From the introduction (by Matt Trease) of an upcoming anthology I have had a hand in bringing into the world:

Some Background

This anthology is the result of a collaboration between Cuban Neobarroco poet José Kozer and Paul E Nelson, founder of the Seattle Poetics Lab (SPLAB) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival, a celebration of poetry and bioregionalism. Their desire was to resurrect the spirit of older, more internationally-focused and inclusive journals in the 1970s and 80s, such as those put out by Keith and Rosemary Waldrop on their press, Burning Deck. Kozer and Nelson were tired of the cliquish, heavily-branded focus of contemporary poetry journals and anthologies and wanted to bring together poets from divergent languages, cultures, and aesthetics to create a type of conversation, or at least a fertile meeting place for ongoing ideas about poetry – something messy that might trouble the too-easy academic labels and the subsequent segregation those aesthetic and political divisions cause within the larger, global poetry community.

Poets included in the book from the neo-barroco (Medusario) side are: Carmen Berenguer, Marosa Di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Reynaldo Jiménez, Tamara Kamenszain, José Kozer, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Maurizio Medo, Soleida Ríos, Roger Santiváñez and Raúl Zurita. Cascadians (Make It True) include Stephen Collis, Elizabeth Cooperman, Sarah de Leeuw, Claudia Castro Luna, Nadine Maestas, Peter Munro, Paul E Nelson, John Olson, Shin Yu Pai, Clea Roberts, Cedar Sigo, Matthew Trease and Thomas Walton.

I hope you will join us for launch events coming in May 2019.