Gathers poems by Kay Boyle, Ted Berrigan, Ishmael Reed, David Shapiro, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Clark, and Bernadette Bayer

I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world on February 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It was Mozart's 39;s birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliac Vincent Katz would never have let pass without a celebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginning Its Mozart's39th birthday. He's only 264.years old; Mozart died young but kept on living. Vincent and I were older already than Mozart was when he died, but if we had any chance at living as long as he did we had better get to work. We are poets but our immortality is far from ensured. Our contributions to the archive of the aptly named School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado are so our only bid for a mozartian afterlife. Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our search for the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung by the melomanes of the future. CoVid was our last chance to make embodied poetry that would keep living in the future, as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces, disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from all human beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yet uncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating our immortal predecessors while noting the daily routines to preserve our bodies, we might make it into that future via our (regularly disinfected) keyboards. Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet- engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at ages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we two could provide them. Our exchanges quickly became an ongoing epic of care. It became also a store of reminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage to the women we cared for, communiques and confessions that we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, at least for me, my mother was past appreciating our fabulous antics though she smiled, sometimes appropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away on September 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listening without recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of this date, still listening in her body to this epic of care. Andrei Codrescu

Codrescu has an amazing instinct for comic revelatory detail (and can) make provocative . . . connections among the stray facts of the everyday.--San Francisco Chronicle. The reason he's adored is that he's smack in the tradition of the lovable, unthreatening curmudgeons such as Fred Allen and Andy Rooney. . . . Quite a feat.--Booklist.

Review Andrei Codrescu transforms the common place into the miraculous. His work is cause for celebration. -- Kay Boyle His command of language is superb, his writing beautifully original, and his insights piercing. -- Harper's Magazine One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers. -- New York Times Book Review Product description An aspiring writer, a professor's wife, a secreretary, gold anklets, Maoists, Rom .harlots and more swirl through this spicy tale of a harried quest for a mythic artifact. Repentance of Lorraine is a lusty yam inspired | by the heady and hot days of the Sixties. This special edition includes a new introduction by the author on the illicit birth pangs of his career and The Repentance of Lorraine. A longtime favorite of National Public Radio audiences, Andrei Codrescu has cemented his literary reputation with a number of poetry and nonfiction volumes, including the critically acclaimed The Hole in the Flag. Early in his career, Codrescu cut his publishing teeth with less lofty work including the delicious Lorraine. Out of print for years, this early Codrescu tale originally published under the pseudonym Ames Claire is again available. From the Publisher An aspiring writer, a professor's wife, a secretary, gold anklets, Maoists, Roman harlots and more swirl through this spicy tale of a harried quest for a mythic artifact.

A reissuing of the debut collection of poems by the noted National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu.

An avant-garde literary journal that publishes poetry, prose, translations, commentary, etc.