Editor: Gail Rudd Entrekin. Poetry by six Northern California Poets: Kirsten Casey, Gary Cooke, Cheryl Dumesnil, Judy Halebsky, Iven Lourie, Scott Young. Another anthology put together by the fiercely independent Hip Pocket Press, this book, according to poet Molly Fisk, ..".includes poems of childhood, love, travel, myth, reminiscence and landscape. But its essential nature is commitment -- to experience, sensation and language -- beautifully encompassed by the closing line of Judy Halebsky's DOWN THE MOUNTAIN: ..".whatever I came with I spent."

Previously considered the domain of bikers and a rite of passage in the services, tattoos have crawled from society's fringes and onto the ankles of starlets and the biceps of bankers. In this volume, stories from writers including Sylvia Plath and Ray Bradbury capture the tattoo experience.

The poems in this collection are the proverbial spring bulbs abandoned in the basement, growing toward a slim crack of sunlight. They are both aware of the limitations of social structures and forcefully committed to breaking out of those traps, urging toward a better way of living. The characters in these poems resist the twenty-first century s prescription for a life of emotional-spiritual bankruptcy, reaching toward an ever-elusive glimmer on the horizon."

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces a drag queen waitress whose painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight, strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds, Pink Floyd s On the Turning Away sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead, black...