Left-Hand Maps, San Francisco Bay Area Poets
Copyright © 1998 ASGP / LeeAnn Heringer, editor

ISBN 1-888431-18-0

This elegant chapbook is our press's first poetry anthology over and above the on-going chapbook series committing to print Agnieszka's Dowry (AgD) ISSN 1088-4300, our poetry journal. It also marks our departing ASGP-er LeeAnn Heringer's last gift to the press for which she has volunteered nearly from its beginnings: a solitary poetry chapbook launched at The Underground Press Conference at DePaul University, Chicago, August 1995. That's a long time!

LeeAnn has contributed to A Small Garlic Press in oh so many ways, and here she not just edits the volume but designs it, provides the cover photograph, typesets the text, takes care of printing and production (proofing under katrina grace craig's eagle eye) -- you name it! And on top of it all, she lives in the Bay Area, and closes the book with a beautiful, fresh poem!

This book is testimonial to what can be done in serious poetry on not too much money, given the best current technology accessible to plain folks and hardnosed work. In essence, LeeAnn shows how to do an anthology and live to tell about it.

There are 29 authors here, some well-known, some not, but all carefully assembled into a tasty melange of impressive and delicious writing.

Here's a taste, we hope that in the true spirit of the City, you'll indulge justly, ably, and tell all your friends to get theirs! Fittingly enough, let's make it a taste of LeeAnn's poem:

 
Left-Hand Maps, San Francisco Bay Area Poets
(fragment of "Too Much Coffee Between Clean Hands" by LeeAnn Heringer)

you know what that means, he said
shaking the dregs of coffee
at the bottom of his paper cup.
and i thought of us,
nylon thin white flags
with no colors or symbols
rising up towards each other
in truce and surrender.
that we accept pain and despair on a daily basis.
and old, worn out people must be the losers
who didn't sit down fast enough
when the music stopped,
but only for today.

he leaned forward.
this means that
it's really important to take naps
at random times or you'll be stuck
doing the same thing
with the same group of people all day.

Poem Copyright © May 1998 LeeAnn Heringer
Book Copyright © May 1998 A Small Garlic Press

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Copyright © 1998 A Small Garlic Press. All rights reserved.
Created 1998/7/13. Updated last on 2008/5/2.