Eileen Tabios, Jonathan Monroe, and Alan Halsey’s books will arrive fresh from the presses this coming week. Skip Fox’s Delta Blues is in process with a cover design by Rikki Ducornet. Robert Lax’s How To Read Finnegans Wake is almost finished, with the wonderful cover shot by Dan Rice. Jane Nakagawa will soon interview Yoko Danno to make her “even more well-known” than she already is. Judith Katz-Levine’s ahadada emergency edition is in process. Ekleksographia I remains half-way between coming and going. Mike Heller’s book is crawling to completion, but will be done as soon as Dan gets his computer fixed. It’s a mad mad world, my masters (and mistresses), but while the laws of physics continue to operate we’ll do our best imitation of Alberto Santos-Dumont heading for the finish line after thrice rounding the Eiffel Tower! Every hand will be accounted for, everyone will be happy and the cheering Parisians will shout “Ahadada! Ahadada! Ahadada!”

We’ve yet to wheel the thing out from the hanger. Dan still has some tuning up to do once he finds some time. Dan, the world is waiting and watching! Meanwhile the little motor keeps sputtering on.

Penguin does it again! John Edwin Cowen’s edition of the complete poems of Jose Garcia Villa, a favorite of mine, is one of the best books of the new year. Read it, along with The Anchored Angel, collected poems, prose and essays, edited by Eileen Tabios, and you’ll have a key to this incredible, experimental poet. Hopefully both of these books will bring the long-overlooked Villa back into the spotlight.

Having seen holography in action on CNN’s coverage of the recent election, it doesn’t take much of a leap to see the application of this technology to poetry readings and slams. Within the next ten years, with the wider availability of these machines and cheaper, better versions, we can imagine virtual guest readers at universities and slams that include readers from across the globe in real time before live audiences.