William Allegrezza wanders the angel-headed streets of Denver looking for a fix, except that he has never been to Denver and he doesn’t believe in angels.  with his other time he mumbles poetic farces and edits the e-zine Moria.

Dodie Bellamy’s books include the novel The Letters of Mina Harker (Hard Press, 1998) and a collection of Burroughs-inspired prose poems, Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2001).  she is currently working on The Fourth Form, a multi-dimensional sex novel.  Dodie is a vegetarian who lives with three carnivores, one human and two feline.

Alissa Carrier is currently working on her MA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens.  her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Miscellany, The Distillery, The Dakota House Journal, and HLF Quarterly.  she spends her free time terrorizing kitties and clerks.

Todd Colby is the author of Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Work (Soft Skull Press, 2000), he was the editor of Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and he’s writing a novel entitled Dirt.  he has coordinated the Wednesday Night Reading Series at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, where he is currently teaching a writing workshop.  it is said that Todd often deserves to be slapped on the back of the head for being a lovable horse’s ass.

C. Nolan Deweese is 22 years old and lives in Philadelphia, where he sometimes finds work as a musician.  he graduated from Oberlin College last May and spends most of his time on the roof.  he was recently published in DIAGRAM and has a poem forthcoming in Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).

Daniel Donaghy has published poems in Southern Review, Commonweal, New Letters, Alaska Quarterly Review, etc.  he lives with his wife and daughter in Rochester, New York, waiting patiently for Springsteen’s long-awaited next album with the E Street Band.

Margot Douaihy likes the rain.  hooray for martini napkins.  martinis are nice, too.

John Erhardt is a recovering Catholic from New York, currently living in Massachusetts.  he’s an assistant managing editor for Verse Press, and has new poems in Spinning Jenny and Passages North.  though his hair is exiting stage left, he appreciates a good shampoo now and again.

Mark Ewert is a Capricorn who lives in an honest-to-god turret.  over the years he has made his living from such diverse pursuits as prostitution, reading tarot cards, and working in Special Education (non-simultaneously).  currently, he’s writing a true-life account of “starfucking such literary notables as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs” while still in his teens.

Michael Farrell lives in Melbourne, or at least part of it.  like most Michaels he doesn’t sweat, he aspires.  he is the Australia ski instructor of slope.

Thomas Fink is a Professor of English at the City University of New York, LaGuardia and is the author of Gossip: A Book of Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2001) and Surprise Visit (Domestic Press, 1993), as well as “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001) and The Poetry of David Shapiro (FDUP, 1993).  his gustatory preferences include Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean cuisine and he often forgets that he’s not a lead guitarist in a rock ’n roll band.

Kevin Gallagher loves being married to Kelly Sims Gallagher and he’s also quite excited that the Boston Celtics will be in the playoffs after a ten year oops.  you can check out more of online poetic oeuvre at can we have our ball back? and VeRT.

Photios Giovanis is a Brooklyn based amateur flute player raised by the toll booths of the Throgs Neck Bridge.  he’s Greek in more ways than one and tries to write poems that are at least as good as his name.

Jonathan Goodman is a writer and editor based in New York City, where he teaches at Pratt Institute and writes art criticism, especially about contemporary art in Asia.  his first book was entitled Metropolitan Rooms and he has recently finished a second manuscript of lyrics.

Rosemary Griggs flew through the ether to get here, and then got lost on the way back.

Tom Hibbard says that the name of his poem, ‘gesshom,’ which is excerpted in this issue, is an improvised variant on ‘gihon,’ the name of the ancient, sacred spring.  “the chapters are now ‘assents,’ trying to imply life-affirming (not in opposition to ‘dissent’ which is necessary at times).”  other chapters have been picked up by milk, Moria, word 4 word, and aught. oh, and he recently walked home from downtown, noticed palm fronds, and found out you don’t need a permit to burn brush piles in the village of Chenequa.

Noah Hoffenberg is a poet living in Vermont.  his book The Man with Two Heads is due out in June, alongside an anthology he has compiled, called The Brink.  Noah is the editor of CRUX Literary Magazine, poetry from which has been selected for the Best American Poetry 2002.  he is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, and has poems forthcoming in The New Delta Review, The Minnesota Review, and Exquisite Corpse.

Jill Jones has spent the last few years perfecting being a natural blonde after years as a natural redhead.  pathetically, she also once gave up chocolate.

W.B. Keckler’s book Recombinant Image Day is available free online in PDF format at Broken Boulder Press.  his poetry was featured in a recent issue of the broadside series a.bacus.  he is tired of memorizing IATA codes and being asked where Conakry is.

