JOE BALAZ (Hawai'i) lives in Ka'a'awa, on O'ahu and has published work in Hawai'i Review, Bamboo Ridge, and other publications. About his two poems in this issue he writes: "Nupaikini means modern. This concrete poem supports the use of present and future technology to acquire knowledge and create much by many. The piece also employs the use of the Hawaiian kaona, words with a double or hidden meaning. The second syllable of the title (pai), stands alone as a word within the concrete poem and is situated on the graphic keyboard. Pai means to encourage or to urge. The last two syllables of the title (kini) also stand as a separate word meaning multitude or many. Finally, the first syllable (nu) can be subtly cross-associated with the English word (new).
Ukolehe 'Ukulele is a concrete poem of fertility dealing with the union of man and woman. The word ule (penis) is entwined with the word kohe (vagina) to create the abstraction ukolehe. The characteristics of the musical instrument the 'ukulele is incorporated within the concrete poem and visually plays upon the old saying of how two can make beautiful music together."
Balaz's poems also appeared in Chaminade Literary Review.
Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo (Hawai'i) is a graduate of the University of Hawai'i and a widely published poet.
JOHN GERAETS (New Zealand) is now based in Japan where he teaches at Aichi-Gakuin University. He's published two poem books, discourse#5 and Itsan, with a third, Sanage Adventure Field, forthcoming. He is the instigating editor of Nagoya Writers & Others.
LYN HEJINIAN (California) is a prominent American poet. Among her many books are Oxata: A Short Russian Novel, The Cell, and The Cold of Poetry. She has translated two books by Arkadii Dragomoschenko from the Russian.
PETER KENNEALLY (Australia) emigrated to Australia from England in 1985. He is a bicycle courier in Melbourne and is currently engaged on a long work entitled Bicycle. He has published in Vehicle, Visible Ink, Ambit, and Antithesis.
JOHN KINSELLA (Australia) has published in literary journals and newspapers throughout the world. He is the author of Night Parrots, Eschatologies, Full Fathom Five, Syzygy, and The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony.
BARRY K. K. MASUDA (Hawai'i) is in the graduate program in English at the University of California, San Diego. He has published poetry and criticism in Hawai'i Review.
SPENCER SELBY (California) "Coat of Mail" is from his forthcoming volume, No Island. He is also the author of Sound Off, Malleable Cast, and many other volumes of poetry.
JOHN TRANTER (Australia) lives in Sydney. Ten collections of his verse have been published, including a Selected Poems in 1982 and his latest, At Florida. The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, appeared from HarperCollins in 1992. About his piece in this issue, he writes: "It consists of a computer-blended text based on excerpts from E.M. Forster's A Room with a View and Real Estate advertising prose describing houses for sale in Sydney's expensive Harbour-side Eastern suburbs." It was originally published in Island Magazine in Tasmania and is reprinted with the author's permission.
ROB WILSON (Hawai'i) teaches at the University of Hawai'iĞManoa. He is the author of three books: Waking in Seoul (poems), American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre, and Reimaging the American Pacific: Local Culture, National Identity, and Transnational Space, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
YI SHA (China), of Han and Kazak extraction, was born in 1966 in Sichuan Province. He teaches at Xian Foreign Language Institute, and his book, Starve the Poets, was published in 1994 by Huaqiao Press, Beijing. WANG PING was born in Shanghai and graduated from Beijing University before coming to the United States in 1985. She is enrolled in the doctorate program in comparative literature at New York University. RICHARD SIEBURTH is a professor in the Comparative Literature and French Departments at NYU.