Books published by Virtual Artists Collective

"I nearly lost balance," Lorraine Henrie Lins writes, "looking that straight up / to the smudged glow / where the moon would be / and then not be and then be again." It may seem odd to praise a poet for losing balance, but isn't that the poet's job: to help us risk a little unsteadiness on our feet? Faced with this world of unsettling beauty and dizzying loss, how can we not feel a little vertigo? In All the Stars Blown to One Side of the Sky Lins offers us a tutorial in how to rejoice and grieve, how to let ourselves be intoxicated by the universe in which we live and how to survive its challenges. In lovingly crafted poems she shows us how it's possible to lose control and keep it at the same time. That's why I turn to poetry; it offers a safe place to take risks. In this astonishing book Lorraine Henrie Lins teaches us by example; how to come to terms with the confusions of childhood and the challenges of experience; how to live as part of the human family and as a citizen of this planet where "the sun is an old sun / a beaten one that feels its own mortality." In "The Care and Treating of Books: A Primer" Lins writes that to read a book "you need a pencil to drag below / the really good words, leave a leaded trail / to find your way back after you lose / yourself in the thicket." My pencil and I couldn't leave a single poem alone, all those good words I wanted to come back to, all those poems that helped me to lose my direction and balance - as the best poems do - and find my way again. This is a writer you can trust, a book you can take with you on every journey, confident that its "good words" will bring you home safely, braver and smarter and ready for the next adventure. -Chris Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

Working in the tradition of populist modernism - what William Carlos Williams called "the American Grain" - I imagined poems as essays "improvised" along the principles of spontaneous composition (the "variable foot," "composition by field"). As essays, they adhere to a multitude of popular expository genres: the oration, the rant, textual exegesis, the rap, the soliloquy and dialogue, the curse. Among contemporary writers, I drew inspiration in equal parts from Rae Armantrout, Amiri Baraka, Kamu Brathwaite, Bob Perelman and Robert Pinsky. I hope that this montage of styles and political orientations helps me to get at some of the precariousness of the present moment: an impossible rhythm with which Ornette Coleman helps me to make an honest peace.

Is there something deeper than this world? Ask a crow, says Black. A crow may laugh at you, but he has a story to tell. It begins in legends-the old ones of black birds and gods, and the ones heard in the air-and dances to the shaman's drum. It leads to the desert, to simplicity and burning. We follow it into blackness, "the root and bed/ before any thing," and pour back into a world "where the wind shakes you." In these poems by Sarah Webb, we live a story that is both everyday and transcendent. Together we "stand beside the dry sand of the river/and feel something moving under it."