Singer and songwriter Chris Bathgate revisits the "salt year" that led to the creation of his new album.

Sam Selinger “Curious Masonry” Christopher Patton 2011, 9781554470938, $15.95 Christopher Patton’s third book, Curious Masonry, includes three translations of Anglo-Saxon poems from The Exeter Book, and “Hearth,” a work which he calls a “palimpsest,” mostly made up of erasures from his translation of “The Earthwalker,” using both the translation and the original text. The Exeter Book is an anthology of...

Michael T. Young I keep believing in the fresh start, keep turning back as if to begin, but there’s no going past the push of hunger. As a child, I filled jugs at a natural spring, my hands rich with the scent of moss, the rocks gurgling, the smell of wet soil saturating the air with a kind of habitable baptism, a slaked freshness I rose from and turned toward home. Years later, as I pass a construction site and each morning...

Michael T. Young He likes to repeat to himself a phrase from a Keats letter: I will clamber through the clouds and exist. It steadies him like leaning against trees, or brewing coffee to a thick brown resistance. It’s that kind of private refusal that helps him push on, dress the children for sleep, clean the kitchen, kiss his wife goodnight and reach bed on a wave of inertia where he watches the window blinds hum with the glow of...

Laura Powers June, and they stand in flowering frustration at either end of my yard. Cottonwoods (geneus populus) are gendered and must be planted accordingly to avoid the outrage of unspent catkins (desiderium). I learned this too late to now keep seedpods sticking to the laundered sheets I’ve strung to dry between them like a blue provocation. Their priapic blossoms, futilely infertile, billow the sky, scatter across my lawn, skulk...

Laura Powers In my lap, The Awakening rests like a pretension. Lately, I’ve found myself going in envy of fiction—not as a poet, but as a woman living a linear life, as she must with no parrot screaming foreshadow in its raucous patois: Allez vous-en! Get Out! Sapristi! Goddamn it! No one is in danger of death in this poem, yet, I resent the birdsong outside my windows— they’ve never offered any instructive imperatives. A...

Sculpture & Boxes Sarah Walko is a creator of highly detailed creative works, all of which possess potent symbolic undertones. Using items like matchbooks, bat wings and moss, Walko’s thoughtfully composed works are not only rich in symbolism, but also quite pleasing to the eye. View more of Sarah’s work here. Sarah Walko is a multimedia sculptor, installation artist and writer. She is currently the executive...

After enduring two years of self-described "hell," songwriter Chris Bathgate emerges from the blackness and triumphs with his best album yet, "Salt Year."

Depicting an otherworldly vision of the west coast, artists Tatiana Plakhova and Leandro Sanchez present their series "Another California."

The first installment of "Gardens of Water" author Alan Drew's original novella, which will be serialized in our three subsequent issues.