Madelynn Wickham's (name mispelled and her other name is Sophie Kinsella of the Shopaholic series) 40-Love is a good read--funny, moving--and fascinatingly literary given SK's other works; this novel, in some ways, seems to be a version of Between The Acts.

"I loaf and invite myself to lock and load"--from Joyelle Mcsweeney's latest book; I like this riff on Whitman.

Just got a rejection from Cutbank of "Coal/Cole/Kohl" poems; oh well, one of these days an editor might want to publish a piece in the "series."  Or it might be that the trope/concept of make/making-up, the poetry of Cole Swensen, and the subject of coal-mining doesn't mesh together into a dynamic of interest for most.

Oops: it appears that Cloud City may be for official students only!

Recent rejection from Lana Turner; I wonder if I"ll ever send poems which "fit"?  I get rejected by C Bedient at-least once a year!

I, a few minutes ago, sent a manuscript submission titled Country to Cloud City.

Urgh--rejections

Pleiades--ok, this is no biggy to me; but I thought two of my submissions to 1913 would make for really good matches, so that's rather deflating/frustrating, and especially because I'm quite fond of 1913.

I guess this is revealing what a wretched aesthete I am: I am cheered that Evie Shockley's poem in honor/in anger at the death of Trayvon Martin does not just repeat an end-word in each couplet to form its Ghazal-ness, but also employs that, for my mindearheart, utterly necessary front-rhyme preceding the repeated end-word.  Honestly, I find, aside from its prosody, the poem a bit dull: there's indisputable truth in it, but it's sociological more than linguistic, and so I am not taken to a "new" location for consciousness, and so the poem for me ultimately ends up lacking urgency and instead seems like a summary of some of the worst of racial politics in the USA.  That said, the newly added couplet which directly references TM works the best I think, as the idea of being punished for surviving is poignant.