Sherry Chandler

In the Criminal’s Cabinet

I found this announcement at Eyewear:

Nthposition’s global headquarters is a minuscule eyrie in North London, and now that In The Criminal’s Cabinet has been in print for nearly three years, publisher and chief editor Val Stevenson is keen to get a few boxes of unsold copies out of her bedroom, though not nearly as keen as her long-suffering husband… If you would like one, please email Val.

Copies will be sent out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, and when they are gone, ITCC will be officially out-of-print.

Copies will be a staggeringly reasonable £2.00 plus postage and packing (for airmail outside the UK) per copy

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a contributor to In the Criminal’s Cabinet, and I must say that I’m impressed with myself to be included among so much lucid and edgy work by an international cast from the e-pages of nthposition.

I’ve been reading my way through the anthology again this summer, and I’m pleased with what I find. It’s a very attractively produced volume with 215 pages of poetry and fiction from Robert Allen to Harriet Zinnes. To quote the introduction by edtors Val Stevenson and Todd Swift:

Since 2002, London-based nthposition has featured several hundred poets, from almost every place where people write poetry in English, especially America, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. …we have tried to offer a full-spectrum report on the state of poetry of the start of the 21st century, to suggest the various ways — from linguistically innovative to mainstream — a poem can be imagined and created. Good poems occur at all points of the writing compass, from political to just plain weird.

Within these pages, you will find, quite simply, indelible poets and poems to reckon with — from India’s Ranjit Hoskote to Ireland’s Kevin Higgins; from Canada’s Stephanie Bolster to UK’s Jen Hadfield; from American’s Charles Bernstein to South Africa’s Isobel Dixon…

And this, of course, is just the poets, in whom I am most interested.

The prose, too, is all “tight, vivid.” Nine short pieces from the UK, America, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Japan. I took time to read it this summer, which I had not done before, and I was blown away by works like Kieran D”Angelo’s “The Internal Life of a Brick” and amused and touched by Kenneth J. Harvey’s “No Better a House.”

Invest a few dollars and get hours, years, of enjoyment in return.

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