99 Poems for the 99 Percent hits #2 on the SPD Bestseller List

99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry is at #2 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List and comes in at the very top of the "SPD Recommends" page.

Dana Levin, Rich Bouchet, and Jon Davis read from 99 Poems for the 99 Percent!

99 Poems for the 99 Percent, held the first of many reading/release parties at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design on July 26, 2014. Jon Davis, Rich Bouchet, Dana Levin, and Dean Rader read their own poems from the anthology as well as work by Bob Hicok, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Camille T. Dungy, Alexandra Teague, and several others:

Jon Davis adopts a creepy persona in his fabulous poem "Preliminary Report from the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering"

Rich Bouchet adopts an even creepier persona for his poem "Gently Now, Gently, Gently Into Your Black Tactical Duty Jacket, Your Striped Plunge Bra with Cherry Charm"

Dana Levin adopts her always cool persona for her haunting poem "Morning News."

Memory/Memorial, Ingrid Wendt

MEMORY/MEMORIAL

Ingrid Wendt

You whose family four years fled through jungles, whose mother,

Camp by camp, weakened, the cancer left to spread, untreated

You, whose mother fled with her children from Russian invasion

Your train bombed and bombed again as it inched its way south

You whose daughter disappeared on her everyday route home.

You to whom a government gave blankets riddled with smallpox

You whom radiation ravaged, whose fatherland won’t remember

You for whom the midnight knock on the door will echo forever

You for whom the syllables Tiananmen, Kent State, still smolder

You whose generation’s memory is short

You who cannot bear the sound of movie gunfire, cars’ backfires

You who’ve gathered together severed limbs from the wreckage

The swamp water; you, family whose mourning can never begin

You who never again will look into cameras, you who have seen

More of the face of evil than anything minds can begin to imagine

You who look for reasons where none exist, who bring to these

Elegies, images of your own, too deep for speech, wave upon

Wave they return when least you expect them, flotsam weighing

The future down. What shape do we give to horror, what form?

Silence between the paving stones of these stanzas: this is for you.

About "Memory/Memorial," Ingrid Wendt writes:

" Throughout human history, with all of its changes, one thing is constant in every country in the world: for every horror, every death, caused by other human beings – from large-scale warfare to airline crashes to the kidnapping and murder of a child coming home from school – there are those left behind who remember, who mourn, who often are isolated in their grief and in their inability to give shape to it.

This poem belongs to a 10-part poem sequence: my part of a collaborative project with a sculptor and painter in 1999. The horrors I refer to are events in the Philippines and Germany during and after the second world war, in China, Chile, Argentina, the United States during the Indian wars, and the United States today. For this poem, I created all lines (except one) of nearly equal length, to resemble paving stones of an imagined path.”