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	Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro originally from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, 2007), all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007), and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press in 2008) has been taught in universities across the United States and the Pacific. His poetry, essays, fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others.
	With the Saina as his figurative vessel -- a ship built in modern times as an exact replica of the swift outriggers designed and sailed by the Chamorro people until banned by their oppressors -- Craig Santos Perez deftly navigates the complexities in his bracing exploration of the personal, historical, cultural, and natural elements of his native Guam and its people. As the title, -- from unincorporated territory [saina] -- suggests, by understanding where we are from, we can best determine where we are going. Perez collages primary texts and oral histories of the colonial domination and abuse brought by the Spanish, the Japanese, the United States, and the capitalist entertainment/travel industry, with intimate stories of his childhood experiences on Guam, his family’s immigration to the US, and the evocatively fragmentary myths of his ancestors. Resonant too in Perez’s title, and throughout this work, is this poet’s evocation of the unincorporated and unfathomed elements of our natures, as he seeks the means to access an expansiveness that remains inexpressible in any language. Perez is not afraid to press language beyond the territories of ‘the known’ as he investigates both the anguish and the possibilities that horizon as one attempts to communicate the spoken and unspoken languages of one’s native people, while fully appreciating the suffering inherent in every word he will use that is pronounced in, and thus pronounces, the language of their oppressors.
	Anna Rabinowitz has published three books of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Tupelo, 2006, Darkling, Tupelo, 2001 (which will be translated into German and published by Luxbooks, Wesibaden, Germany, forthcoming 2010), and At the Site of Inside Out, University of Mass. Press 1997. Darkling was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Best Poetry Book of 2001 Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002, and At the Site of Inside Out was a winner of the Juniper Prize. American Opera Projects transformed Darkling into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music. This production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2001, Anna Rabinowitz has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, Verse, and Doubletake. Her work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets' Grimm, Poetry Daily, and Poetry After 9/11.
	Present Tense is a tour de force, a book-length poetic project that is anatomy, history, testimony, eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present. In four acts, Rabinowitz dramatizes not only our various socio-religious-political ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Through dialogue, reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous cultural and historical events and more, Rabinowitz offers readers an arresting account of who and what we are as humans--in all of our darkness and our brilliance. This poetry--with its invigorating breadth and shocking immediacy--compels its readers' full engagement with the page, an interaction that incites us to examine our own position and potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we experience it moment by moment.
	Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her recent poetry publications include The Vulgar Tongue, Desire & Its Double and Spinoza in Her Youth, Scout, a text/image work in CD-ROM format. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert's Journals, Anne Portugal's Nude and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. She created 2004-6 Collective Memory, an installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," California Historical Society, San Francisco, CA. Cole has received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award, as well as awards from the Fund for Poetry. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for over twenty years.
	To Be At Music is the first collection of essays by Norma Cole, who is one of our most respected poets writing in the innovative tradition, as well as an esteemed translator and visual artist. These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.
	Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Pleiades, and other journals. Currently, he is working on an English-to-English translation of the complete works of Emily Dickinson, part of which has been published as a chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, vol. 1 (Try and Make, 2009). Paul lives with his husband, Orion Jenkins, in Brooklyn, NY where he works at the Academy of American Poets. Ann Lauterbach, the highly esteemed poet who selected Paul Legault's manuscript for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, explains that in these poems, “History is here, in uneasy tangents; landscape is here, lonely in its names; luminous images are here but they are not pictures; music is here in a spare, phrasal pacing… Here, in The Madeleine Poems, modernity's abandonment becomes a bare harbor into which sail vessels carrying unexpected cargo.” In hauntingly beautiful lyricism, and with a lightness that conveys the most weighty of subjects, Legault offers a dynamically charged vision of the real as he perceives its volatile, constantly shifting valences.