PARSE is GO!

What is PARSE, you may ask? PARSE is the newest creation from Friendlyfire Press, an ongoing proposition created by yours truly and Chad Griffin (whose excellent personal site can be found here). It's about art, it's about poetry, it's about collaboration, it's about $12.00 and will soon be available from our website (under construction), Amazon.com, and wherever poets are doing their thing. We sent it to press on Friday and I am about as nervous as a mother hen.

Chad had this idea of showcasing art with poetry which we put together with a few poet friends of mine as PARSE: POEM. We sort of consider that to be Volume .5 as we did an extremely limited run of 43 handsewn, laserprinted books in awesome anti-static bags. Even though we got great feedback, the labor involved putting it together was more than Chad or I saw as being useful in the long run, so for this edition we decided to enlist the help of printers. Hopefully we'll have our first printing back before nationals so we can start spreading the word nationwide.

The newest edition is called PARSE Volume 1: Alchemy, and should be available by the end of August to the general public, with a release party of some sort occurring in September. It features artwork and setting by Mr. Chad Griffin and poetry by (click to visit their website or see their bio):

Elana Bell
Oscar Bermeo
Jai Chakrabarti
Robert Bevan Dalton
Mara Jebsen
Sabrina Hayeem-Ladani
Raymond Daniel Medina
John Trause
Rich Villar

and me acting as editor and slipping a few of my own poems in on the sly.

Can't wait for you all to see it. I think it's different from anything anyone is doing right now - it's truly collaborative, with the poets all writing to a theme and the artwork being a response to the poems (and vice-versa), as well as the poets responding to each other. The fun part is over - now we've got to sell the damn thing.