Now, more than ever we feel our changing world and look to poetry to give us voice, to console and to guide. Marilyn Chin's new book of poems, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, does precisely that. Through it, she reminds us to look within ourselves and to be aware that it is here that conflict begins. She says it best in The True Story of Mortar and Pestle,"…the bad sister pounding the good. Somewhere in / the scintillating powder we grind into light." This light is where we all live, where everything is created and destroyed."Somewhere" between our two warring selves, where friction is greatest, is where we become alive.

There is an art separate of masturbation The words have no layer of flesh to feel

St Columba wanted the text of the Gospels. Since this anecdote takes place in 6th century Ireland, he borrowed the only such book around, which belonged to Finnian of Druim, and made a copy. But when Finnian found out, he demanded not only the return of his text, but the copy as well. The king, when called upon the arbitrate, decided for Finnian: "As the calf belongs to the cow, so the copy belongs to its book." And so St Columba went to war with Finnian, and won, thus retrieving what he considered to be his copy of the sacred book.

Mientras se nos empuja a ver (vía buenos canales de publicidad) en la pantalla de los cines un muy interesante documental sobre una película que nunca se llegó a acabar -"Lost in La Mancha"-, apenas si nos hemos enterado de la existencia de una excelente película, ésta perfectamente acabada: 11'09'01 . Oxímoron donde los haya. Para mas inri, la película a la que nos referimos esta nada menos que compuesta de ortometrajes dirigidos por cineastas de primera fila provenientes de diferentes latitudes y nacionalidades.

Bajo el título El Greco to Picasso. Time, Truth and History (Del Greco a Picasso. Tiempo, Verdad e Historia), se presenta en el Museo Guggenheim de Nueva York, la primera revisión histórica del arte español en Estados Unidos. Cerca de ciento cuarenta pinturas de artistas desde Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo, Zurbarán, Goya, Mirò, Juan Gris a Dalí y Picasso, por citar algunos nombres, todos de primer orden, distribuidas tan magistralmente, a pesar de la dificultad de la disposición de la rotonda ideada por Frank Lloyd Wright, que parece que siempre estuvieron allí, y en las salas adyacentes.

On plain white paper, with plain black ink, in under one hundred pages and only a few inches along the length and across lies the eclectic, yet powerful, diverse, and appropriate collection of poetry of this year's Long Shot number 26.

Martin Reckhaus, actor/director/writer, has been living and working on the Lower East Side since the early 1980s. He is co-founder of Loretta Auditorium, a collaboration of theater artists whose latest work, NEW SCIENCE, was produced in November 2006 at Theater for the New City.

In the brief light of the solstice the wall of ice presses in, inex-

orable glacier, glinting cliffs

casting long blue shadows.

He remained on the couch for another hour or so, his half-erect penis cupped in his left hand. He heard the muezzin's incantations, "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar" (God is Great! God is Great!), calling the faithful to the first of their five daily worships to the Creator. He gently rubbed his penis and listened:

Jennifer Dworkin's prize-winning documentary is an honest and touching portrayal of three generations of a family that, to be sadly blunt, live in a place two steps beyond redemption.

A surreal, depressing look into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told from a militant, overly intellectualized Palestinian perspective using wildly sardonic humor, brutally honest irony within a disjointed plot that at times is somewhat maddening but always surprising.

It is rare that two novels come out about the same place and time, this being Spanish Harlem. It is also next to impossible that two authors can create two books evoking the same angels and demons while creating two distinctly different main characters.

Todd Solondz's fourth film, Palindromes, is a success. Well, it is a success in that I left the theater feeling sick and hating everything. But, since this film takes place in a world where all humans are weak, awful creatures incapable of growth or change, I can only assume that nauseating the audience was among the director's stated objectives. So, good job, Mr. Solondz!

Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, tells the story of a boy's struggle to cope with the death of his father, who was killed in the September 11th attacks. Sounds fun, doesn't it? Surprisingly, much of the book is fun. Because of the book's idiosyncratic, imaginative, outspoken narrator and protagonist, 9-year-old Oskar Schell, the book culminates in a fun, funny, tragic, moving, and often beautiful experience.

"I had come to Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration." So writes Thomas Friedman on the second page of his latest release The World Is Flat, and from there expands a lighthearted comparative device into the basis for a weighty treatment of the present and future of the globalizing economy. "Columbus accidentally ran into America but thought he had discovered part of India. I actually found India and thought many of the people I met there were Americans ... Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife ... 'I think the world is flat.' "

Frank Gonzales, otherwise known as"Frankie G.," heats up a seat at the House of Tribes Theatre, a small black box on the Lower East Side of New York City. With a quiet confidence and intense gaze that could melt Alaska, he sits inside the red theatre seat in a black jumpsuit and sneakers, donning a chiseled jaw, gracious humility, and the smoldering eyes of a rising star.

Backwoods Broadsides' editor, publisher and sole source of funding, Sylvester Pollet is officially part of the micropublishing set. Poet Ron Silliman describes micropublishing as "any book or journal done in such a fashion as to preclude bookstore distribution, even via Small Press Distribution" and goes on to say that it [micropublishing] is one of the very best things about poetry.