"Russell weaves his writing into pictures... He chops his text into geometric shapes, casts it in rainbow colors and visually assaultive fonts, and scratches it onto photographs. In the work contained here, in Pattern Book, he laces text into art nouveau wallpaper, dissolving his stories into a swooning screen of domestic pattern. At every turn, it seems, Russell throws some wrench into the cogs of literary consumption, slowing the reader down, jostling expectations, demanding attention-challenging the reader, in other words, to really want to be reading."-Holly Myers Pattern Book by Christopher Russell collects a number of images and texts, images woven through texts, and texts woven together through images. Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess (City Lights 2009), says, "I was born wanting a Christopher Russell to join me in this confusing world.... I wanted a boy with confused gaze, mortified as I am by the harsh and ugly crumples of life, but one who, with bold decisive strokes, could hack a pathway out if it. ... Russell's method, in which he dethrones language's hegemony over rival visual formations by distorting and exaggerating its recognizable, even homey, patterns borrows roots from many traditions. Medieval monks are said to have curried favor with abbots by carving Bible verses into the head of a pin. ... When language, or the image, is enervated, the work of art has room for other connotations to manifest. ... And in these beautiful pages we will see, and we will not see, things it will take us a hundred years to understand."

"Impossible Princess" is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Awardwinning San Franciscobased author Kevin Killian. A member of the "new narrative" circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of "Mirage/Periodical," Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer's biography, "Poet Be Like God," and co-edited three Spicer books, including "My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems." His latest book, "Action Kylie," is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.