Entering our 11th year, the editors would like to thank our sponsors, Howl Happening, La Mama, and KGB. And subscribers and contributors. Thanks to our readers, audience, and party-mates. Welcome to our new Associate Editor, artist and curator Kim Power.

New Orleans Poetry Fest. What a gas! Live Mag! panel with Poets Reading the News editors J Spagnolo and Elle Aviv, plus C&R Press editor John Goslee shared publishing and publicizing tips—DIY style.

Came back to NYC with books from all over. Poetry of “brutal cartography” by Hossannah Ascuncion from Magic Helicopter (who also had Noo Journal). Oracle flarings from Marc Vincenz’s Beautiful Rush, Unlikely Books. Tables included Lavender Ink/ Daialogos with yummy translations of Catullus by Joseph Bienvenu, Trembling Pillow, Western Kentucky U, Iron Boot, Chax, Convulsive Editions from Chicago. Shoutouts to Jonathan Penton, JS Makkos and Paris Tate.

In big-time New Orleans style, there was a splendid second line parade for the much-missed Marthe Reed, to whom the festival was dedicated. Saturday night at Siberia Lounge rocked—with Douglas Kearny, Tonya M. Foster, Bruce Andrews, Jesse Statman, and Bill Lavender topping it off. Congrats to Festival founders Bill and Megan Burns. Round three: April, 2019. Featuring Anne Waldman!

Tonya M. Foster, her parents, and Mark Statman in New Orleans

Allen Hansen’s paintings: Super show of powerful, finessed rawness, paintings that project the grotto, the cave, the soul of expression! “Atmosphere of Nothingness / or O” at the ever-fun Licthundfire Gallery.

Painter Amy Hill makes the NY Times for her Front Room show of ironic, anachronistic portraits of idealized people in a disturbing utopia. Done to a tee.

It’s one thing to live it. It’s another to remember it well. And it’s a whole ‘nother thing to write it down which Martha King has gloriously done.

Outside/ Inside just outside the art world’s inside, new from BlazeVox. Romantic, uplifting, historic, sprawling, spunky and searching. So many cross currents of artistic lives, interactions with icons, told with clarity and catchiness. And insightful observations about class, gender, and ambition. What a valuable testimony! What scope. Martha brings it all home in this Romantic memoir /culture lab tour de force portrait by a pioneer in the front line.

Touch down.

JCW