Brian Leary

These are ten of my favorite poems from 42opus in 2007…

I set out to make a list of five, but found choosing among the nineteen stories more difficult than I had anticipated. I whittled the list to seven, then, to justify my failure to choose, slipped a cheap play off the year into the title.

The writers included in this month may not have yet been published elsewhere but their writing shows the same promise as any of the other writers we publish. The same attention to craft, to character. To line, and to voice. But I also found in these works a sincerity, an earnestness even, that extended through the brasher, wilder styles of chaotic energy just as into the more conservative voices. This sincerity seemed to me proof that these poems and stories were not so much created to be poems and stories but to be vehicles for emotion and meaning.

Many of the changes to 42opus and 42opus.com listed below are foundation changes meant to increase our usefulness to readers and better our abilities to procure work from only the very best writers.

Of the many, many poems we've published over the course of 2006, the following eight are the pieces that moved me most—the ones that I most wished I had written instead and that I most shared with friends.

There are 42 lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, sometimes called the 42-line Bible.

Like so many good books, Mother of Sorrows is about what one man has and does not have, and therefore, it is about the tragedy of desire that bridges the space between.

Ben Lerner's first collection of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the 2003 Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, is a sequence of untitled fourteen-line poems (with one fifteen-line exception) that run on the collision, the violence, and the unresolved resolution of juxtaposition.