Mark Tardi is from Chicago, Illinois. His first book, Euclid Shudders, was a finalist for the 2002 National Poetry Series. A chapbook on Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin called Part First-------Chopin's Feet is forthcoming from G-O-N-G. Currently he is completing a new manuscript, as well as an adaptation of Stefan Themerson's story "Wooff Wooff or Who Killed Richard Wagner?" for the stage. He has also served as an editor at Dalkey Archive Press. Recent work can be found in Antennae, Aufgabe, Bird Dog, Conundrum, and Travers

Brenda Iijima's book AROUND SEA was published this year by O BOOKS. An essay titled COLOR AND ITS ANTECEDENTS, published as a chapbook was also released this year by Yen Agat Books. She is the editor of PORTABLE PRESS AT YO-YO LABS. As well Iijima is a painter and a photographer. She grew up on the highest mountain in Massachusetts, in the town of North Adams. Since the 90's she has lived in Brooklyn, New York.

The following poem is from the manuscript EARLY LINOLEUM forthcoming from Furniture Press.

RAPACIOUSNESS

Flounder flat
Bogus style
On these racks of totalitarian barbarity
Dacnomanian mania: earth dweller versus
Earth dweller between dips in surrounding rock strata
Igneous arrangements, loaded extemporaneousness
Gilded swans kimball in dives, ball up into verb
Butterfly as psyche can’t be quelled
Midden of myth and a harkening transmutation
Dark funereal beauty underscores this prophecy
In our garden’s ravens and ravenous fires. Ruse’s epic
Reflection scorched in Hiroshima, Castor and Pollux mock-up
Righteous patron saints vertiginous as interlocutors
Mystic borderland metal. Tint of torpor, wisteria, cosmic purple aura
Lost pink gentleness to white vice or excess yellow
Light brown practical mind
In fore a diorama discrete, built to live in the midst
Ideograms resembling secrets
Retrieving rosebuds for the drusy eye
Darkle a sarcoline scene
Corruption of generous moves
Racy subatomic particles collide steadily
Into non-existence
Like Tang, like hoedown
To die this way is
Softened into camp, a blue notebook of doves
Deepest regions of death
Life possesses me
Undulating hazard between chance

Friday June 11: poets Mark Tardi & Brenda Iijima and performance by composer Keumok Ho.