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"The Muse of Museums has found her poet in Lucille Lang Day. She has a painter's eyes, a scientist's mind and an alchemist's soul. In her museum poems-be they dedicated to art, anthropology, science or pinball-she describes the world we enter with scientific precision, paints it with colorful words, then throws in a tincture of wild imagination, memory, a drop of ancestral spirit and proclaims: 'Let there be magic!' and there is magic, in poem after poem. The shaman whose costume is preserved in a glass case rises to fly over oceans. At the Pinball Museum, with her nine-year-old grandson, we are suddenly in the company of his grandfather, 'slender and seventeen,' playing a mean pinball. In the art museum a female Buddha dances for us in the poet's eye. Read these poems and you too will be touched by magic." ~~~ - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Little House on Stilts Remembers and The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way ~~~~~ Lucille Lang Day is the author of eight previous poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, The Book of Answers, and Infinities. Her first collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She has also published a children's book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She earned her MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University and her PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for many years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley.

Daniel J. Langton was born in Paterson, New Jersey and raised in East Harlem with his brothers and sister. He is married to Eve and they have a son, Mark. They live in San Francisco, where he teaches English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. His poetry has appeared in such journals as the Nation, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the TLS, the Harvard Advocate and the Iowa Review, and has been awarded the London Prize, the Devins Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and others. This is his seventh collection.Daniel J. Langton was launched into a life of writing poetry by William Carlos Williams. As he tells the story, "When I was just starting out, I went to a reading by William Carlos Williams. Afterward I showed him a poem of mine, and he told me, I don't care what you're doing, quit your job, and write nothing but poetry. And that's what happened."SOME COMMENTS ON EARLIER BOOKS BY DANIEL J. LANGTON"These poems have a lovely pacing and interior radiance." -Tess Gallagher. . ."superbly written, beautifully controlled, and yet continually freshened by a kind and fresh imagination." -Robert Bly. . ."such beauty, so moving, so beautifully made that I have to tell you it is one of the finest lyrics in the language." -William Carlos Williams"The poems I have known before are as fresh as ever. The new ones shimmer." -Pamela Skewes-Cox"Dan Langton may be America's greatest living poet." -Richard Martin

Tom Hazuka has co-edited the short story anthologies Flash Fiction, Sudden Flash Youth, You Have Time for This and A Celestial Omnibus, and published the novels The Road to the Island, In the City of the Disappeared, and Last Chance for First. He teaches fiction writing at Central Connecticut State University.Tom Hazuka's Flash Fiction Funny is a delight. Comical, silly, absurd, slapstick, quirky and always fun, it tickles. Well-crafted flashes by established and up-and-coming authors find humour in a wonderful array of characters and scenarios: waitresses, teachers, musicians, dentists, gynaecologists, Barbie dolls and superheroes; first dates, sexual fantasies, walks with ABBA and swimming with chickens. There are also porcelain wiener dogs. Some flashes reboot Shakespearean tragedy, Bible stories and fairy tales, others refresh the on-screen world of Google and PowerPoint. Ranging from Prince Charming's shoe fetish to a male model's emotional investment in yoga pants, this endlessly surprising anthology is light-hearted but also warm-hearted; its humour doesn't mock or belittle but offers moments of insight into growing up, growing old, loving and living. Enjoy!-Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler, Editors, Flash:The International Short-Short Story Magazine (Chester, UK)You know those sketches on Saturday Night Live that go on too long? None of these stories do. The secret of comedy is timing, and Flash Fiction Funny is comic perfection.-Wesley Stace, novelist and (as John Wesley Harding) musician and host of NPR's Cabinet of WondersIt's no surprise that Tom Hazuka, one of the originating and still best editors of flash fiction, has produced another great collection-and these flashes are very, very funny.-Robert Shapard, co-editor of Flash Fiction Forward, Sudden Fiction Latino and the forthcoming Flash Fiction International

~~The Scent of Water has the memorable imagery, engaging perceptions, and heightened language we have a right to expect in genuine poetry. But it offers something else, something frequently missing in contemporary American poetry, even though that something is what most readers still desire: a personal voice speaking meaningfully about real life. Barone has been writing notable poems for thirty-five years, long enough to slalom over the waves of both confessional and language school poetry. Like the "one true horse" in one of her poems, by forgetting the race she has found her own inimitable dance, and it is not to be missed. ~~-Kay Cavanaugh Barnes, author of Mortal Means~~~~There are poems in this book I adore, the others I simply love. Imagine a woman on a path stopping to examine something she's found, and you discover in her description a new world. Barone makes this happen by using exact language and music in precisely right images and quirky insights: "Nature is a maniac for sperm." "I hate the tyranny of windows." Her world is family, home, garden and the river; like Brueghel in his art, she's made scenes of their appearance on earth into a record of time. ~~-Sharon Chmielarz, author of Calling~~~~In The Scent of Water Patricia Barone has united poems of the personal with poems that engage the larger world and its chaos. "We're sinking through the river silt to bedrock," the poet writes as she leads us deeply into nature and our own natures. With authentic insight, she describes what is at the border between the visual and the visionary, the ordinary and the ineffable, and gaining and losing. Her language pulses with the exhilaration of being alive. This is a book of water, especially the Mississippi and the lives it nourishes. "Water has endured..." and mothers, fathers, children, dirt, seeds, leaves, geese, crickets-all endure in a shared and threatened world. These poems, impeccable in craft, are swift, quiet arrows that pierce the reader as they recreate a life. ~~-Mary Kay Rummel, author of What's Left Is the Singing~~~~~~~~~Patricia Barone has spent most of her life on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, where she lives with her husband, Stan. Although she was born in Gainesville, Texas, she grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and lived for six years in New Orleans, Louisiana, and one year in Zurich, Switzerland.Over the past three and a half decades, she has published widely in anthologies and periodicals: Most recently, a poem was published in Inspired by Tagore, a SAMPAD (South Asian arts) anthology published by the British Council of India. Her work has also appeared in Irish journals: Revival (Limerick Ireland), The Shop (County Cork, Ireland), and in An Sionnach, published under the auspices of the Irish Studies Department of Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She has also published poetry in the Canadian journal, Germination. Her United States publications also include those in And Magazine, Blue Buildings, Commonweal, Handbook III, Milkweed Chronicle, The Prose Poem Project, Ptolemy, Sidewalks, Sing Heavenly Muse!, Turtle Quarterly, Umbrella-Tilt a Whirl, West End, Widener Review, and Women's Quarterly Review. She received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in poetry, chosen by Marilyn Hacker; a Lake Superior Contemporary Writers Award for the short story; and a Minnesota State Arts Board Career Opportunity Grant for a workshop with the Irish poet Eavan Boland.

