[Michael Cantor]

Again, thank you all for the good words and the encouragement - I hope the book lives up to the cover illustration.

I would also like to echo something Aaron mentioned on his site, and thank Alex, and others he worked with (I know that Julie Sih, for one, was involved, and very helpful) for a terrific job of proofreading and correcting - tightening the manuscript by catching and eliminating numerous inconsistencies and outright oversights and errors.

The manuscript was a proofreader's nightmare because of the nature of the poems and the ground covered. I wander through spelling errors and missing diacritical marks in English, Japanese, French, Portugese and Spanish, plus some invented and/or delberately ungrammatical language; there is a good deal of dialogue or internal monologue involved, and I used italics - or quote marks - or a bizarre mixture of both - to guide the reader; foreign and American place names and film references are sprinkled throughout; there is no "standard" and absolute English spelling for some of the Japanese words I used; I interwove two or even three threads of action and counterpoint in the same poem (in one case with haiku stanzas simultaneously alternating with nonce iambics); and all of this was very dependent on fonts and indentations and punctuation and other "guidepost" tricks to keep the reader on track and the poem flowing.

The problems were that my handling of the guideposts and the various title and foreign names was (a) careless and inconsistent at times within individual poems, and (b) much more inconsistent from poem-to-poem. The poems were written over a number of years, and I was writing poem-by-poem, not thinking in terms of a manuscript. And as long as I was publishing one poem at a time it more or less worked. However, once everything was assembled into a manuscript, one poem played (or didn't play) against another, and the lack of a consistent template was potentially very confusing and distracting. I didn't notice this because I knew what I was saying (and because Im a bit of a slob.) But Alex and the other proofers did, and their diligence made this a much tighter and better book. I learned some important lessons in the assembling and checking of this manuscript. My thanks to all.