LAST COPIES! Magazine. Poetry. O•BLĒK/12: WRITING FROM THE NEW COAST is a special double issue of the journal. One volume, titled Presentation, was edited by Peter Gizzi and Connell McGrath; the other, titled Technique, was edited by Peter Gizzi and Juliana Spahr.

"We are the generation of artists that grew up with a photograph of the earth tacked to our walls. When that first image of the earth was sent back in 1959 our conception of this place was changed materially. No longer was it to be a world so defined by our ancestors; in that swift shutter and instant transmission it became worlds, peoples, and languages. All boundaries or clear definitions of identity are eroded, active and blurred. Simone Weil said 'You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.' We live in this space of multiplicity where the ability to construct a single world with shared aspirations, sensitivities and imagination is not only improbable but impossible. Yet it is poetry's function to aspire to the impossible, because poetry works through a human agency—the generosity of a reader and a writer. Poetry demands that a risk be taken, and from this act of intelligence courage claims precedence over poverty of spirit."—Peter Gizzi, from his foreword

Author City: Unknown USA