Noelle Allen lives and works in Chicago. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Wendy Cooper Gallery.

 

The Atlas Group was founded in 1999 in New York by Walid Raad (b.1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanono) as an imaginary foundation to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. The Atlas Group documents are organized and preserved in The Atlas Group Archives, which contains authored, found, and newly produced files. The Atlas Group's most recent solo exhibition in the U.S. was at The Kitchen (New York, 2006).

 

Mick Barr lives in San Francisco and plays guitar in Orthrelm, Octis, Ocrilim, and Flying Luttenbachers, among others. His drawings have appeared on record covers and recently in a group exhibition at Atelier Cardenas Bellanger.

 

Joshua Beckman is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Your Time Has Come and Shake (Wave Books, 2006).

 

Whitney Bedford lives and works in Los Angeles. Her most recent solo exhibitions were at D'Amelio Terras, Cherrydelosreyes, and The Wrong Gallery.

 

Often mentioned in the same breath as the Syrian poet Adonis, the Iraqi Saâdi Youssef, and the Palestinian Mahmood Darwish, Mohamed Bennis is one of the major poets writing in Arabic today. Born in Fès in 1948, he started the avant-garde magazine Al-Taqafa al-jadida (The New Culture) in 1974, which ran for ten years until finally succumbing to government censorship. The magazine was one of the essential centers for the development of the new Moroccan poetics, as well as a major platform for a dialogue between cultures and radical intellectual debate. In 1985 he co-founded the publishing house Toubkal, and in 1996 he founded the “House of Poetry” in Morocco, one of whose achievements was to persuade UNESCO to declare March 21st World Poetry Day. Bennis’ writings have been collected in a two volume Complete Works published in Beirut in 2001. A range of his poetic work is available in French, translated by poets such as Bernard Noël, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mostafa Nissabouri. The extracts printed from his “Book of Love” are a writing-through of the core texts of Arab love poetry though the centuries, as well as a dialogue with the great Al Andalus Arab 10th century poet Al Hazm (sublime love poet who saw his life ruined by civil war and imprisonment), as a necessary No! to the present situation, specifically the disaster of the first war in the Middle East.

 

D.C. Berman is an intermediate level guitar player living in Nashville, TN.

 

Dennis Cooper is the author of eight novels. They include God Jr. (Grove Press, 2005), The Sluts, (Carroll & Graf, 2005), My Loose Thread (Canongate, 2002), and a cycle of five novels: Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), and Period (2000), all published by Grove Press. A new book of poems entitled The Weaklings will be published next year. He is a Contributing Editor of Artforum. He currently lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

 

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was raised in India and Nepal. Tsering received her MA in Literature from the University of Delhi (India), MA in Professional Writing from the University of Massachussetts, and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her first book of poems, Rules of the House, published by Apogee Press in 2002, was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003. Her most recent book, In the Absent Everday, is also from Apogee Press. Other publications include two chapbooks, In Writing the Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press). Tsering works for a San Francisco based non-profit foundation that provides humanitarian aid to people of the Himalayas.

 

Lidija Dimkovska is a Macedonian poet and essayist. Her book Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers was released by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2006.

 

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), and two books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003) and American Tatts (Chax 2004). He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2005).

 

Harriet "Harry" Dodge repeats indeterminably big bang adjacent to black hole?

 

Alex Epstein is an Israeli writer. He was born in 1971 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and came to Israel at the age of 8. Epstein is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. He was awarded the Prime Minister`s Prize for literature in 2003. The stories printed in SOFT TARGETS are from Epstein's new book, Blue has no South — a collection of very short tales and stories (Am-Oved, 2005).

 

Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in German-annexed Czechoslovakia. He has made close to 90 films, including three feature films, essay films, and documentaries.

 

Jason Fox lives and works in New York City. His most recent solo exhibition was at Feature, Inc.

