Everyday Genius, December into January

December is over and Sasha Fletcher put together an amazing month. That Daniel Bailey piece we ended with? Just fantastic. A perfect ending to the story and to the year, right? I even think of 2009 as the chewed off leg, wrapped bloody in a tee shirt, carried with love and a big, big song like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I'm just like, wow, what a thing to wrap up PG's fourth quarter.
Nice work, Bailey. Nice work, Fletcher.

Speaking of ghost legs, the Kathryn Regina poem -- short, with a striking simile (which is not, in this poem, a dream but an actuality) -- is another favorite. It resonates with me.

Plus, I was thrilled to get to publish people I've admired but not received submissions from before, like Carl Annarummo, whose name isn't too hard to spell once you figure it out. And Rozalia Jovanovic (likewise with the spelling). Those are both double duty submissions.

So much goodness. Sasha Fletcher created a month of uniform quality, and I'm sincerely grateful to him and the authors who lent us their work. I'm already looking forward to the archives.

It strikes me that have been many similarities from month to month, but still each editor has created a fairly distinctive flavor. Sometime I would like to pore over the archives and trace this out a bit. But for now let me diverge just to say that: whoa, January is going to MESSED UP.

Lauren Bender, who lives in Baltimore, is 1/3 of my publisher, and is AWESOME, has put together a collection of some really beautiful work. Take the first thing posted this year, for example: Adam Trowbridge's "The Goat Said" is a complicated and inviting combination of text and image. It's something to look at deeply and shallowly and widely and narrowly. (NOTE: because I was on a ski trip, Adam's piece didn't get posted until this morning. So please do take a look, as it's likely to have been missed. I'm sorry about that.) (But the skiing was fun.)

What the heck is the thing we have today? I don't know. It's a picture by Alex Epstein, and it looks great. I like Bender's image-centric literary eye. I find it very fitting for a literary publisher who's first book was a collection of drawings.

There is a lot more to come, a lot of it images, all of it awesome. Check in every day, genius.