, we have considered the possibility of supplementing a book with web-versions in order to re-enact the material experience of reading/hearing LR.

Ken Rumble is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group and director of the Desert City Poetry Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Parakeet, GutCult, Word For/Word, effing magazine, Coconut, the tiny, No Tell Motel, Carolina Quarterly, and Wherever We Put Our Hats amongst others. In 2005 he was awarded an Indie Arts Award from North Carolina's Independent Weekly.

Sagawa Chika (real name Kawasaki Aiko) was born in 1911 in Hokkaido, Japan. Through the encouragement and connections of her brother, Kawasaki Noboru, a poet and editor himself, she became a member of the lively community surrounding Kitasono Katue, and was highly esteemed by many of her contemporaries. Stomach cancer took her life at the age of 25, at which point her poems were collected and edited by Itô Sei and published (Sagawa Chika Shishû (Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika), Shôrinsha, 1936). Later a more complete collected works — including her prose, in memoriam writings from poets, and a complete bibliography — was published as Sagawa Chika Zenshishû (Collected Works of Sagawa Chika) by Shinkaisha in 1983.

Todd Sandvik is Poet Laureate of Carrboro, NC. He is a member of Lucifer Poetics Group.

Most information on Sappho's career as a poet and singer is easily accessible through a search on Google.

Standard Schaefer is a writer living in San Francisco, California. His first book, Nova, was selected for the National Poetry Series in 1999 and published by Sun and Moon Books. His second book, Water & Power, has just been published by Agincourt Books. His poetry and criticism has appeared in several U.S. anthologies, and two international ones. His fiction has appeared in X-Connect, Epoch, and Rosebud. He co-edited the literary journals Rhizome, Ribot and edited the Selected Poems of Paul Vangelisti (Marsillio, 2001). His currently the non-fiction editor of The New Review of Literature.

Evelyn Schlag was born and raised in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austrian where she now lives. She studied German and English literature at he University of Vienna, and was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She is an award winning author of seven volumes of prose fiction, a book of essays on literature and medicine which reflects her interest in Katherine Mansfeld and five collections of poetry. She has translated Douglas Dunn, Mark Doty, Gwyneth Lewis and John Burnside. Her novel Die Kränkung is available in English as Quotations of a Body, trans. Willy Riemers Ariadne Press, 1998.

Julian Semilian is a poet, translator, novelist and filmmaker. He was born in Romania and presently teaches film editing and serves as the Chair of the Editing and Sound Department at the North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking, after a twenty-four year career as a film editor in Hollywood where he has worked on more than 50 movies and TV shows. Semilian is a member of PEN America. He has published three books: A Spy In Amnesia, novel, from Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York, Paul Celan's Romanian Poems, translation, Green Integer Transgender Organ Grinder, poems, Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York. Recently he translated Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, for New Directions Press (fall 2005). His translation of Gherasim Luca's The Inventor Of Love will be out later this year from Green Integer. His new novel, Osiris With A Trombone Across The Seam Of Insubstance will be out this year from Spuyten Duyvil Press.
          Among the published poets translated by Semilian are: Paul Celan, Gellu Naum, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Fondane, Stefan Augustin Doinas, Tudor Arghezi, Urmuz, Gherasim Luca, Ilarie Voronca, Mircea Cartarescu in such magazines as: Exquisite Corpse, Suitcase, Arshile, World Letter, Mr. Knife & Miss Fork, Ribot, Transcendental Friend, Syllogism, Callaloo, Sun & Moon Kenning Review, Trepan, Urvox, LACMA and MOMA catalogues containing writings by the Romanian avant-garde. The October 2004 issue of Words Without Borders contains Semilian's translations of current Romanian literature. As a poet, Semilian has published in magazines such as: Exquisite Corpse, Suitcase, Arshile, Callaloo, World Letter, Syllogism, Trepan, Romania Libera, Vatra (Romania).

Oz Shelach's novel Picnic Grounds was published by City Lights; he lives in Paris

Evie Shockley's chapbook, The Gorgon Goddess, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2001. Her work has also appeared in Hambone, HOW2, Callaloo, nocturnes (re)view, Titanic Operas, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry Daily, among other journals and anthologies. She is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University and is believed to be the first member of the New Jersey chapter of Lucipo.

Celal Silay (1914-1974) is one of the lesser known of Turkish poets, more remembered among his friends for his adventures with women than his poetry. Not clearly associated with any group, his work, particularly poems written in the 1960's, anticipates a spiritual poetry written more than two decades later.