 

Andy Friedman is a painter, poet, songwriter and performer touring the nation with what he calls an “Art-Country˜ performance. Since 2002, Andy Friedman, 30, has been widely credited for inspiring a new role for the visual artist. The self-proclaimed “painter with lyrics˜ has also been referred to as “The Johnny Cash of Painting˜ and a “Country-Singer-Conceptualist,˜ setting projections of his paintings, drawings and photographs to interact with music from his band, The Other Failures, and his original songs onstage. Andy was a staff member of the New Yorker magazine’s Editorial Department from 1998-2002, where he is a frequent art contributor. His two books of art and poetry, Drawings & Other Failures (2001) and Future Blues (2003), were published by City Salvage Records, a label and publishing house founded by the artist in 2001. Andy’s work has appeared in numerous other periodicals, newspapers and literary journals including The New York Times, New York, Esquire, Pindeldyboz, Bombay Gin and the Utne Reader. The artist’s first CD, Andy Friedman & The Other Failures Live At The Bowery Poetry Club, will be released by City Salvage Records in January 2006. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Tara, and their son, Walker.

 

Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No (Action Books, 2005). Her poems have appeared in Conjunctions, New American Writing, Fence, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Athens, GA.

 

Wayne Gonzales lives and works in New York City. His most recent solo exhibition was at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

 

Richard Greenfield is author of A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press, 2003). His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Electronic Poetry Review, Five Fingers Review, Fourteen Hills, Lit, Volt, and others. He is an editorial adviser for Noemi Press and co-founder of Apostrophe Press. He lives in Eastern Tennessee.

 

Meg Hamill has spent most of her life in the northern reaches of New England. She overlaps her time between work, human beings, and poetry. She currently lives in Oakland, California where she writes, and leads canoe trips on the San Francisco Bay.

 

Carla Harryman's twelfth book and most recent challenge to the separation of literary genres, Baby (2005), features the sensual world and critical perspectives of a maverick baby. She is co-editor of Lust for Life: on the writings of Kathy Acker (2006) with Amy Scholder and Avital Ronell and a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in Poetry (2004). She is responsible for numerous innovative and inter-media performances and collaborations. Her most recent work for performance, Mirror Play, has appeared in many versions and was recently presented as a bilingual polyvocal work with speaking voice and instrumentation (Wels, Austria, Unlimited XIX–, 2005) and as a bilingual work for speaking chorus (Hölderlinturm, Tübingen, Germany, 2005).

 

Brian Howe lives and writes in Chapel Hill, NC. His music writing appears regularly in Pitchforkmedia.com and Paste Magazine. Poetic work has appeared or is forthcoming in Octopus, Eratio, GutCult, and McSWEENEYS.net. He blogs at http://slatherpuss.blogspot.com/ and http://moistworks.com/.

 

Stanya Kahn lives in Los Angeles, recently transplanted from New York. She is a writer, performer and video maker. Her live performances and collaborative video projects (made with Harry Dodge) have been presented and commissioned nationally and internationally. Recent video screenings include showings at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, the Sundance Film Festival, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and at the Backyard Invitational Video Competition, where she and Dodge's video "Let the Good Times Roll" won. This video is based in part on Kahn's performance piece of the same name, presented at the Hammer Museum in 2004. Her writing appears in LTTR #4, Movement Research, and numerous chapbooks of her performance texts.

 

In 1928, Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) and friends founded the last avant-garde collective of the early Soviet period, the OBERIU, or Union of Real Art, which followed in the footsteps of avant-garde artists and writers they admired — Kazimir Malevich, Velemir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Matiushin, and Igor Terentiev, among others. Kharms' idiosyncratic visions and aesthetic theories centered around a belief in the autonomy of art from real world logic, and the intrinsic meaning to be found in objects and words outside of their practical function. By the late 1920s, his antirational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of decadent and illogical behavior earned Kharms — who always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe — the reputation of being a “fool” or a “crazy-man” in Leningrad cultural circles. Soviet authorities, having become increasingly hostile toward the avant-garde in general, deemed Kharms’ writing for children anti-Soviet because of its absurd logic and its refusal to instill materialist Soviet values. In 1931 he was arrested and prosecuted for his involvement in a group of "anti-Soviet children's writers." After serving a short time in exile, he was no longer allowed to perform his work. He found it increasingly difficult to publish even his work for children, which had been his sole source of income, and became evermore destitute over the next decade. He wrote for the desk drawer, for his wife Marina Malich, and for a small group of friends, the "chinari," who met privately to discuss matters of philosophy, music, mathematics, and literature. Kharms lived in debt and hunger for several years until his final arrest on suspicions of treason in the summer of 1941. He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No.1. and died in his cell in February, 1942. His work was saved from the war by loyal friends and hidden until the 1960s when his children’s writing became widely published and scholars began the job of recovering his manuscripts and publishing them in the west.

