Like the music industry or the neighborhood video store, the publishing industry is witnessing a transition of its own; a farewell, perhaps, to hardcopies as a way of life, and an emphasis on the transitory nature of the screen-read. In November of 2009, Amazon, the powerful online purveyor of books and music, flew out several of New York’s most prominent literary agents to Seattle to break down their business plan. This business plan featured drastic cost-cutting on the prices of new hard covers from $25 to $8.99, and an aggressive marketing focus on so-called ‘e-books,’ virtual copies of literature that can be read on mobile devices such as the Kindle.

Suzanne Erickson is constantly surprised to find that she is just like her parents. “I used to get really freaked out when my dad would dig for junk. I’m exactly like my dad now,” she laughs. “I drive through the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for someone else’s garbage.” Suzanne and I are sharing a couch in her studio that might have been garbage itself, were it not for her magnificent reappropriation, inscribing the upholstery with a florid patchwork of paint and needlepoint. She tells me this sort of transformative creativity is inherited from her mother—a woman who would disassemble a bed and convert it into a wet bar in the scant free hours between ferrying Suzanne to and from day school.

In a lorikeet cave
motions exist of disintegrated swans
in a translocated lake
brimming with harvested poisons
sealed by corruptive post-mortems

You talk ecstatically
about your future
vagina. (Insert my
response here.)

Interrogative sentence:
How can you sound the same when you’re not?

Forth Issue #5

Editor’s Note:
I know, I know. For any publication, especially in Los Angeles, the practice of putting a celebrity on the cover seems predictable. But the notion of celebrity is not what interests me here; rather it’s what the talent represents. Those who have found great success at a creative craft yet need more, who can’t stop the winds of imagination as they pour through other mediums, challenging themselves, keeping themselves young, firing up old dreams and new hallucinations. Indeed, living, breathing examples of artistic success.
To me, presenting the artwork of John Lithgow is a proclamation: Look! Here is …