Editor: Gail Rudd Entrekin. Poetry by six Northern California Poets: Kirsten Casey, Gary Cooke, Cheryl Dumesnil, Judy Halebsky, Iven Lourie, Scott Young. Another anthology put together by the fiercely independent Hip Pocket Press, this book, according to poet Molly Fisk, .,."includes poems of childhood, love, travel, myth, reminiscence and landscape. But its essential nature is commitment -- to experience, sensation and language -- beautifully encompassed by the closing line of Judy Halebsky's DOWN THE MOUNTAIN: .,."whatever I came with I spent."

This is the moving and humorous story of a lesbian couple's struggles with infertility as they attempt to become parents, set against the backdrop of the marriage equality movement in America. The book follows Cheryl and her un-lawfully wedded wife through four conceptions, three miscarriages, a temporarily legal wedding during San Francisco's Winter of Love in 2004, a stint as poster children for the marriage equality movement and - finally - the arrival of their longed-for son (after 25 hours of labour).

• Rick Moody • Flannery O'Connor • Sylvia Plath • Mark Doty • William T. Vollmann...and others

INK ON INK
Once the province of sailors and bikers, tattoos have emerged from backdoor parlors to suburban shopping malls. Today they adorn starlets' ankles, housewives' shoulders, and bankers' biceps. Fashionable? Most definitely. Respectable? Not always. Evocative, transformative, still dangerous? Just ask many of our most gifted writers across several colorful decades, who have found the images of the tattoo needle a vivid subject for the language of the pen. Brought to you by two editors who are themselves widely praised (and proudly tattooed) authors, these stories, poems, and memoirs span the range of human experience, from the awesome to the absurd. From Flannery O'Connor's likeness of God to Sylvia Plath's fifteen-dollar eagle, from Herman Melville's power of the primitive to Mark Doty's embrace of the ineradicable to Franz Kafka's lasting mark of the penal colony, this bold exploration of the illuminated body is guaranteed to get under your skin.

DOROTHY PARKER'S ELBOW

THE BODY ADORNED...IN FACT AND FICTION

• ELIZABETH McCRACKEN tells a tale of romance, loss, and a walking, breathing love letter...
• On a literary canvas WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN paints a portrait of a skinhead girl who wears her rage on her thigh...
• KAROL GRIFFITH recalls how she animates her art, from fruit to flesh...
• From a historical palette, MADAME CHINCHILLA tracks the sinuous, true trail of the illustrated woman...
• RICK MOODY describes how he paid homage to his literary achievement in a place where no prize committee can find it...
• In a story of deliverance, ALEJANDRO MURGIA follows a motorist who picks up a temptress with the mark of danger on the highway to hell...
• DEENA METZGER reflects on her own liberation through illumination of an intimate bodily scar...DOROTHY PARKER'S ELBOW