Mudfish 23: poems so good you forget you're reading poetry.

'You tell me, ' is the theme of MUDFISH 23. Honesty, emotion, shock, subtlety, poems whose reverberant language and intensity awaken more poems in the reader's mind. Poems that remind us of our own forgotten lives, that stick in our mind like burrs on a woolen sleeve.

Donald Hall, in A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, writes: "Jill Hoffman, a painter and a poet and a fiction writer, edits a thick and handsome literary magazine called . Mary Florio in NewPages writes: Mudfish "marries poetry and art in a spellbinding series of verve and verse .... The volume is so well-edited that one has difficulty celebrating any particular poet out of the entire collection." In its generous layout, it is as if every poet is featured. And a story-teller. Mudfish 1984 was the first slender issue and Mudfish gradually expanded to include fiction. Now MUDFISH 23 presents Stephanie Emily Dickinson's Lastness celebrating the life and death of the poet Ted Jonathan, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry, and fiction and nonfiction. Each work selected is a memorable experience, and each issue is a work of art. The Mudfish Individual Poet Series are companion volumes each featuring the work of a single Mudfish poet. The art, Florio writes, is "exquisite," and "moving," and the poetry "likewise compelling."

Art editing done by Jacques Louis Vidal.

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art.