Marcus Slease is a native of Portadown, N. Ireland. He currently teaches in North Carolina and is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. Check out his blog at: http://www.marcusslease.blogspot.com.

Mary Margaret Sloan is the author of two books of poetry, The Said Lands, Islands, and Premises (Chax Press, 1995), and Infiltration (Queriendo Press, 1989). She edited the anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Talisman House, 1998), which surveys poetry as well as cross-genre and multimedia works from the nineteen sixties to the mid-nineties. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and has been anthologized in Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Talisman House, 1996) and The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets (Potes & Poets Press, 1994). She teaches at the University of Chicago and in the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be seen currently at the Emily Dickinson Archives "Titanic Operas" website, http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/index.html .

Dale Smith publishes Skanky Possum Books with Hoa Nguyen and edited 10 issues of Skanky Possum Magazine. His poems, reviews and essays have appeared in The Chicago Review, First Intensity and House Organ. His books, American Rambler and Flood and the Garden, are available through SPD. A chapbook, Notes No Answer, was published recently by Habenicht Press. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Sophocles was a fifth century BCE Greek dramatist. He was the author of 123 plays of which probably 20 won first prize in the Festival of Dionysus. Only seven of these have survived in entirety.  Not unlike many other affluent Athenians of the time, he was active in politics and he also held a religious office as priest of Asclepius. The Ajax is perhaps the earliest of his extant plays.

Rob Stanton lives in Leeds. He completed a PhD on 'vision' in American poetry in 2003 at the University of Leeds and he is currently training to be a teacher. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in can we have our ball back?, Great Works, Octopus, Poetry & Audience, The Rialto, Salt/Verse, Shearsman and Stride. His blog-sequence Copy can be accessed at www.sonofissue.blogspot.com

Ulf Stolterfoht was born 1963 in Stuttgart and lives in Berlin. He has published three volumes of poems: Fachsprachen I-IX (1998), Fachsprachen X-XVIII (2002), and most recently Fachsprachen XIX-XXVII (2004). For the first two volumes he received the Hans-Erich-Nossack and Christine-Lavant prizes respectively.

Nicomedes Súarez-Arauz was born in the Amazonian Bolivian town of Santa Ana in 1946. He is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and visual artist. He has published eleven books, including six volumes of poetry. In 1978 he was awarded Bolivia 's national Premio Edición “Franz Tamayo” for his poetry volume Caballo al anochecer [Horse at Nightfall]. Two of his poetry books have been published in English translation: El poema
      América [The America Poem, 1976; translated by Willis Barnstone], and Recetario Amazónico [Edible Amazonia, 2002 translated by Steven Ford Brown]. His work has been included in many international anthologies.
     Súarez-Arauz, who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, has been a member of the Spanish and Portuguese Department of Smith College , Massachusetts , USA , since 1987. He is widely known for his leadership of a Pan-Amazonian cultural vision. Recent publications include Literary Amazonia : Modern Writing by Amazonian Writers (2004) and entries on Amazonian culture in Oxford University 's Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History (2004).

Eric Sweet is a painter, an Italianist, and a translator of poetry and prose. He currently resides in San Diego.

Stacy Szymaszek recently moved from Milwaukee to New York to take the position of Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Her book, Emptied of All Ships, is out from Litmus Press. She is a co-editor of Instance Press and editor of Gam: A Survey of Great Lakes Writing, which is always given as a gift. More sections of "Hyper Glossia" will appear this fall as a Belladonna chap book. She is reading Robert Sullivan's Rats late at night.

The translator Hiroaki Sato writes of Takarabe Toriko: "Soon after Toriko was born, in Niigata, the Takarabe family emigrated to Manchuria—or Manchukuo, as it was called as a state established in the previous year, 1932, by Japan. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchukuo and Japan's defeat, in August 1945, all 320,000 Japanese immigrants became refugees. In the ensuing chaos and deprivation, 80,000 would perish, among them Toriko's father and three-year-old sister. (Before his death her father had her hair cropped to make her look like a boy to prevent rape and kidnapping.) It took thirteen months for the remaining family to make it back to Japan. In 1981 she went to visit the city where she grew up for the first time since the war.
       Takarabe published her first book of poems, Watashi ga Kodomo datta Koro (When I was a Child), in 1965. Among the books of poems she published subsequently, Saiyûki (Journey to the West), in 1984, won the Chikyû prize; Chûtei Gentô Hen (Magic Lantern in the Courtyard), in 1992, the Hanatsubaki prize; Uyû no Hito (Nonexistent Person), in 1998, the Hagiwara Sakutarô prize; and Monochro Chronos, in 2002, the prize of the Museum of Contemporary Japanese Tanka and Haiku. She translates modern Chinese poems."

