The 1998 Pushcart prize XXII: best of the small presses

Introduction / Bill Henderson

Courting a monk / Katherine Min

Demonology / Rick Moody

Elegy ending in the sound of a skipping rope / Larry Lewis

The beauty treatment / Stacey Richter

Ode to meaning / Robert Pinsky

Grounded / Claire Davis

The balloon / Mary Ruefle

Preacher / Steve Yarbrough

Stonehenge / Albert Goldbarth

Women dreaming of Jerusalem / Rachel Kadish

Atomic bride / Thomas Sayers Ellis

Give the millionaire a drink / Mike Newirth

What the water knows / Sam Hamill

Jessica, the hound & the casket trade / Thomas Lynch

Living with stripes / Kay Ryan

Oxygen / Ron Carlson

Blacklegs / Brigit Kelly

Not the plaster casters / Janice Eidus

What the animals teach us / Chard de Niord

New York days, 1958-1964 / Charles Simic

Karma Lollipop / Albert Saijo

Out of the woods / Josip Novakovich

Missing it / Dan Brown

The twelve plagues / Gerald Shapiro

Matinée idylls / Molly Bendall

We have time / Paul L. Allman

Door / Dana Levin

Knowing your place / Sylvia Watanabe

Executive suite / Michael Heffernan

Carp / Jessica Roeder

No turn on red / Richard Jackson

The kiss / Pamela Painter

Troubadour / David St. John

For the relief of unbearable urges / Nathan Englander

Davy Cricket / David Hayward

Umbilicus / James Alan McPherson

That half is almost gone / Marilyn Chin

The forest / Andrea Barrett

Fragments from the burnt notebooks of O. Fleming / Frank Polite

Civilization / Tomʹas Filer

Oysters and other workers / Turner Cassity

The wings / Kristin King

For the young men who died of AIDS / Julia Vinograd

Rhyming action / Charles Baxter

The lipstick tree / Kiana Davenport

Souls / Dannie Abse

Dentaphilia / Julia Slavin

L.A. dream #2 / Maureen Seaton

Native daughter / Lee Smith

Breathing lessons / Rane Arroyo

Two accidents : reflections on chance and creativity / Lewis Hyde

On the failure named Bosnia / P.H. Liotta

The famous torn and restored lit cigarette trick / Elizabeth Gilbert

Invierno / Junot Diaz

Sparrow / Reginald Gibbons

Return of the Boyceville flash / Gordon Weaver

Old Woodrat's sticky house / Gary Snyder

Jamming traffic / Rita Ariyoshi

Van Leeuwenhoek : 1675 / Linda Bierds

The appropriation of cultures / Percival Everett

Some information about 23 years of existence / Jeff Clark

The secret names of whores / Donald Rawley

Body parts (1968) / Bin Ramke

Killer whales / Susan Daitch

El Perifʹerico, or sleep / Joshua Clover

Zenobia / Gina Berriault

The man who wouldn't plant willow trees / A.E. Stallings

At least thirteen ways of looking at look / Gordon Lish

g The nude detective, a complaint / Dorothy Barresi

Gooseberry marsh / Gretchen Legler

Vous etes plus beaux que vous ne pensiez / Kenneth Koch

Jaget / Anne Carson

Scar Vegas / Tom Paine

The coat / Flannery O'Connor

Special mention

Contributors' notes

Presses featured in the Pushcart Prize since 1976

Contributing small presses

Index.