Welcome to Posit 3!

We are excited to offer the gorgeous verbal and visual work in this issue, which once again represents a range of aesthetic and substantive approaches hailing from a broad swath of the Anglophone world, including the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, from North Carolina to Buffalo, Wisconsin to New York City. As it happens, almost half of the poetry in this issue is in prose – a favorite form of ours, whose versatility and power is wonderfully demonstrated by the work of Michael Basinski, Andrew Cantrell, Dennis Etzel Jr, Howie Good and Ken Taylor. As well, a number of these selections are linked excerpts from larger series, which we suspect you will want to read as much as we do, after sampling the poetry of Dennis Etzel Jr, Nicholas Grider, Crag Hill, Krystal Languell, and Joe Milazzo.

So come on in and check out Michael Basinski’s mesmerizing, fantastical encyclopedia entries which morph into songs and commercials; Iain Britton’s screenplay for an ethereal dream; Andrew Cantrell’s effortless weavings of seeming non sequiturs into surprising and satisfying wholes; Elaine Equi’s wise, humane, celebratory gems of lyrical refinement; the rich, evocative excerpt from Dennis Etzel Jr.’s hybrid-poetic memoir/conceptual collage of original and historical texts; Howie Good’s wistful and resonant prose poems spiked by the verve and punch of his plain-spoken anything-but-commonplaces; Nicholas Grider’s surprise-filled rollercoaster of a ride, delightful in the seeming incongruity of the disparate images which he manages to magically unite; Crag Hill’s poems from Four’s Core, like glimpses caught from a speeding car at a landscape both familiar and strange; Krystal Languell’s eight-line “octaves” whose musical form plays off a certain declarative vocalism that carries the sung finality of the collection of which they form a part; Camille Martin’s powerful, compressed, multiply relevant deployment of language as aesthetic, emotional, and political wake-up call; the great strange beauty of Joe Milazzo’s virtuosic haunted house dream tour; and Ken Taylor’s incantatory chant-like spells cast in prose.

Thank you once again for reading!

Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

* * *

For Posit 3, it is my pleasure to present five more incredible galleries of sculpture, painting and drawing.

Claudia Alvarez’s work teases out the tension and violence of childhood that we’d all prefer to deny. Her portrayals of the lives of children may be read as personal narratives or as metaphorical portraits of society, writ large.

There’s nothing quite like Charles Dellschau’s frenzied and beautiful explanations of the world inside his mind. His fantastical visions of impossible airships amaze and delight. Born in the latter half of the 19th century, Dellschau created a magical future where fantastical creations cruise the skies fueled by his vision of the century to come.

Dimitri Kozyrev’s paintings of an abstracted reality are both formally challenging and visually stunning. The “real” world lies somewhere beneath his fractured vision of it. Our eye dances back and forth between the competing realities.

Julie Peppito creates collage and assemblage pieces that are funny, psychological, intricately detailed and infinitely interesting.

And Louisa Waber’s watercolor and ink drawings are like delicate whispers from fleeting dreams.

I hope you enjoy!

Melissa Stern