 

Paul Killebrew was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He presently lives in Brooklyn and goes to law school at NYU.

 

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of nonfiction prose: Andy Warhol (2001), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics (2000), Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (1995), The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993), and Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989). He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (2004), and five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (2006), Model Homes (2004), The Milk of Inquiry (1999), Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender (1994), and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems (1990).

 

Damon Krukowski is the author of The Memory Theater Burned (Turtle Point, 2004). He is also a musician — his most recent album is "The Earth is Blue" (20/20/20, 2005), by Damon & Naomi.

 

Rachel Kushner is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found, most recently, in Fence, Artforum, Bomb and ArtUS. She is currently at work on a novel, from which “Debouchment” is excerpted.

 

Justin Lacour's poems have appeared in jubilat and Mipoesias. He edits Kulture Vulture, a journal of New Writing.

 

Ben Lerner's first book is The Lichtenberg Figures, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copper Canyon will publish his second book, Angle of Yaw, in 2007. He co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts.

 

Daigan Lueck is a senior priest at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Muir Beach, California. His paintings, poems, translations, and other brouhaha's have not been widely published or well received. He was born, um, in 1931.

 

Dan Machlin is the author of 6X7 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), This Side Facing You (Heart Hammer), and In Rem (@ Press). He is a recent finalist for both the Verse Prize and National Poetry Series. "Dear Body" is part of a new manuscript of poems, portions of which have appeared in Fence Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and Tarpaulin Sky (tarpaulinsky.com). He is the founder and editor of Futurepoem books.

 

Mariana Marin was considered one of Romania’s most important poets at the time she died at the age of forty-seven in 2003. A proverbial born poet of exceptional quality as well as poète maudit, Marin was silenced for much of the 1980s by the Çeausescu dictatorship for the uncompromising dissidence that can be seen in her pained, traumatized voice even when she is not directly political, as is the case with many of her later poems. She was a kind of innate resister to happiness. Marin published five books of poetry, the last The Dowry of Gold, a career retrospective published by the Romanian Writers Museum Publishing House (Bucharest) a year before her death. Her poems have come out here in Field, The Portsmouth Review, The Kit-Cat Review, Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Art, The Literary Review, Smartish Pace, Runes, and Cairn, among other places.

 

Sabrina Orah Mark's first book, The Babies, won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (judged by Jane Miller) and was recently published by Saturnalia Books. She received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Georgia.

 

Dennis Phillips' 10th book of poetry, his selected poems, is due out from Green Integer in the Summer 2006. He is one of the poetry editors of the New Review of Literature and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.

 

Boris Poplavsky was born in Moscow in 1903 but settled in Paris after the Revolution. He was regarded as one of the most talented of the younger generation of the first emigration of Russian poets, but died tragically at the age of 32, poisoned by a fellow drug addict intent on suicide. Despite various projects prepared for publication (some with the assistance of his friend and mentor, the futurist poet and book artist Ilya Zdanevich), only Flags (1931) was published in his lifetime. His posthumous collections include Snowy Hour (1936), From a Garland of Wax (1938) and Airship of an Unknown Direction (1965), as well as the novel Apollo Unformed. Recently, much of his work (including a book of Automatic Poems) have been collected and republished in his native Russia, where he was relatively unknown during the Soviet period. It is generally accepted that Poplavsky's poetry was the closest thing Russian poetry every had to French Surrealism. To date, little has been translated into English.

