Sugarhigh asks: Wudjathink (of me and others). First thought: hey, you know editors, get us sugarhired. Second thought: f*ck it, I'll just speak my mind here for free.

Shenoda: It gets better as it goes on, but it doesn't start very well -- frontload your manuscripts. Or backload them -- I can't be the only chumleigh to read from back to front. The scenes of life in Egypt come through fine. I'm sensitive (post Nuala ni Dhomnaill) to recontextualized lawn equipment, but I liked the "weed whacker way over county lines" poem almost as much as the one where the woman's ankh gets snatched by someone reaching from a passing cab. As with 80 to 90 percent of poetry books published in the last ten years, I don't get why this isn't a perfect 16-24 pp chapbook instead of a windy 48+ pp perfect-bound book. If poetry is published to enhance a press' prestige, wouldn't it behoove the editors to make sure something is going on in every poem? Just sayin'. It's an ok book -- in no way indifferent -- but I feel like everybody would have been better served by some rigorous c'mons here.

Nutter: I am the only person (besides Rebecca) I ever heard express enthusiasm for Nutter's Summer Evening -- again, scenes of urban life, in his case NYC, so I'm pretty conscious about not giving him the doubt-benefit card on his choices, and I thought they were fine, though I'm sure someone who knows better will tell me that in fact all those urban half-line vignettes took place in Iowa City. Anyway, this as-yet-unreleased Verse title (what's the deal with Verse turning into Wave or whatever they're calling it? Did someone ahem them re how little metrical work they run?) is easily the slyest Ashbery-imitation-imitation I've seen in ages, but I still loathe the whole category. Yes, it's great when a poem goes from beginning to end continuously and yet is rife with dream-like juxtapositions and discontinuities. (Sound of eyes rolling.) It would be even greater to get hints in the course of the poem why these half-feelings are being cued up, backwards-masked, looped, and otherwise serving to destroy what little pleasure I still get out of My Bloody Valentine.

Wait, what's that last sentence with the generic complaint about [your name -- or mine? -- here] doing there.