Ruby Street

Issue Five of Otoliths is now here. One year old and as lively as ... It contains work by Paul Siegell, Andrew Topel, Jordan Stempleman, Ernesto Priego, Paolo Manalo, Eileen Tabios, Jeff Harrison, Katrinka Moore, Corey Mesler, Raymond Farr, Steve Rodgers, Robert Lee Brewer, Mark Cunningham, Martin Edmond, Steve Timm, James Sanders, Audacia Dangereyes, Thomas Fink, Spencer Selby, Maria Zajkowski, Richard Lopez, Marcia Arrieta, Tom Hibbard, Matina Stamatakis, Louise Landes Levi, Márton Koppány, Anny Ballardini, Jill Jones, Craig Santos Perez, mIEKAL aND, Dax Bayard-Murray, Ed Schenk, MTC Cronin, Alana Madison, Alexander Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Carol Novack (& Stan Crocker), Stephanie Green, Maurice Oliver, Caleb Puckett, David-Baptiste Chirot, Derek Motion, James Maughn, Michael Rothenberg, Tom Beckett, Nick Piombino & Richard Kostelanetz.

Some new work is now in the hutt , especially in 2.5 and 3.1 , with other new hutts also filling.

Well, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews , curated by Tom Beckett is now available from Otoliths Books Mark Young, who must be the busiest publisher in the world at the moment, says: "In response to popular demand, Otoliths is releasing one of the books from its next round of offerings early, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews. Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website has become, since its inception in 2005, an important source of information on contemporary poetry and poetics. This book brings together the first eleven interviews from the on-going series, augmented by bionotes and almost one hundred pages of self-selected examples of the interviewees' work. The interviewees (some of whom later reappear as interviewers) are Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller and Jean Vengua.The other ...

Some of the many interesting things Brendan Lorber of LUNGFULL has to say . The Weightlessness of any Anthology in the Last Few Decades: Their sheer abundance negates any anthology’s authority to define a movement. Each new anthology is like the person on The Price Is Right who bids $1 higher than the last guy on the dinette set. To the extent an anthology is successful, it points to the decentralization of poetry and the impossibility of any one boss or singular vision. It rides the air between poems, placing the extreme connection ahead of being a supreme collection. He won't remember but I met him many years ago when he was here. I still have a very old copy of LUNGFULL somewhere around here.

Of course, next month is the Sydney Writers Festival , and as part of it there's Poets Paint Words , which is curated by Peter Minter and Lisa Slade, who commissioned a number of Australian poets to write a poem inspired by a painting in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery collection. Their choice, not ours. Poets involved include Luke Davies, Martin Harrison, Keri Glastonbury, Kate Fagan, Jaya Savige, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, John Tranter, Judith Beveridge, Jill Jones, Peter Minter, John Kinsella, Robert Adamson. The exhibition runs until 17 June and during the Writers Festival there will be readings by a number of the poets.

Finally Mark Weiss's Junction Press has got itself a website. Now you can order lots of good poetry books online including New and Selected Poems 1961-1996 by Rochelle Owens, Stet: Selected Poems by Jose Kozer, and Mark's own excellent Fieldnotes .

The first edition of Mascara , an Australasian-based poetry zine went on-line recently, featuring poetry by Chris Kelen, Ouyang Yu, Yi Tang, Libby Hart, Cyril Wong, Keri Glastonbury, Agnes Vong, Cath Vidler, Nathan Curnow, Jan Owen and others ... It was launched last weekend to time in with the International Love Poetry Hate Racism Weekend which featured transnational and multicultural poetry readings around the world.