David Abel is a poet, editor, and teacher, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop. A founding organizer of the Spare Room reading series and of the artists' collective 13 Hats, he is also an interdisciplinary artist and frequent collaborator. Three new books were released this summer: Float, a collection of collage texts from Chax Press; Tether, a chapbook of poems from Barebone books; and Carrier, a sequence of hypergraphic visual poems, from c_L Books.

Lissa Wolsak is a poet, goldsmith, and energy-field therapist living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her poems, essays, and cross-genre works from 1994-2005 were collected in Squeezed Light, published by Station Hill in 2010, and a new long poem, Of Beings Alone, is forthcoming. Charles Stein's essay on her poetics, "Magic without Tears in the Poetry of Lissa Wolsak," can be found here.

what enters the camera
through the lens
never re-emerges

might as well
not have been

but kicks
the image
from rest

David Abel



from Pen Chants, or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences


toe over a leaf

this is our salt

salt language

the carrying skin

I leave to another pen


Lissa Wolsak