No friend to linearity, Avery Burns was born in California 1961, and has edited the astonishing magazine "lyric&" since 1992. I hate to admit it, but there's another reading series in San Francisco and it's called "Canessa Park," also run by Burns for the past 3 years. His publications include Differing Senses of Motion, Sabin, and Fragments Formerly Attributed to Archilocus. Recent work appears in Chain, Lowghost, Idiom Online, and Poetry New York. Burns' poetry, so fresh and so chiseled, extends the familiar trajectory of Melville-Pound-Williams-Creeley-Eigner-Grenier into new and exciting blips and scrawls of Typee/Omoo Pacific Rim chance operation Basho funk.

February 12, 1999