 

Joan Retallack’s most recent book is Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan) coedited with Juliana Spahr. Memnoir — a long poem — was published in the US (Post-Apollo Press) and in French translation (CIP-Marseilles) in 2004. The Poethical Wager — a volume of essays — came out last year from The University of California Press, which will also publish her forthcoming introduction to Gertrude Stein with selected work. “The Reinvention of Truth” is part of an ongoing investigative project carried out in a range of poetic forms. Retallack is John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College where she teaches in Languages & Literature and Interdisciplinary Arts.

 

Matthew Rohrer is the author of four books of poems: A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the 1994 National Poetry Series and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book of the Year" for 1995; Satellite; A Green Light (which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Prize); and Nice Hat. Thanks, which was written collaboratively with Joshua Beckman. An audio CD, Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, collects some of their live, improvised collaborative poems from their extensive tour to support the book.

 

Martha Ronk is the author most recently of Why/Why Not, University of California Press, and In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, Omnidawn Press, winner of the PEN USA award in poetry for 2005. She is a professor of literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

 

Christian Schwager was born in 1966 and grew up in Uster, near Zürich. His photographic project "False Chalets", an examination of the appropriative architecture of Swiss Army bunkers as part of Switzerland's cultural heritage, won the 2004 award from the Kulturstiftung Winterthur.

 

Jason Smith lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

David Stromberg was born in Israel in 1980 and moved to Los Angeles in 1989. He holds a BS in Mathematics from UCLA and an MFA in Writing from CalArts. He is the author of three books of cartoons, Saddies, Confusies, and Desperaddies, and publisher of Jovian Books, a small press based in Los Angeles.

 

Born in 1931 in Chefchaouen in the mountains of northern Morocco, Abdelkrim Tabbal worked as a teacher until he retired, though he remains very active on the literary scene of his hometown and beyond. Among his books are Atariq ilâ al insane (The Path towards Man) and Al Achia ‘ou Almounkassira (The Broken Things); his Collected Poems were published in 2000 in Rabat. This all too brief selection does not allow to show the breadth of a life’s work consecrated exclusively to poetry. Tabbal’s achievement sums up the birth and development of modern Moroccan poetry during the second part of the twentieth century, and he remains one of the Maghreb’s exemplary voices. This “vigilant watchman of the human condition,” (so wrote Abdellatif Laâbi), is in dire need of translations into English.

 

teleseen runs, teleseen hides, stands forceful edges across ones, twos and up on the third. shadows tell deep and material, or slow and cunning, like stalk or chalice. is as told or is as is seen.

 

John Tremblay lives and works in New York City. His most recent solo exhibition was at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

 

Alexander Vvedensky co-founded OBERIU, a small circle of avant-garde writers in Leningrad at the end of the 20s. Most OBERIU members made a living from children’s literature; few were able to publish any “adult” work. A series of scandalous poetry readings led to the 1931 arrests of Vvedensky and his main partner Daniil Kharms. After release, Kharms, Vvedensky and friends met for discussions at each other’s apartments. Without hope of publication or even circulation in manuscript, they created a collective body of work that in retrospect has become one of the most important developments in twentieth-century Russian literature. Vvedensky died after his second arrest in 1941.

 

Catherine Wagner is the author of Macular Hole (Fence 2004) and Miss America (Fence 2001). She lives in Boise, Idaho.

 

Adam Walko is an artist living in New York City.

 

Benjamin Weissman's second book of short fiction is called Headless. His writing about art and the good people who make it occasionally appears in Modern Painters.

 

Allyssa Wolf's work has appeared in Versal, GutCult, Ribot, Octopus and other places. Poems and reviews are forthcoming in The New Review of Literature, Cutbank, Montana, The Bedside Guide to No-Tell Motel Anthology, The New College Review, Volume I, and Fascicle. She maintains an online mag called Ghost Play, and is the editor of Gateway Songbooks, a chapbook series. Her first collection of poems, Vaudeville, was released by Seismicity Editions in 2006.

