"In the old story of love and loss, Lisa Ampleman's I've Been Collecting This to Tell You cuts to the core of the matter with concision and subtlety. Hearts are laid bare, dissected, even grown anew. Masterfully structured and alert to the most vital details, this collection has lots to tell us--and a voice at once authentic and lyrical with which to do it."
--Don Bogen

"In these poems, the beloved is a space the speaker moves through--at first with trepidation, then with gathering force-- emerging finally into a hard-won world ravishing in its clarity...

"Off the Books": not recorded, not taxed. Under the table, stretching the rules. We conceived of this issue as coinciding with the theme of the 4th Annual Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group (scholars, primarily medievalists, interested in bridging disciplines and testing boundaries) in October 2015. In addition to works by creative writers, we feature here several revised presentations from the BABEL conference. We're glad to host these works for people who presented, performed, experienced, and embodied the conference. We see this issue as a bridge between the creative text and...