The new featured poet at Anti- is Bob Hicok. While we're on the subject, you can also check out 13 Facts About Bob Hicok.

This draft is different from most of mine in that I really like most of the lines in it, but the arc still feels murky to me. It's usually the other way around: I know the arc, but am not sure of some phrasing. I stole the title from Machiavelli quoting Livy quoting Gaius Pontius.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I was already thinking about this before it was Thanksgiving week, and now seems like a good time to put up the list. I'm avoiding the big general items like "family" and "friends," though of course they're going to sneak into the list anyway. In no particular order:

1. The new tradition of group Sunday dinner with S&S, including intermittently cooking or getting pizza for everyone.
2. Being able to riff ad infinitum on TV or movie lines with my brother, especially when it befuddles our mom.
3. Not carrying any credit card (or other) debt.
4. When I get out and run the fast break in basketball and hit a tough layup as a reward.
5. Being able to work out virtually every day in the middle of the day.
6. How my dad's dog Fischer spins across the driveway with excitement when I take him along on one of my jogs.
7. Stealing Cheesy Nacho Twistaroni and See's Chocolates when I visit my mom.
8. Nachos, either the legit kind at Senor Manuel's or the ballpark cheese sauce kind at Blueberry Hill or Tony's.
9. When people I've never previously met or corresponded with know my journal or my poetry.
10. That moment when two or three separate writing ideas I've been tossing around in my head suddenly click together as working in the same piece.
11. When my girlfriend told me about the stray cat she wanted to adopt and name Gubler.
12. The point I can first see the mountains when I drive back to Colorado.
13. Having a book forthcoming.

What are you thankful for this year?

Received my contributor copy of The American Poetry Journal yesterday. The new perfect-bound format is spiffy, and there are lots of names-I-know-and-like, including Amanda Auchter, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jason Bredle, Hannah Craig, Keith Montesano, Rebecca Aronson, Jennifer Sullivan, etc. I look forward to reading through it.

I believe I've said on here before that I'm more of an individual song person than an album person, which I think is becoming true for more and more people in the mp3 era. There are lots of groups I like even though I don't like full albums of theirs because I can just pluck the songs I like off each record and leave the rest. I saw someone characterize Foo Fighters as an exemplar of that type of band, and I wouldn't argue with that--I have many of their songs but could barely tell you what albums they were from. It's even true for some of my favorite bands: Tool, for example, doesn't have a single album that I truly like to hear all the way through, because they all have tepid interludes and bizarro filler.

But there are exceptions. Here are 13 albums I'd like to listen to front-to-back, right now. This tends toward more contemporary bands, since I often got my introductions to classic acts through greatest-hit sets, but also not so much toward bands I discovered in the last five years or so, since that was often via mp3. It's not in order of preference.

1. Nevermind by Nirvana
2. Toxicity by System of a Down
3. Tantilla by House of Freaks
4. Automatic for the People by REM
5. Generator by Bad Religion
6. Achtung Baby by U2
7. Master of Puppets by Metallica
8. Shake the Sheets by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
9. Operation: Mindcrime by Queensryche
10. Ten by Pearl Jam
11. Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails
12. Graceland by Paul Simon
13. Blast Tyrant by Clutch

How about you? Not just your favorites, but albums that don't lag at any point if you play them?

Sonnet

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

As wound deepened by wound? Not jewel, not gem,
Not beauty, not gem. I am this anger.
Must each note aria I mean as requiem,
I mean requiem, mean dirge, must one finger

Bear the weight of every word, set in gold,
Hand held so the pearl catches the angle
Of light, and glowing, says “I am betrothed.”
Betrothed? I am small terror wed to wild

Rhyme. We must climb inside the world to live.
A sand-grain in the mind tells us to survive.

--Dan Beachy-Quick

I just spent the $25 Amazon gift certificate that I received for winning C. Dale's most recent caption contest. I decided it would be appropriate to purchase poetry with it, so I bought Czeslaw Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 and Matthew Dickman's All American Poem. That left me a whole 23 cents short of the $25 total (which I also needed for free shipping), so I cheated slightly and also bought Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, edited by Orson Scott Card, which was the cheapest item on my wish list.

Your recent rejection slip stated "We regret to have to return your work unread. Please note that our reading period is April 1 - October 1."

