Featured Poem on Luzma Umpierre's page

A dual purpose and then some here: new poem, new poets (in sense of new to my personal reading list), new poetry page to add to reader and share.:Being a hurricane season appropriate poem is lagniappe. And who does not need a survival plan? Now to hustle up a few more links and an illustration. for Luzma's New Poem (a regular feature on her page), Survival Plan by J.L. Torres

To live in Puerto Rico
you need a survival plan
El Departamento de Ai Bendito
recommends one from below:



The Armageddon Plan

Zoetrope: All-Story

…Late night posts tend to the minimalist…better that than incoherence…

Zoetrope: All-Story is a quarterly literary publication founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997 to explore the intersection of story and art, fiction and film.  

Along with new stories, each edition of the magazine presents a Classic Reprint—a previously published short story that inspired a great film—to illustrate the narrative relationship between the art forms. Previous Classic Reprints include Liu Yi-chang's "Intersection" (which inspired Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love), Steven Millhauser's "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (Neil Burger's The Illusionist), Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (Sarah Polley's Away From Her), and Paul Auster's "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" (Wayne Wang's Smoke). More about  ...

Contests. Submissions. Online workshops. Artwork. Community. Virtual Studio. New and classic short stories... and more at Zoetrope: All-Story

A History of Book-Pulping

…and other sad fates for the beleaguered (or so we are continually told) book in its print incarnation. Even innocent, "unsullied" books face the same fate. From dust unto dust and from books unto books…and other fates. 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hasn’t said what it plans to do with all the copies of Imagine, Jonah Lehrer’s sullied best seller on the science of creativity, that it has yanked from shelves. But most book people agree that the copies will eventually be pulped, or dissolved into a milky liquid and reconstituted as clean paper. In this regard, at least, Imagine has plenty of company. Every year, millions of books are sent to the “cruel machines,” as one young editor calls them, simply because their sales didn’t meet projections. The process is tidily symmetrical: from the vat to the store and back to the vat. 

What eureka moment gave us book recycling?

There is a sense of purpose, contrapasso, to repurposing the repurposer. Not all instances are poetic justice, intentionally or accidentally. Read the rest at A History of Book-Pulping in New York Magazine and consider the future of book recycling in the age of e-books...or the oxymoron of recycling e-books. Where does book art, books as art, fit in here?

Social media and the self-epublished author

In the third in a Guardian Books series of essays on digital media and publishing, Ewan Morrison,  Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, claims that as the project to monetise social media falters the self-epublishing industry's defects will be laid bare. Plus heated comments.

'Taos' by Jillena Rose

Image: "From the Faraway, Nearby, Georgia O’Keeffe," 1938, accompanying "Taos," a poem by Jillena Rose

Bones are easier to find than flowers
in the desert, so I paint these:
Fine white skulls of cows and horses.

When I lie flat under the stars
in the back of the car, coyotes howling
in the scrub pines, easy to feel how those bones
are so much like mine: Here is my pelvis,
like the pelvis I found today
bleached by the sun and the sand. Same
hole where the hip would go, same

white curve of bone beneath my flesh
same cradle of life, silent and still in me.

'Taos' by Jillena Rose | berfrois