Well, I haven't added to this for a while, but thought tonight would be an appropriate time to do so. Ammie and I have started a new blog (http://www.usagi-kage.blogspot.com/) to document our life in Japan. For all our friends who are checking this, we love you gals and guys and are so grateful for such an eclectic, generous, and glorious group!

So here's a tentative list of books I'm bringing to Japan: this was serious work!

1) A gift from my fab girlfriend: a first edition of _Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti_ by Maya Deren.
2) _Science Fiction_ by Andrew Joron
3) _Poetry and the Fate of the Senses_ by Susan Stewart
4)_Selected Non Ficions_ by Borges
5)_The Collected Books of Jack Spicer_
6)_The Black Reeds_ by Mark McMorris
7)_Gravity's Rainbow_by T. pynchon (because I've been reading it, in very small portions, very smalll, for three years now)
8) _Tales of Murasaki_by Martine Bellen
9)_The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon_
10)_The Shadow of the Wind_ by Carlos R. Zafon.

Of course this is subject to change, but I think it's a good start.

For those of you in the Bay Area, please do attend Loop/Press62's poetry event at Escape from New York Pizza in S.F. It starts at 7pm on Friday, May 7. It's a fortuitous date and time, I'll be reading (among others, I'm sure), and you can get a slice of pie!

On a side note, on the radio, right now, there's a song being sung in German which sounds as if it's sampling the screams found on Nick Cave's song "Stagger Lee." Ah, now it's concluding with a quote from G.W. Bush. Pleasant. Enough of this Pamela-nonsense.

Here's a line from James Meetze's chapbook, Serenades:

To disclose the facts of our pasts we spoke the future,
coy as ghosts of summer in what little shade.
Why not be furious at last
from all angles at once.


It's a lovely book filled with a lot of lovely poems.

You should all open up another window right now and google Andrew Joron's NEO-SURREALISM: OR, THE SUN AT NIGHT (Black Square Editions 2004). This book is so fascinating. Andrew's writing is top-notch: "Surreality is not a state of standing 'over' reality; rather, it is the boiling over of reality, a phase-change that always departs from a highly specific set of initial conditions."

Phew! I bought my tickets and luggage, so now moving to a foreign country is cemented! Somehow, that flurry of spending made everything more real...mercantilism at work! Maybe it has to do with loss: the loss of income acting as a sacrifice of sorts, and thus making the ritual of moving "true."

On to poetry:

Here are a couple of recent poems I'm working on from a series called "Struck Landscape."


Corners collapse and everyone has the feeling of collapsing

like both buildings in large cities and suns describing advantages
of gravity and geometry. A mantis can fold in such a way as
to disguise itself from other small things because it is complexity
that breeds fragility—viruses are durable and strong
the most brave fragile thing is god because we can
only eat and fuck and sleep in a miraculous world.


A cup scattered in the kitchen exploring

the breadth of the floor and simultaneously enacting
a redefinition of self somehow finally knowing the popular theory
that time does not even exist and without it the universe makes
sense again. I think immediately of only loss, sit unexpectedly
down to cry and notice how the lowest tip of my spine bends
easily in accordance like a bee stinging its own back.

My computer has been crashing like every other day--I would turn it on and it wouldn't be able to find the hard drive. Finally, I set the preferences so that the machine would never "sleep" and, voila, problem solved. It turns out this often happens with the new macs...

I did learn a valuable lesson: it's just a machine.