I sent my submission to you on August 9. I'm know it didn't take nearly two months to reach you, since you responded with congratulations when I withdrew one of the poems accepted elsewhere on September 18 (per your submission guidelines). Please get your editorial shit together. Also, shilling your back/current issues on your insultingly erroneous rejection? Not a good move.

Best,
Steve

The new Anti- featured poet is Peter Davis. This set features the poem with the longest title and shortest body we've published so far. Well worth your while!

• I think I mentioned that I've started some prose work. What I'm doing right now is alternating 500 words of prose with poem drafts. Right now I'm partway through a sort of short story/extended monologue, but I'm in the poem part of the cycle. It's working out well right now.
• My poem "In This Country, Trail Breaks You" has been accepted by The Bitter Oleander. They're one of just a few journals that has accepted my poems on more than one occasion now. The others I can think of: Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, The American Poetry Journal, Pebble Lake Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, and three candles. All places I like a lot.
  
• My big happy news: I finally won C. Dale's caption contest!
• Fallout 3 calls. Gotta go.
  

...a car backs into your car in a parking lot, and there's no damage to either car. Whew! My Saturn thanks you for not backing up too fast and for driving a small-yet-sturdy car, somewhat careless lady!

OMG! I have one!

...a number of people a number of e-mails. I'll try to get to some of them this weekend.

Hey! If you're in St. Louis, come see me MC the Observable Reading this very night at 8 PM at the Schlafly Bottleworks. Readers are Cynthia Arrieu-King, Nickole Brown, Erin Keane, and Kristi Maxwell.

I may be having more to do with Observable in the very near future. I'll keep you posted.

2 oz. Reserva del Senor Almendrado
1 oz. amaretto
4 1/2 oz. sweet and sour
3 oz. Diet 7 UP or equivalent
splash of lime juice

Mix ingredients over ice and stir. This is a very sweet drink, so avoid it if you don't like that sort of thing.

Peter mentioned that the cover art for Torched Verse Ends below is fairly literal. I was certainly aware of that, and I don't mind much at all, as long as it's not completely on the nose. I'm not a great big fan of the "abstract painting as poetry cover art" school, though of course most poetry book titles are not exactly things you can have literal cover art of unless you get really weird or start doing pictograms or rebuses.

Anyway, here are 13 books of poetry that have cover art with an obvious literal connection to their titles, I'd say successfully. These are just pulled off my shelves--I'm sure there are many more.

1. Murder Ballads by Jake Adam York. Interestingly, the cover photo for Jake's A Murmuration of Starlings is a literal depiction of its primary subject matter but not its title.
2. Above the River by James Wright. A classic of literal cover art.
3. Radish King by Rebecca Loudon. This is one of the weirdest titles I own to receive something approaching a literal representation on its cover.
4. Pain Fantasy by Jason Bredle. One of my favorite covers on the list: Girl in an all-American student style dress and Betty Page pose, with a ski-mask over her face in a way that looks pretty S&M.
5. The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh. The cover is a filled-out MMPI-3 test form, from whence comes the title phrase.
6. Body Painting by Jane Hilberry. I bet Jane sells as many books based solely on the cover as anyone out there. Just sayin'.
7. Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey. I actually don't like the title, but if you accept the title, the art is fine.
8. Theories of Falling by Sandra Beasley
9. Mosquito by Alex Lemon
10. A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
11. Archeology of the Circle by Bruce Weigl
12. Hitler's Mustache by Peter Davis
13. Shells by Craig Arnold

And just for the hell of it, a few titles I own that would be most difficult to do good literal cover art for:
1. The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtromer
2. The Way It Is by William Stafford
3. Hapax by A. E. Stallings (which is funny, since Archaic Smile has quite literal cover art)
4. Epistles by Mark Jarman
5. Isolato by Larissa Szporluk
6. Centuries by Joel Brouwer
7. The Little Book of Guesses by John Gallaher
8. The Keepsake Storm by Gina Franco
9. Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest by B. H. Fairchild
10. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly by Denis Johnson
11. Sensational Spectacular by Nate Pritts
12. Awe by Dorothea Lasky
13. All of Us by Raymond Carver

For the next two weeks on Anti-, we're proud to feature "Fragments from a Nonexistent Yiddish Poet" by Jehanne Dubrow.

I choked on chocolate filled
with wine, purple-black
as iodine.