Constance Rowell Mastores was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, CA. She has a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. After completing her MA thesis on Wallace Stevens, directed by Josephine Miles, she left for Europe to study for a year each at the University of Florence and the Sorbonne. On her return to the United States, she taught in the Comparative Literature Department at UC-Berkeley while working toward her Ph.D. Mastores is a classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice.Mastores' poems have appeared widely and earned numerous awards. Her poetry has been featured in The Bellowing Ark, Blue Unicorn, and most recently in The Magnolia Quarterly. You may also find her work in the anthology The Phoenix Rising From The Ashes (Friesen Press, Canada, 2013). Her book, During My Grandfather's Time (based on her maternal grandfather), is a part of the Julius Francis Behrend Collection, housed in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. Constance and her husband, Kent Nickolas Mastores, live in Oakland, California. ENDORSEMENTSI have found these poems a constant source of pleasure. Mastores is to me a poet of immediacy-of rapt contemplation of the phenomenal world which, curiously, does not exclude detachment and humor-also of an erudition that does not exclude spontaneity. She is a dexterous wielder of both the vivid image and the musical line. -Esther Cameron, The Deronda Review These poems of Constance Rowell Mastores are vibrant, complex in the best sense of the word, and superbly crafted. In most of them, her persona is an extraordinarily intelligent and educated consciousness who seeks to understand herself and her place and purpose in the world around her. This restless searching, often filled with anxiety, sends her from massive objects amid the emptiness of interstellar space to the sub-atomic realm of quantum mechanics. She peers intently into both her personal and our western cultural pasts, her identity often merging with characters and events from both arenas that seem to reflect her present state of mind. In this process she has presented us with absorbing depictions of how memories over time become more like dreams than reality-dreamlike because the people and objects have been transformed into archetypal figures and symbols. But these poems are more than intellectual exercises-they are invested with emotional intensities that are sometimes startling. As an added bonus, Ms. Mastores has a musician's ear for how to create marvelous and appropriate sound effects with words and cadences. -John Freeman, Batture Willow Press With her shape-shifting, synesthetic imagery and her subtle use of sound, Mastores is a poet whose words seem to breathe on the page. She is a specialist in skies and seasons, and in the corresponding-or commingled-seasons of the soul. Hers is a world of brightness, shadow, and sharp focuses, sometimes dismaying, sometimes invigorating. These windows burn, as she says in one poem, "with the clear image of winter." As editors of the poetry tri-quarterly Blue Unicorn, we have been pleased to publish Constance's work over the years. -Ruth G. Iodice, John Hart, Fred Ostrander Mastores' poems reflect a wide range of experiences, from unusual encounters with the natural world and its inhabitants, to meditations on the cosmos, grief, and memory. Her poetic vision shines a light into the corners of the heart. -Jean Millichamp Milliken, The Lyric

Philip Kobylarz is an itinerant teacher of the language arts and writer of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays. He has worked as a journalist, a film critic, a veterinarian's assistant, a deliverer of furniture, and an ascetic. He currently teaches at Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and Menlo College. His work appears in such publications as Paris Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry series, Massachusetts Review, and Lalitamba. His first book, Zen-inspired poems concerning life in the south of France, is entitled rues. He lives ever so temporarily in the east bay of San Francisco. ~~~ You don't know who the alien is, you or the other guy, or girl, or possibly both. Not that that makes you compañeros; so we learn in these wry stories, told with the air of a disabused Mediterranean wanderer run aground, occasionally, in the American west. From Kobylarz, both poet and storyteller, let there be more. -David Hamilton author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, Ossabaw, Hard Choices: An "Iowa Review" Reader ~~~These stories are the product of a first-rate talent that doesn't let the reader down, intellectually, artistically, or viscerally: no boring, standard literary tripe here, but a healthy serving of smart, readable, sophisticated stories that remind us of the age we live in, of the everyday grotesquerie we're attempting to beat in any way we can-with art that matters and helps us to get by. Philip Kobylarz is really, really good. Turn on to him and spread the word. -Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of The Mexican in His Backyard ~~~And NOW-Nowhere 21st Century America-teeming with rivers and rooms, t.v. icons of glamour and war, mysteries of the visitor, the stay-at-homes, the all-nights, and anything but and including the plain as day. We hear it all with the one voice that impels us to wake-up, to embrace both the ordinary and the uncanny figures who dwell outside and inside of ourselves. These stories of leaving do happily confound the reader's arrival at every turn, and serve to confirm us in our belief we are all living the lives of the innocent and inescapably, that of the experienced. -Jeannine Savard author of Accounted For, My Hand Upon Your Name, Trumpeter, Snow Water Cove