Roberto Tejada [ Los Angeles , 1964] is the author of two collections of poetry, Gift + Verdict (San Francisco: Leroy Books, 1999) and Amulet Anatomy (New Haven, Connecticut: Phylum Press, 2001). He has published widely as a literary translator, most recently in José Lezama Lima: Selections, edited by Ernesto Livon-Grosman (University of California Press , 2005). His book, Travels in the Image Environment: Camera Culture Out of Mexico, 1900 and After, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University, where he edits Free Verse: A  Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics (http//: english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/) and Free Verse Editions, a new poetry series from Parlor Press. Most recently, he is the author of The Book of the Floating World (Parlor Press, 2004). “The Treason of Writing: Emily Dickinson's Letters ” is from a manuscript entitled After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing .

Nguyen Dang Thuong was born in Battambang, Cambodia in 1938, and now lives in London, England. He has translated poems, plays and short stories from Neruda, Cendras, Prevert, Beckett, Claude Simon, Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein and many others into Vietnamese. A poem of his, translated into English, appeared in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogues (Palgrave 2001). His poems and translations appear regularly on the leading Vietnamese webzine <tienve.org>.

John Tipton had an itinerant childhood in Indiana, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Illinois. After a three-year stint in the U.S. Army, he attended the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill where he earned an AB in philosophy. His first book-length collection of poetry, surfaces, was published by Flood Editions in 2004. He currently lives in Chicago and  directs the Chicago Poetry Project, a series of readings at the Chicago Public Library.

Mónica de la Torre translated and edited a volume of selected poems by Gerardo Deniz, one of Mexico 's most prominent Neo-Baroque poets. With artist Terence Gower she is co-author of Appendices, Illustrations & Notes. She is co-editor of the anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2002. Her poems, translations and essays on art have been published in journals including Art on Paper, Bomb, Boston Review, Cabinet, Chain, Circumference, Fence, Pierogi Press and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts. She is the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature at Columbia University.

Tony Tost is the author of Invisible Bride (LSU 2004), and the forthcoming chapbooks World Jelly (Effing Press) and "Complex Sleep" (Desert City Press). Recent poems can be found in Hambone, Talisman, Milk, Filling Station, The Hat and Verse. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he's a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group as well as a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He is also the editor of Fascicle.

Tatiana Tulchinsky, a longtime translator who has translated and published numerous works into Russian and into English, co-translated Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (2003) with Philip Metres, and the Anthology of Russian Verse, 18th-20th century, with Gwenan Wilbur. In 1998, she was awarded the AATTSEEL Prize for Best Translation from a Slavic or East European Language for her work with Marvin Kantor on Leo Tolstoy's Plays in Three Volumes (Northwestern University Press).

Urmuz is the nome-de-guerre of Demetru Demetrescu-Buzau. He was born in Romania in 1883, studied law and earned a living as a judge's assistant. His entire literary output consists of eight story/poems, (of which Fuchsiada is the longest) and one short absurdist poem. The story/poems were presumably written to entertain his nieces: Urmuz did not originally see himself as a littérateur. He was fortuitously found by Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi (see "The Chiming Man" in Exquisite Corpse #56 and Thus Spake the Corpse, vol. 2), who bestowed on him the Urmuz moniker, and published a volume of his complete works. Urmuz took his own life upon publication of this volume, in 1923. His fame is posthumous: the Romanian avant-garde made Urmuz their star; Eugene Ionesco credits him as his seminal source of inspiration. Tristan Tzara attempted to suppress the French publication of the Urmuz texts, according to noted critic Virgil Ierunca, "in order not to blemish his own claim at originality."
       The young and fervent Geo Bogza (long before he became a state poet): "Urmuz's presence among us: a whip to lash at our conscience. In the basement of our soul, bent deeply from the waist down, we follow the traces his steps have left, gashing violently the earth trivialized by the mundane.
     Virgin ears still bleed from the deflowering precipitated by his impetuous and virile sentence.
     From this moment on the word becomes a fertile spermatozoid. Urmuz too was a contributing surgeon to the operation which Voronca committed upon the stuttering and anchilozed language.
     At the century's crossroads: Urmuz swaying, a noose about his neck: semaphore signaling the disequilibrium of those leaning attentively over the clamor emanating from the soul's abyss."

