Shopping List

If you feel the need to spend some money, I have a few hot tips for you! (Or you can just send me the money and I'll spend it, because I'm helpful like that. Go on. Send me as much as you want.)

• The Boxcar Poetry Review 2006 Anthology is out in dead-tree format. Costs less than a cup of coffee (depending on where you buy your coffee, that is) to download, a little more than that to have a printed-and-bound copy shipped to your hot little hands. And congratulations, while I'm at it, to editor Neil Aitken, whose first book won the Philip Levine Prize and will be out in the near-ish future.
  


• Congratulations also to Erin M. Bertram, whose chapbook Body of Water won the Frank O'Hara Award and has just come out from Thorngate Road Press. (The chapbook just came out, that is. Erin came out ages ago. *grin*) If you want to get a copy of what is no doubt a lovely bit of work, see Erin's blog and get in touch with her. I just sent her a check today, so now I have mail to look forward to -- a good thing, since now that I'm doing at least half of my poetry-submitting online, checking the mail has lost a bit of its thrill!
  


• I've been wanting to get some business cards, but since poetry isn't really a business, I've never really come up with anything I like in that department. I do want to have something with my name, email address, etc. that I can hand to people, though, to avoid the "fumbling around for a scrap of paper" routine I found myself doing at the IAC grant workshop the other day. A happy medium: I've ordered myself some MiniCards from moo.com, with images from a couple of my own photographs (one of the dunes near Provincetown, another of a cat's eyes) on one side, and my contact info on the other. They have a ton of super cute & cool designs you can use, or you can upload your own images like I did. I've heard that these folks ship a high-quality product, so I hope I'll be happy with what I get. I'll let you know! If they turn out well, this would be a neat little promotional item for books and suchlike, I think.

And in the department of stuff that won't cost me a penny, Joshua Bell is giving a free recital here in Bloomington next month -- I just have to get myself over to the box office on Thursday and get a ticket before they're all gone. (And believe me, they will be all gone very quickly. People around here love them some Joshua Bell.) He'll be performing with pianist Jeremy Denk, and they'll be doing some Prokofiev, Dvorak, and Saint-Saëns. But honestly, the kid (I can call him that; he's younger than I am, and I remember when he was an up-and-coming young prodigy in the music school here) could play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I'd probably want to hear it. He's that good.