Edmund Berrigan is the author of two Idiom chapbooks, Counting the Hats and Ducks and A Serious Earth (with drawings by William Yackulic). His poems have been published in Arshile, Mirage #4/Period[ical], Talisman, and The World. Berrigan-formerly manager of Small Press Traffic-is an accomplished singer and actor, but his forte is poetry. For most of us, poetry is a second language, but for him it's almost his first, a sustaining and living M.O. His best work delights and perplexes with its resolute treatment of, and analytic questioning of, pleasure and risk, danger and play. "Great art is creating us;/ strung down, tuned low,/ its hands are our feel &/ show us dims that glower/ like a coward retreating/ from the scene of his crime."

October 3, 1997