This is an exhilarating anthology remedying the clear lack of collaborative poetry collections. Collaborative poetry grew out of word games played by Surrealists in the 1920s and taken up later by Japan's Vou Club and then by Charles Henri Ford, who created the chainpoem, composed by poets who mailed their lines all over the world. After WWII, the Beats' collaborative experiments resulted in the famous "Pull My Daisy". The concept was embraced in the 1970s by feminist poets as a way to find a collective female voice. Yet, for all its rich history, virtually no collections of collaborative poetry exist. This exhilarating anthology remedies this stark omission. Featured are poems by as many as 18 people in a dizzying array of forms: villanelles to ghazals, sonnets to somonkas, pantoums to haiku, even quizzes, questionnaires and other nonliterary forms. Collaborators' notes accompany many of the poems, giving a fascinating glimpse into the creative process.

Sex Talks to Girls chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as ""Molly Meek,"" Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose. Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree is the story of a life set on play and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.

The JackLeg Press Poetry Series Storming the genders of Americanismo with crossed fingers and sans rules, these poems contradict the text by adding values and filling out applications. Two voices and three voices are threaded to one and the resulting operatic tool digs up the shades of birds, mathematics, riots, and catastrophe. Experience a disturbing disintegration of authorial identity. Experience that identity reshape and reassemble as an intelligent chimera that stares you in the face with as many faces as you can imagine. - Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden When I interviewed these three authors about how they "did" it, that is to say, collaborate, it wasn't like I received three sets of answers. Group mind groped, it was like talking to the tank. - Terese Svoboda Cover art: Pamela Callahan, "West Nile Kid." (Courtesy of the artist and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago

"Sex Talks to Girls "chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as "Molly Meek," Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose. Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation--from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree--is the story of a life set on "play" and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.