Recent News...

This is almost in danger of becoming a regular feature, but here are some recent new items floating about the web...

- Coach House Books (who published Christian Bok's Eunoia) have had one of their stable shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize - Jeramy Dodds' Crabwise to the Hounds. The two audio poems by Dodds on their site are great: The Epileptic Acupuncturist and The Gift.

- David Hart's new pamphlet (Nine Arches) launches in Birmingham in a couple of weeks. It's a square book, which makes me happy anyway, but G&P's sneak preview of the long poem, with photographs, has left us with our jaws on the floor. (Well, mine anyway. Simon had to sell his lower jaw on the black market when his first collection failed to keep him supplied with lentils.) Review pending, methinks. (Of the book, not Simon's jaw, or lentils.)

- An inexplicable email arrived via my other blog, advertising a short short story competition run by the Tehran Art & Cultural Complex. The website is helps not a lot in elucidating of the problems of the competition meaning.

Sample: "This competition features in the genre of short-short stories, is a common language of all the people in regard of admiring the literature, because the story in any culture and geographic could reveal the tangible image of life, reflection, and dreams of an individual. By intellectual world in this contest, means all internal and spiritual perception of a human being, therefore for those which is conceivable, could be the subject of short-short stories in this competition. Participating in this contest or helping to the intelligence is an assistant to the literature."

Clearly fans of machine-translation tools.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Bailey sends over a wonderful little link - The Eater of Meaning. I wholeheartedly recommend using this tool to create short short stories to enter into the above competition. (Click the picture to see the chaos in action.)

- Baroness played in Birmingham last week and made the Editors extremely happy.

- And Max Cannon at Red Meat has put out a notice about the Alternative Comics Apocalypse. Here are two reasons why you should support him: bug-eyed earl and milkman dan.

- Link to Avaaz added in the sidebar.