Allow us to break the code on the City Paper’s cover: Nobody felt like cranking out a cover story over Thanksgiving so they farmed it out to poetess/childhood sex abuse survivor/activist Samantha Barrow who gets on her hawg and workshops her way across the U.S. of A. swinging heavy-duty sharp-as-an-axe free verse like Shiva The Destroyer:
Why I am grateful for my sexual traumas, particularly the childhood stuff
Because I earned every poem / orgasm the hard way
stroking with sutures my heart to my cunt
loving my body more intimately
since she has wrestled me down with flashbacks and pleasure blocks,
insisting that I listen, let go control and trusted her to take me there.
Wow, powerful stuff. For real. And we even like the way the cover has that old school alt-weekly look, like it’s the third issue of the City Paper instead of 1,124th. But then we gotta give props to PW’s Incredible Shrinking Paper of Record cover image for Steve Volk‘s fairly exhaustive compendium of the events leading up to what’s about to happen in a few minutes. By the way, Steve assures us that in the event of a strike editors will, as per his instructions, seal him into a large cardboard box and ship him to a secure undisclosed U-Store-It facility where he will blog 24-7 about the strike until it is over. Go get ’em, Slugger.
WINNER: PW, by a RCH