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

Long cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and textbooks, and more recently celebrated on the internet, the groundbreaking Concrete and Minimalist poems of Aram Saroyan (born 1943) are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. Working in the 1960s among the so-called Second Generation New York School of poetry and the international Concrete poetry movement, but also informed by Conceptual art, Saroyan brought an intense focus to the sensuality of words--often single words--highlighting their material strangeness. Among the most popular of these poems are the infamous "lighght" (singled out by Senator Jesse Helms, who publicly lambasted the poem when its author received an NEA award), "eyeye," and his four-legged letter "m." "Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle and end," Saroyan once stated; "A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant." Complete Minimal Poems reissues the entirety of Saroyan's rare collections Aram Saroyan , Pages and The Rest for the first time, as well as his well-known "Electric Poems" (originally published in the 1972 All Stars anthology) and the previously unpublished sequence "Short Poems." The first edition of Complete Minimal Poems was published in 2007, receiving praise in The New York Times and winning the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award. This reprint of that edition includes a new preface by Ron Silliman.