But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, the he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya … work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens.
           ~Federico Lorca

2008. The Lobster made a new friend.

Freshly collected from the local fishmonger, boiled red with a slew of lemon wedges, the 2008 Arsenic Lobster Anthology arrives at your dinner table. Its pages are filled with energy, a special kind of flavor and spirit that eludes our mundane lives. Each year I am thankful for this meal. I am thankful to the bounty of poets who submit such scrumptious words—without you, our lobster would not be so delicious.

This year we’ve introduced a new sister site, The Rooster Moans, a private community offering regular poetry workshops, collaborations and peer critique. Each contributor to the Lobster receives an invitation to take an active role.

Several years ago, Lissa Kiernan, one of the Lobster editors and moderator for the Rooster, and I met at a website called Perspectives. The beloved moderator of Perspectives died from a rare bone cancer. The site folded; shattered like stained glass. Lissa has worked hard to recreate an environment that can serve our community as a place to explore, be creative and continue ones struggle with the duende. Since its inception, already, I feel the site and workshops have promoted life-long friendships and professional relationships. I am very proud of the Rooster, Lobster and growing online community. Truly, I wish to thank Lissa for creating such an engaging, mentoring and highly successful website—a place where we can all hone our poetry writing skills.


This year’s delicious Lobster for your table.

I write poetry for the same reasons I read poetry; it changes me. It provides a record of my life—it saves me. It is the challenge of creation. To turn the burning blood-snarl into art is sometimes all I can do to keep the duende from strangling me. In this year’s Arsenic Lobster Anthology, I found a darkness so rich that I am stained:

                 There is a blade growing in my belly
                 a matter for rounding and the half dark
                 circles of moon
                 it hovers over my placenta
                 elbows poignant and rigid.
                 It sucks at poisoned suss:
                         callus and spread.

Herein, the exasperations of the duende may be found. As Lorca reminds us, she is no muse but rather the mercurial, sassy, hell-bent— the farouche:

                 She's smackleg, gunbody brilliant.
                 She knows how to pin a man with her
                 tailbone, pen him nitrogen-blind
                 like a block of dry ice. She's
                 Lauren Bacall with a cigarette
                 stuck to her gums, lipstick
                 smeared on her pretty
                 cupid's bow. Glasslights

She is one that smashes style, exhausts and dips so far into pain that it transcends the dangerous-pleasurable:

                 the broken
                 animals
                 in their own

                 bone    down

                 here

It is with thrilling delight that I invite you to travel the road in a lonely man half of which turns into a bird, to discover our bellies full of heat and eggs, to walk a broom of moths past a furnace. Dig into the Lobster! Try to deny it's delicious.

---
Susan Yount
Editor & Publisher, Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal