Contributors' Notes

William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poetry has been published in small magazines in several countries and is also available in, among other places, the e-zines Aught, poethia, canwehaveourballback?, Milk Magazine, and Shampoo. His chapbook Lingo is forthcoming with subontic press, and he is the editor of Moria, an e-zine for experimental poetry and poetic theory.

Dan Beachy-Quick: "I have always kept as a tenet of poetic faith and possibility Dickinson's 'The thought beneath so slight a film / is more distinctly seen / As laces just reveal the surge / Or mists the Apennine.' I try my best to stay true to that parting-cloud vision."

David Braden lives in Oakland and teaches public elementary school. he's been published in various small presses and e-zines including: Shampoo, SPIT, Green Zero, Verve, Red Dancefloor, Blood Over Oil, Protea Poetry Journal, Stone Country, moria, poethia, and Shampoo. Multi-voice poetry work with Big Bean Burrito appeared on a cassette magazine called Eat Nobody Last. His written and audio work can be found at http://www.home.earthlink.net/~barleydog/poems.html.

Contributor's Note: "'By Gentle Concussion'" is one of several poems in my 'sampled text' series. I have a fascination with quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary. They are lingustic artifacts from different times and places. The OED is a giant warehouse of painstakingly cut and pasted quotes arranged in alphabetical and then chronological order. The quotes with their ellipses, archaic spellings, obsolete uses retain connotations of other times. I can almost smell the words. And sometimes the quotes evoke meanings that were never intended by the writer, who could never have suspected that his/her writing would find its way into such a tome and read by me centuries later. So the quotes connote meanings that stretch from the past into this present, and even into alternate possibilities of the future. For me words are objects that can be manipulated, rearranged and processed through a variety of 'filters'. Each new arrangement creates new meanings, like chemical elements or statistical data. Randomizing the text allows for increased permutations. Although I don't accept pure randomization as a finished piece, I do consider my final editing another, perhaps more mysterious device through which the word objects are filtered and processed."

Martin Corless-Smith is from Worcestershire, England. His second book, Complete Travels is available from SPD.

Richard Deming, along with Nancy Kuhl, is an editor of Phylum Press. His work has appeared in Sulfur, A. Bacus, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Haven, CT, and can be reached at rdeming@hotmail.com

tom hibbard would like to thank editors of shampoo, moria, canwehaveourballback, cotworld, milk, aught, oht, jacket, washington review and m. sonnenfeld's give out sheet for recent use of work. strengthen the wilderness.

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen lives and writes in Espoo, Finland. He is mainly interested in computer processing and manipulation of text and language. He has been published in Poethia, Moria, SHAMPOO and Aught.

Aaron McCollough has recently published poems in The Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Lit, and Bird Dog. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His book Welkin is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press.

Sheila E. Murphy recently performed her poetry for Lit City in New Orleans. In 2000, she presented a series of readings and workshops at the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh-Barton, Devon, in the UK, in addition to performing at the third annual Boston Poetry Conference. In 1999, she was a featured performer at the annual Brisbane Writers Festival in Queensland, Australia. Murphy has authored numerous books of poetry, most recently The Stuttering of Wings (Stride Press, UK, 2002), and The Indelible Occasion (Potes & Poets Press, 2000). Books scheduled for publication include Recent Flute Silences from SUN/gemini Press and Green Tea with Ginger (Potes & Poets Press). She and Beverly Carver co-founded the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series and served as coordinators for 12 years. The series continues under the direction of Carolyn Robbins, Curator of Education, at the Scottsdale (Arizona) Museum of Contemporary Arts. In 1996, Murphy's Letters to Unfinished J. won the New American Poetry Series Open Competition. The book is scheduled to appear from Sun & Moon Press.

Christopher Mulrooney is the author of notebook and sheaves.

David Pavelich is a Wisconsin-based poet living and studying in Buffalo, NY. He works entirely outside of chance/procedural methods. He is currently studying Lorine Niedecker's reflective poetics and exploring ideas of variation, repetition, and conversation in his poetry. He can be contacted at davidpavelich@yahoo.com.

James Shea currently attends the University of Utsunomiya, Japan where he studies free-verse haiku.

Kerri Sonnenberg lives in Chicago where she edits the poetry journal Conundrum. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New American Writing, Aufgabe, Columbia Poetry Review, Moria, & canwehaveourballback. Recent projects include collaborations with composer Jeffrey Weeter.

Virginia Stonebarger lives in Tucson, Arizona and travels in the summer. She has a Masters in painting from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and studied with Hans Hofmann in New York City. She's been teaching art for about 40 years and has work in galleries around the United States. Her last major show was with two other artists at the Tucson International Airport, in 1999. She likes to paint on location intensifying the colors she sees. Her biography is listed in Who's Who in American Art.

Jon Thompson teaches twentieth-century literature at North Carolina State Univesity. He has just finished a manuscript of poems, Pictures of a Floating World, loosely based on photographs of Japan taken during the American Occupation, portions of which can be found in The Iowa Review, Quarterly West , Faultline and Prism International. He is also editor of the new on-line, international journal, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. It can be read at: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/index.html