Do you know Seth Landman? If not, you should. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few weeks ago in Denver, thanks to Mike Young. (Do you know Mike Young? If not, you should.) There were burgers, there were pints and $3.00 martinis, and there was a vacuum. And, later, there was a trade. I gave Seth a copy of We Take Me Apart, and he gave me lovely looking copies of the poetry journal he edits, Invisible Ear (Issues 2, 3, and 4), which look like little chapbooks, each with a unique cover, and each printed in limited editions.

Issue 2’s contents looks like this:

Marie Buck, Jessica Fjeld, Brad Flis, Lawrence Giffin, Rachel B. Glaser, Ben Kopel, Lily Ladewig, Emily Pettit, Alex Phillips, Jono Tosch.

Issue 3’s contents looks like this:

Brian Baldi, Ezekiel Black, Jack Christian, Ari Feld, Lewis Freedman, Anjali Khosla Mullany, Mark Leidner, Edward Mullany, Emily Toder, Lesley Yalen.

And Issue 4’s contents looks like this:

David Bartone & Jeff Downey, Eric Baus, Luke Bloomfield, Francesca Chabrier, Phil Cordelli, Loren Goodman, Kim Hagerich, Hailey Higdon, Brian Mihok, Michelle Taransky.

My favorite from Issue 4 is Eric Baus‘s “Cold Cloud.” Anyone familiar with Baus’s writing will immediately recognize his subject matter (among others, personified objects and nature) and the language–e.g. “I replace the sleet with sea. It stings, I think. I thought, This sponge, a tongue.” Or, from the poem “Lamb Comb,” the final sentence: “It sifted all their tufts.”

Not surprisingly, I also enjoyed the other prose poems in Issue 4:

Kim Hagerich’s “Fluent” begins: “Before you write a love letter, learn a new language, not to feel the tenderness of wordlessness, I mean be fretful at dawn in a flurry of words unspoken, I mean find a new alphabet, one that delineates in dashes and diacritics to the heart, forget phonetics, toss letters that wail into the night . . . ” And “Bugs” ends with: “And you said you had begun to like modern art but it was a leap at similitude, you vying for forgiveness for eating popcorn during the sex scenes of foreign movies, and that heteronormative change purse, those flowers to mask our smell of death.”

Brian Mihok’s “Good Luck Sailor” begins: “On a ship twice run aground a sailor cranked a rope round a spool bigger than his head,” and “War Bride” ends with: “I lived in Florida for twenty-three years. I have seen many terrible storms.”

And Michelle Taransky’s “For Days I Have No Ideas” opens with: “what worrying identifies the failed procedures from your letter that never intended to invent the confession that the window was there where I have not been recording the watchers” and “For Days I Have No Idea,” which ends with: ” . . . the records demanding like the misunderstood a sum in the archive the archive in the house afraid of the calculation in the prayer book the reminder if you see him say I say it’s been days”.

For all those who enjoyed what they’ve read here, please know that there is much more to enjoy–for the special price of oh no, not $36.00, not $26.00, that’s right folks, not even $16.00 but an unbelievable rate of only $6.00! You heard right! Only $6.00! If you order now. Seth Landman is standing by.