Stephen Kirbach lives in the Snow-Panic Belt of Asheville, North Carolina, though the snow rarely amounts to much.  he never races out to stock up on bread and milk, based on predictions, although he does enjoy the spectacle of watching others do so.  some of his poems have been published in Exquisite Corpse, Main Street Rag, and in Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Rodney Koeneke is reviewer 5,488 on Amazon.com, where you won’t find either of his chapbooks, J. Edgar Hoover Hears the Blues or Introducing . . . Doctor Marvelous!   you can write to him at gm9@pacbell.net if you’re interested in rating one.  he lives in San Francisco, where he’s hard at work on a new collection called “Rouge State.”  he’s a T-gel man with a Pantene shine.

Bob Marcacci has been living, working, publishing, and writing in San Francisco, California for the past twelve years.  his poems have appeared in Coracle, Pearl, Tight, Santa Clara Review, and the Suisun Valley Review, among others.  he is sometimes known as Bizob in this world.

rob mclennan is a Canadian poet, editor, and publisher, living in Ottawa, Ontario.  his seventh poetry collection is paper hotel, due out in fall 2002 with Broken Jaw Press.  he is also editor of the forthcoming books side/lines: A Poetics (Insomniac Press) and evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press).  check out his clever website.

Roberta A. McQueen is an English as a Second Language Teacher who believes that Poetry should be accessible to everyone.  she is the author of Independence and she is coming out soon with Little Red Moccasins and Other Poems.  she has two cats, Prince and Tara, who practically run the household.  “Bubble Wrap Mania” won third place in the Warm Fuzzy V Contest.

Joseph Victor Milford resides on St. Simons Island off of the coast of Georgia.  since graduating from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, he has perfected the arts of kite-crafting and bellybutton-lint manufacturing.

Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent book is The Stuttering of Wings (Stride Publications, UK, available from Small Press Distribution).  her home is in Phoenix, where she is an avid fan of sunshine and wildflowers.

Guillermo Juan Parra received his M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University.  he’s a high school teacher who grew up in Boston, Venezuela, and Florida, etc.   the album “Spiderland” (1991) by Slint is one of his favorites.

Kirsten Patel claims that she has no talent and that her ohso-vibrant shampoo art in this issue is just a fluke.  some of her favorite things are dog noses, green apples with peanut butter, and tableware.

David Prater’s current project involves mapping Melbourne’s bubblers (drinking fountains, for the uninitiated), with a view to forcing local councils to repair the faulty ones.  he’s toying with an online listing of bubblers, a partnership with a savvy travel guide book company, or possibly an alliance with mobile phone companies and GPS technology providers (who could potentially locate the functional bubblers and alert drinkers as to their whereabouts).  he edits Cordite and always carries at least one litre of water wherever he goes.

Barbara Jane Reyes is a Taurus, born in the year of the Boar, doing the MFA thing at San Francisco State in the art of poetic thievery.  her work can be found in Turnings (Women’s Studies at ODU, 2000), Babaylan (Aunt Lute, 2000), and Eros Pinoy (Anvil Publishers, 2001).  having recently experienced a very sexy Lunar New Year as part of Bindlestiff Studio’s Clit Chat Filipino erotica show, she is geared up for more crazy performance art involving olive oil and partial nudity.

Charlie Rossiter has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is much published.  about his book Back Beat, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has said, “Back Beat beats everything for being beater than the Beats.”  in 1998, Charlie drove to the top of Pike’s Peak with Jack, his then 6-year-old son, only to discover a summit gift shop so distractingly crowded with tram-riders and trite tourist merchandise that they forgot to play their conga drums and spent the afternoon romping in mid-May snow.  he lives in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago.

Dipti Saravanamuttu was born in Sri Lanka, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she keeps a very low profile, for reasons of sanity as well as survival!

Jared Stanley used to live in Oakland.  the biggest earthquake ever happened in New Madrid, Missouri.  it rang church bells in Boston.

Eileen Tabios’ poem “The World Is Yours” is one of a dozen poems she created as a result of making sculptures.  the poem, and its associated sculpture, is part of her visual poetry exhibit entitled “Six Directions” (at Pusod, Berkeley, August-September 2002).  she wants to know your secrets.

Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the is the co-editor of the online zine, milk, which has featured the likes of Anselm Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Wanda Phipps, and Thurston Moore, among others (who also need to find a little home in SHAMPOO!).  this saucy Gemini has been side-swiped by near-blindness not once, but twice in her fragile 28 years—but she’s three times a lay-day.  her books include The Meanest Man Contest (mother’s milk press, 2000) and the upcoming collection, Opaque Lunacy.

Nick Whittock lives in Melbourne and is currently ghostwriting, in verse, the autobiography of Michael Slater (cricketer).

Dylan Willoughby is not tested on animals, nor were any animals harmed in the writing of his poem.