"Ghost Factor"
(10 X 18 encaustic)
Jill Bullitt

Her 9/11 series, from which this work is taken, uses the intersection and often collision of organic against rigid, geometric shapes in evocative, Redon-like landscapes. References to carnivorous plants, de Chirico houses, towers, Becher blast furnaces, and architectural wire-frames go to the heart of our response, in its many human inflections, to that horror. This use of visual language aligns her work with representational art while the dreamlike, often floating appearance of human and animal figures constrained by rectangles or circumscribed by circles ironically convey an abstract and dreamlike space.

I'm writing this as I arrive home from the 2008 AWP conference in New York City, where 7000 of us writerly types (poetry and fiction) crowded into half a dozen hotels and 200 plus events around every imaginable subject pertinent to the literary arts, the best of which, by far, was the reading celebrating Cortland Review's 10 years of publishing voices, with a reading by Laure Anne Bosselaar, Anne Marie Macari, Maurice Manning, David Rigsbee and Patricia Smith, distinct, strong and wonderful voices all.

L to R: Laure Anne Bosselaar, Maurice Manning, Patricia Smith,
Anne Marie Macari and David Rigsbee

As always we were proud to credit founder Guy Shahar for being first online with the vision to publish poets in audio as well as text and for the genius to create a site that could accommodate that vision. Although Guy is busily distracted these days collecting honors in the film world, he's still our North Star, and it added to the celebration that he was on hand to get the party started. Issue 38 continues that celebration!

For our cover art, we celebrate Jill Bullitt and her incredibly haunting encaustic. Titled "Ghost Factor," it was inspired when Jill walked to the city from her home in Brooklyn to witness the devastation of 9/11 just two weeks after that event. What she saw inspired a series of twelve encaustics, of which "Ghost Factor" is just one.

Jill is a Seattle native who has exhibited her work in the US, Italy, and France. A graduate of Stanford, UNC, and the New York Studio School, she has taught at UNC, Duke, The Savannah College of Art and Design, and the University of Washington. In 2002 she was a finalist for an Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

We're continuing the celebration with Issue 38's voices of longtime poet friends and emerging talents, poets new to us and some of them new to publishing. We welcome them all to the Cortland Review: Stanley Paul Anderson, Anna Catone, Gerald L. Dodge, Brian Fogarty, Cassandra Garbus, Robert Gibbons, Niki Koulouris, Kei Miller, Michael Montlack, Jeff Newberry, Matthew Olzmann, Papa Osmubal, John Powers, Martin A. Ramos, Eric Reymond, Charles Savage, Terry Savoie, Vivek Sharma, David R. Slavitt, and Gary Sloboda, and our wonderful reviewer-in-residence, David Rigsbee.

There's an extra candle on the cake to celebrate the amazing staff of dedicated lovers of the literary arts who make this pretty incomprehensible thing happen issue after issue and feature after feature, each an indispensable contributor somewhere on the other side of a computer screen. They are Greg Nicholl, Jennifer Wallace, Scott Challener, Elizabeth Cornell, Natalie Baszile, Amy MacLennan, Brian Woodham, and Seth Perlow.

On to what's important: the contributions to Issue 38.

Don't forget TCR's audio upgrade now allows you to hear audio from our pages via Adobe Flash Player, probably already downloaded on your computer. With Flash, audio is instantaneous. If you can't hear the audio, you need to download Flash Player which is free here. Audio designated by the RealAudio symbol from Issues and Features prior to 2007 are still accessible via RealPlayer. RealPlayer can be downloaded free here.