Artist/Poet Collaboration #6 Velleity's Shade
poetry by Star Black artwork by Bill Knott
Reversing their roles in 2006’s Stigmata Errata Etcetera, Star Black serves as poet, and Bill Knott takes on the role of artist. Bill Knott’s colorful, mischievous, semi-abstract paintings compliment Star Black’s meditations on love and relationships, as well as the divide between what time holds captive and what eludes time. In Velleity’s Shade the temporal collides with the imagined and the passing years become a confluence of queries, shifting views, odd inventories, and light-hearted challenges as if time were a rocking-chair on a flying carpet and turbulence was nothing to fret about. Star Black is the author of three books of sonnets– Waterworn, Balefire and Ghostwood–a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time, and book of collaged texts, October for Idas. Her poems have been anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to The Present, and 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11. She has taught at The New School, Stony Brook University, has lectured at the Bennington Writers Seminars, and is the co-founder of the KGB Bar Poetry Series in the East Village. She works in New York City as a photographer and visual artist. Bill Knott is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Stigmata Errata Etcetera. He taught for many years at Emerson College and is now living in central Michigan.

Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap
Sarah Vap, award winning author of Dummy Fire and American Spikenard, dazzles again with this third collection. Vap celebrates the mysteries of pregnancy with wonder, fear, sorrow, and joy. Like counting the beads on a rosary, she takes us along a trail of connected couplets, building a concrete yet mythic exploration of the body as it prepares to bring another body into the world. Alice Notley writes, “This is a poetry of light, edge, and coherence, and it is beautiful.” And Cynthia Hogue adds, “I am in awe of the rare beauty of these poems.” Sarah Vap is the author Dummy Fire, winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by Forrest Gander. She is also the author of American Spikenard (University of Iowa Press, 2006), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2006. She currently lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington with her husband and two sons.