 

Born in Casablanca in 1953, Abdallah Zrika grew up in the slums of Ben Msik. He wrote his first poems at age twelve and self-published his first book (Dance of the Head and the Rose) in 1977. In these so called “years of lead” of political repression and student unrest, the book was an immediate popular success with the younger Moroccan generation — as were the many poetry readings he gave to audiences that often numbered in the thousands. In 1978 he was arrested and condemned to two years in jail for disturbing the public order and supposed crimes against “the sacred values” of his country. Since his release in 1980 he has continued his career as a writer, becoming one of Morocco’s major voices. Abdellatif Laâbi wrote of the early work: “Brutal, disheveled, wild, blasphemous, one could be tempted to say that it is voluntarily ugly — the same way people found Picasso’s paintings ugly,” while he sees the more recent work as having “restructured itself to make room for the visionary,” by becoming a “crucible in which human and historical matters are transmuted… After having called for the destruction of the old world, he has now put his shoulder to the task of reinventing life.” Of his ten or so books, three have been translated into French. The present texts come from the book Petites Proses,& published by L’Escampette (Bordeaux, France) in 1998 in Zrika’s own French translation.

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Translators

 

Ljubica Arsovska is editor-in-chief of the quarterly Kulturen Zivot, the leading cultural magazine in Macedonia, and translator of numerous books, plays, and poems.

 

Rachel Tzvia Back, poet and translator, has lived in Israel for the last 25 years. Her translations from the Hebrew of Lea Goldberg's poetry were recently awarded a PEN Translation Grant and are forthcoming in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005). Her own poetry collections include Azimuth (Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), and The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2003).

 

Poet, translator & essayist Pierre Joris left Luxembourg at age 19 & has since lived in the U.S., Great Britain, North Africa, and France. Rain Taxi praised his collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999, for "its physical, philosophical delight in words and their reverberations." Since then he has published two chapbooks of poetry: Permanent Diaspora (Duration Press) and most recently The Rothenberg Variations (Wild Honey Press, Ireland). In 2003 Wesleyan U.P. brought out his collection of essays A Nomad Poetics. Recent translations include 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour (Inconundrum Press, 2002), Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press, 2005), and Lightduress by Paul Celan (Green Integer, 2004), which won the 2005 PEN Award for Translation. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited the award-winning anthologies Poems for the Millennium and, most recently from Exact Change, Pablo Picasso, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems.

 

Anna Moschovakis is a Brooklyn-based translator and poet. Her translations of Henri Michaux, Blaise Cendrars, Theophile Gautier and Claude Cahun have been published by New York Review Books, nest magazine, and Fence. Her first book of poems is forthcoming from Turtle Point Press. She is an editor and designer at Ugly Duckling Presse. She does not speak Russian.

 

Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature, a book of poems available from Ugly Duckling presse, and the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

 

Peggy Reid is a translator of Macedonian poetry and prose. In 1973 she and her husband, Graham W. Reid, received the Struga Poetry Festival Translation Prize for their translation of The Sirdar, by Grigor Prlicev. In 1994 she received the Macedonian Literary Translators' Society Award; she has also won first prize at the Avon Poetry Festival, UK, twice for her own poetry. She teaches English at the University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje.

 

Adam J. Sorkin recently won the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation of The Poetry Society London for his version of The Bridge by Marin Sorescu (Bloodaxe, 2004), translated with Lidia Vianu. He has published twenty-five books of Romanian translation, most recently Daniela Crasnaru’s short stories, The Grand Prize and Other Stories (Northwestern UP). Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State Delaware County.

 

Matvei Yankelevich is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-edits 6x6, a poetry periodical. A book of Kharms' selected works in Matvei's translation is fortcoming from Overlook Press. Matvei's translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's "The Cloud In Pants" was recently published in Circumference Magazine. His own writing has appeared in various little magazines. An ongoing critical piece on Russian-American poets appears on-line at Octupus Magazine. He is the co-translator, with Eugene Ostashevsky, of An Invitation For Me To Think, the Selected Poems of Alexander Vvedensky, forthcoming from Green Integer; and of Russian Absurdism: OBERIU, an anthology forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Matvei teaches Russian Literature and Language at Hunter College in New York City.