I read within this little red book, which can fit in the back pocket of your pants easy enough for reading on the bus, in church, while not watching TV or screwing around with porn on the internet or emailing somebody about insurance or India or ordering a gazabutgoo bush to block your Nazi Republican neighbor's view... I read that A. D. Winans published in more than 500 magazines and that he edited for years Second Coming Magazine. I knew that. But I didn't know about the 500 publications and - how lame can I be? - I did not read, that I remembered, any of those more than 500 publications (I assume many poems). So I had a treat. So I had an intoxication. So I hear da voice as fresh as wet kittens and frank as jumping on a rusty nail. His poems about the Buk were crocodiles and I was an overweight drunk in the Nile. Now this poet is of the gut-philosophical beer can couch, bacon, working class shoes and a suit that is too small with an outdated tie that you only wear to weddings and the too frequent funerals of friends. Let me escape my own powerful pleasurable first impressions. Winans of short lined poems pours smooth. He remembers the great Buk as a man as much as a genius poet. Therefore, he is always fair, fart and candid and therefore finger on the trigger real. Apollo the sun. Moth for the moon. His poems are cans of tuna, starkissed. This is no easy thing to talk write without being behind the mask of the some far-stretched notion of what a poet is. Well - I am gunna tell you what a poet is: A. D. Winans.

Ronald Wardall has a way of seeing a man pickled in a six-foot glass jar. And a way of writing about his grandmother Mary's meeting death. And seeing things, like Hemingway's suicide. And in his poem called: Patsy Cline, "I had he taste on my lips, like rust." I too had the taste of rust and winter and the smell of, "Egyptian perfume meant for the underarms of the dead." His poems strike deep - an injection with a thin needle, almost invisible, bubbling with imagination into the a real vein. Afterwards, you thirst. Throbbing, striking with a little sweet red blood, striking what Wardall finds and defines in the real of our everydays. What he sees is really what I really think is there, dense, thickly complex with flowers and thorns, moments of clarity enhanced with art.

Before you get to page 87 you read through poetry by Gerald Locklin, Dancing Bear, Valentina Gnup, Lyn Lifshin, Robert Penick(City Edition Breaks Down - a poem about greed, November and pitiful humanity in the face of tortured nature) and Rocking Chair Frank. Maybe you stop off at Ken Feltges's poem: Happy Hour. You should. But then on page 87 begins a short story by E. R. Baxter III. The story is called: Jack Gets a Thesaurus. A treasure. It is a story, a short story that plays with the form of the short story. At each step in the narrative the narrator reminds the humble reader that the story is a fiction or a fiction being told by a writer, which is the art of the story. So the writing of the story becomes as much of the story as the story itself, which itself is a very important story about love, death, sons and fathers, coming of age, growing old and the form of our emotions in art and presenting of such in art. Still in the midst of the literary acrobatics there is a tremendous and deep earthiness or centered facet of the story. It takes place in Niagara Falls. The characters are as real as really created characters might be and their language complete with there own manufactured words are believable. Well-balanced and mature, Baxter's prose finds the seam between the real and the making of art. He sits on this fence with one eye in each realm, reworking each separate reality into one finely woven masterpiece. And Baxter is working way hard to save Niagara Falls. All poets, you must save The Falls: www.niagaraheritage.org