Earlier this year we decided to have a poetry contest. We read many poems. We enjoyed them all. But we liked one person’s the best. This person is now involved in a very special thing. (S)he will have a collection of poems published in book form in 2010. Dark Sky Books is the publisher. This is exciting. We will all do our best. We felt this person’s poems were snappy, imaginative; they took us to weird places and made us reconsider the meaning of words. Sometimes we overheated while reading them. Other times we shivered with cold. They are grand poems. A handful of them have been published in literary magazines. More of them will be collected here for the first time. It’s still a bit early for Christmas. But we are smitten with good cheer. We wish good cheer to all the fine poets who submitted their work, we wish good cheer to our readers, and we wish good cheer to our winner…

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Gregg Gerke’s debut There’s Something Wrong with Sven was released by Blaze Vox in April of this year. Packed with darkly humorous prose, Gerke’s book is a wildly addictive collection. Gerke’s stylistic acrobats afford him the ability to bounce around subjects and story lines. His wit and attention turns the mundane into the mesmerizing. In one tale a man contemplates a fart in a library. In another, a newly wedded husband debates returning his foreign-born bride. In yet another, an over concerned mother gets her son laid as a substitute for sex ed. Gerke’s characters are often awkward and appalling. However, his stories are handled with charm, and his work deserves attention. In case you missed it, here’s a link to Greg Gerke’s Truth be Told, which ran yesterday on DSM. –Brian Allen Carr

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It’s December. Time for Santa Claus, present buying, over indulgence and weather-induced depression. It’s so cold we can’t feel our toes, and when we can’t feel our toes we feel like knocking off someone’s hat. The good thing about bad weather is it’s an excuse to stay indoors and hunker down with some literature. The best reason to read is that it’s raining outside, or because it broadens your soul, one of the two. Thankfully we live in an age of multimedia reading. Rick Moody is Twittering a novel, for Christ’s sake, and sites like ours offer literature online. But sometimes there’s nostalgia for the paper vehicle. In the spirit of Christmas we present to you Anis Shivani’s 2009 top 10 list. The Rumpus talks McSweeney’s with new editor Oscar Villalon. Ryan Call contemplates 140 characters. And Noam Chomsky scares the hell out of us. Again. — Brian Allen Carr

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