For eleven years I have had the peculiar privilege of putting every last one of these poets in front of an audience. That sentence makes it sound organized. It's rarely been that easy.

What it actually looked like was borrowed rooms, me feeling like Kermit the Frog as I did my best to hold things together, too much money spent on liquor in hopes of luring the unfamiliar in, bartenders pretending to listen, and a small congregation of the faithful gathered to hear language do what it has always done best in St. Louis - survive.

This city does not hand out literary careers like party favors. It does not anoint. It endures. And the poets in this collection have endured right alongside it. They have read to packed houses, to six people, and to one distracted guy nursing a beer in the corner. They have read through heartbreak, day jobs, night shifts, bad reviews, good reviews, and the long silences in between.

I booked them because they were good. I kept booking them because I've never stopped believing in them.

What you hold in your hands is not a "scene" in the trend-piece sense of the word. It is something better. It is a small sample of a body of work forged in open mics, back rooms, bookstores, and bars - with too much booze, coffee, and/or anxiety running through us. It is argument and confession. It is humor sharpened into a blade and tenderness smuggled in under a joke.

If there is a common thread here, it is persistence. Not the glamorous kind. The kind that shows up anyway.

These poets have given more to their craft than can ever be quantified. I hope they know how grateful I have always been for every syllable they gave. This anthology is proof that the performance was never the point. It was the work. Always the work.

-Daniel W. Wright

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