César Vallejo (1892–1938) of Peru, is one of the great 20th century poets of the Spanish-speaking world.

Tim Van Dyke writes, "Butch grew up in Colombia, South America.  Butch lives in Fayetteville, AR.  Works at a mental hospital.  Butch has been published in Octopus and a few other places."

Lola Velasco was born in Madrid in 1961. She has published six books of poetry and fiction and appeared in anthologies such as Las Diosas blancas and Ellas tienen la palabra. She is a free-lance journalist in Madrid and serves on the editorial board of La Alegría de los Naufragios.

Stephen Vincent, poet, essayist & blogist, lives in San Francisco. These Sappho pieces are from a manuscript entitled, Sleeping with Sappho – an absolutely unique and exhaustive translation of the poet's entire known oeuvre.  A selection from this work recently appeared as a faux ebook.  Also recently is, Triggers, from Shearsman Books. Vincent also keeps a well-known blog.

Chris Vitiello's Nouns Swarm A Verb was published by Xurban in 1999. He lives in Durham, NC and blogs at http://the_delay.blogspot.com . Poems from his recently completed manuscript Irresponsibility can be found in issues of Shampoo, GutCult, Backwards City Review, Free Verse, War and Peace, One Less, and on Chris Murray's texfiles blog. He is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group.

Keith Waldrop is author of numerous collections of poetry and is the translator of The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabes, as well as works by Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach and Jean Grosjean. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and DAAD (Berlin). His titles include Hegel's Family, The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander: Selected Poems and a Few Songs, Shipwreck in Haven, The Balustrade, Light While There is Light, The Locality Principle, Analogies of Escape and Haunt.

Rosmarie Waldrop's recent books of poetry are Blindsight (New Directions) and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès was published by Wesleyan University Press, and a book of essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), is just out from University of Alabama Press.

Eliot Weinberger's most recent books are What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions) and What I Heard About Iraq (Verso, in the UK). A collaboration with Vija Celmins, The Stars, will be published in the fall by the Museum of the Modern Art.

Mark Weiss—art dealer, quondam filmmaker, psychotherapist and social worker, occasional teacher of writing, literature, history and psychology—has published five books of poetry, most recently Fieldnotes (1995), from his own imprint, Junction Press, and Figures: 32 Poems (Chax Press, 2001). Different Birds appeared as an ebook in 2004 (Shearsman Books). He edited, with Harry Polkinhorn, the bilingual anthology Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002). Forthcoming are Stories as Equipment for Living: Late Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff, edited with Marc Kaminsky (University of Michigan Press); Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer, translated and edited (Junction Press); and The Whole Island / La isla en peso: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, editor.

Wen Yiduo (1899 – 1946) received a traditional education at Qinghua University in China before studying in the United States—at the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado College—between 1922 and 1925. Returning to China, he became affiliated with the Crescent Society, along with poets such as Xu Zhimo (1895 – 1931). His poetry, published in Red Candle (1923) and Dead Water (1928), strove to achieve the classical rigors in vernacular verse, with a formalist quality modeled after English iambs. After the publication of his second book, though, he mostly abandoned his own literary work in favor of scholarship of ancient poetry, such as the Book of Odes and Songs of Chu. Japan 's invasion of China politicized him, and he joined the People's Democratic League, a third-party between Mao Zedong's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. He was assassinated in 1946.

Can Yücel (1926-1999). Murat Nemet-Nejat writes, "If one wants to find out how a gag may also be the purest kind of poetry, one can read Can Yücel poetry from the 1970's, when Turkey was politically in a perilous state, on the verge of a civil war: Turkish wit at its most irreverent--a caricaturist's stiletto."

Andrea Zanzotto was born in Pieve di Soligo (Treviso), where he currently resides. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including IX Ecloghe (1962), La Beltà (1968), and, most recently, Sovrimpressioni (2001). He has received several major literary prizes, including the Viareggio (1979), the Librex-Montale (1983), and the Feltrinelli (1987). His work in English translation includes The Selected Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto (Princeton University Press, 1975) and Peasants Wake for Fellini's Cassanova and Other Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1997).
      Poem copyright © Andrea Zanzotto. All rights reserved, handled by Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, Milano.

 

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