If there was one poet I wish I could write like it, it might be Emily Toder.  Her poems are empathetic, generous and open with an emotional intelligence that run laps around the world we are becoming in. She doesn’t demand or consume, she considers.  Just look.

Today her first book, SCIENCE, has been released from the newly rebooted Coconut Books.

Read the first poem in the book that originally appeared in Sixth Finch. Then if you feel like I do, buy it here.

I think this may be my favorite book of the year. It could be yours too.

Why don’t all our turn signals blink at the same rate?

That moment when I am waiting to turn left at the intersection and so are two cars in front of mine and three cars behind and all our signals are flaring and dying. I have terrible astigmatism, which smears the light across my vision. This effect is exaggerated by my dirty windshield. My light blinks and your light blinks and this light blinks and my light blinks and this light blinks and your light blinks. 1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2. What I mean to say is that the order changes. The relationship shifts. Some lights are faster than others. Say yours is faster than mine. So there is a time where we blink in alternating shifts. And then there is a time where we are blinking together. And then we slowly shift apart again, back to the time where we are blinking separately. This makes me feel a little ill.

It’s bad enough they blink at different times. They should at least keep the same rhythm. If we knew, at the intersection, that mine would go and then yours would go and then hers would go and then his and then we would do it all again then I could prepare myself for the sensation. What I can’t live with is what we have now, where everyone is blinking to a similar but very slightly different rhythm, so I never know what’s coming next, or where, only that it’s coming.

But it would be best if all our signals could signal at once. “Left,” they would say. “Left, left, left.” And then these others, at the same time, on the same beats, would say “Right, right, right, right.” The ideal tempo is something for the Congress to determine. What we can do is we can build a little device into every car that receives a signal from say a network of radio antennae. Or possibly this could be piggybacked through cellular towers, GPS satellite signals, or etc. What the signal will say is, “Now, now, now, now,” forever. What the device in our cars will do is it will tell our signals when to flare. “Now, now, now, now,” they will say. When you flick the switch that activates your car’s turn signal there will be a very slight delay as said car, listening to said transmission, waits for the next beat. “…now, now, now, now.” And so the chaos at the intersection will end, and I won’t feel so much like throwing up when I drive. And consider, as an additional benefit, how beautiful this will look from the sky: the USA, as seen from above, will be bright, and then a little brighter, as collectively we signal. Left, right, now, left, right, now, now, now. Bright, and then a little brighter.

Catch Up Issue 3 is available for preorder. You can read/hear work from past contributors in their rad Bonus Round. Brought to you by the hard working folks at Gold County Paper Mill.

Deep in the throat of the internet, a movement is rising. This movement has a cruel ass need to lay down a laugh track over bloody human tragedy. They’ve already taken their fight to space. Now, on October 28th, they prepare to plague down on Sidewinder, CO via Twitter. Read their intentions!

A few months ago hundreds of funny, smart tweeters got together all over the USA to LIVE TWEET 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was LIFE AFFIRMING and fun and hilarious and it’s time to do it again!

On Sunday, October 28th, at 7pm MST join Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert) and Sommer Browning (@vagtalk) in Live Tweeting THE SHINING!!

We’ll start the film precisely at 7pm Mountain time (that’s 9pm for you Easterners, 6pm for West Coast & 8pm for Middlekins…I don’t know why I said Middlekins or why I’m teaching you about how time zones work.)

This is going to be the most fun you’ve had since you stopped going to church.

Hashtag: #redrum

Laugh at other peoples pain and join the movement of Sommer Browning and Elisa Gabbert here. And don’t forget to look for the bullshit. The moon is a liar.

This is in response to Mike Kitchell’s recent piece “Everything is fucked and why do we bother,” (damn, that title looks bleak in isolation) questioning the need for so many lit journals; for historical precedent note last year’s ToBS round in which Melissa Broder deemed being editor-in-chief of a lit journal more akin to being “editor-in-chief of a blogspot,” which, maybe I would amend that to Tumblr, but still a worthy invective for our day and time, in which lit journals elicit such teeth-gnashing blog post titles as Mr. Kitchell’s, to say nothing of such statements at large…. READ MORE >

Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer and Nightwork. She is also the author of two novels: All Souls, which was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and Florida, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. With Diane Williams, she edits the literary journal NOON. Her new novel, Prosperous Friends, will be published by Grove Press on November 6.

Michelle Y. Burke is the author of Horse Loquela, winner of the 2007 Red Mountain Review Chapbook Series Award. She lives in Cincinnati.

Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. READ MORE >