FOREWORD

Welcome to Blackbird, year two.

	Julia Johnson
	Norman Dubie
	Cornelius Eady
	Radically Local

First and foremost, we are privileged to publish "Book of the Jaspers," the second section of Norman Dubie's futuristic book-length poem, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake. ("The Book of the Jewel Worm" was published in Blackbird, Vol. 1 No. 2, and the conclusion of the poem will appear in Vol. 2 No. 2.) Dubie's enriched narrative has its origins in the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism as much as in the best traditions of speculative fiction, and perhaps the poem's hunger for wholeness in a chaotic tomorrow has in some way presided over the choices we have made in this volume, for much of the work here either explores the patterns that bind our lives in time and desire or introduces the voices of a new generation of writers who will speak into time yet to come.

Several of these voices are linked in a cyber loop that particularly recommends them to your reading pleasure. The poets Joshua Poteat, Miguel Murphy, and Erin Lambert, and the fiction writers Becky Hagenston and Julia Johnson are also linked in their care for language and in their ability to place their readers slightly off-center. This stance invites us to examine more alertly our familiar landscape and its inhabiting objects. We welcome the opportunity to call your attention to their work.

We also direct you to new poems by Cornelius Eady and Claudia Emerson and to the remarkable variety of poetry that joins them. John Allman's gritty evocation of a Queens neighborhood of the 1940's joins Natalie Peeterse's drive through the Virginia countryside and Paisley Rekdal's tour of an eighteenth century tapestry via the imagined mind of its creator.

Presented in this issue are the astonishing fictions of four writers, four women, giving voice to four narrative points of view. "Fiona," a prismatically faceted excerpt from Melissa Pritchard's forthcoming novel, Late Bloomer, is revealed through the lenses of several shifting personae. Becky Hagenstrom's poised and evanescent second-person story, "How to Keep Busy While Your Fiancé Climbs Mount Everest," listens in on a lover's distraught mind, while Julia Johnson's "The Shower Wall" presents a chilling survey of a simple room from the point of view of a disintegrating consciousness. In wrapping up Blackbird's new fiction, we're pleased to also introduce Sandi D. Terry, an emerging young writer, and her gracefully wrought first-person narrative, "Bocca," her first published story online or in print.

R. H. W. Dillard explores the sources of creative reading and writing, and Dennis Danvers weighs the virtues of William Gibson's most recent opus in two of our nonfiction offerings. The Gallery section takes for its subject the ways in which three quite different individuals approach art making. Noted art critic Donald Kuspit connects Kandinsky's abstract paintings to his spiritual reflections. Sculptor Sheila Pepe crochets a connection between bridges and shoelaces, and dancer Chris Burnside helps us investigate his attraction to both movement and words.

Intricacy of detail marks much of the work before you, detail that leads us to an uneasy peace within the space/time continuum. Welcome, all, to Blackbird for a second year.  

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