"In such a fashion, one fine day, were the foundations upon which the crofter had built his life swept aside; those almighty giants of commerce who stood with one foot in Iceland and the other on the Continent itself - one fine day saw them wiped away like so much spit."

Halldor Laxness, Independent People

to sing a life

to sing a life
to, like a monkey, swing

I have been North again:
shrunken pupils
and a heart at ease,
and licked the cobbles,
the door.

"It is because Baudelaire was morbid that poetry can again be healthy and glad. The romantics had infected their age with a vague melancholy and incapacity for living. Baudelaire took this on himself and lived it in its full intensity, so that what had been vague became precise and the malady, being thus exasperated, was taken away from us." Christopher Brennan

Upstairs at Duroc invites you to the second reading
in their new series
Pause on the Landing

with poets
Timothy Bradford, Christophe Lamiot Enos
and Nathan Thompson

At Berkeley Books of Paris
8 rue Casimir Delavigne, 75006 Paris, Métro Odéon
May 31, 2010 at 7 PM

Timothy Bradford’s poetry has most recently appeared in ecopoetics, Drunken Boat and 42 Opus, and is forthcoming in No Tell Motel. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for his novel-in-progress, based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, and was a guest lecturer at Stanford University. From 2007 to 2009, he was a researcher with the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in France. Currently he teaches English at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Christophe Lamiot Enos lives in Paris after spending 14 years in the US where he taught French literature at UC Berkeley and at Rutgers. He is currently maître de conférences at the University of Rouen. His many publications include Des pommes et des oranges, Californie I – Berkeley (Flammarion, Paris, 2000); Sitôt Elke, illusion, récit en poèmes (Flammarion, Paris, 2003); Albany, Des pommes et des oranges, Californie II (Flammarion 2006); as well as his most recent part-French-part-English book 1985-1981 (Flammarion, Paris, 2010). His poetry is an exploration of lived experience, of the contours of emotion and the internal workings of the quotidian.

Nathan Thompson was born in Cornwall and studied at the University of Exeter, where he later lectured in musicology. He now lives on the island of Jersey and runs the PoAttic reading series at the Jersey Opera House. His first collection, the arboretum towards the beginning, was published by Shearsman Books in 2008 and Holes in the Map appeared from Oystercatcher Press in 2010. A Haunting, a collection of lipogram sonnets, is due from Gratton Street Irregulars later this year.

County Cork

He lay that summer in the long grass,
and the rains ran off him and into the earth.

Geneva

The river was moving
and the train was moving
so it looked as though the log
was standing still.

New York

I remember landing in New York
and staying drunk
three days.

That was ten years ago
but I shall not be sad.

The world has been so good to me,
it will destroy me if I do not give some back.

May poems up at nthposition

New poetry is up at nthposition. This month's issue features work by

Oliver Dixon

Glen Sorestad

Michael Farrell

Feng Sun Chen

Steven Fowler

Simon Perchik

Beth Boettcher

Jesse Patrick Ferguson

Those interested in submitting poems should send their work to me at rquintav AT gmail DOT com. Full guidelines here.