Californians, hark! On June 6, our esteemed poetry ed., Don Bogen, returneth to Berkeley. Don is a Cal graduate himself, and he is skulking back to what he terms “the scene of the crime” to host yet another event in our Greetings from Cincinnati series. For those unfamiliar, this is a stealth operation whereby we infiltrate cities near and far (mostly far) to stage surprise literary gatherings that are sort of like poetry explosions, only without the fire and smoke and, actually, without the element of surprise—because we are telling you about it now.

Our Berkeley edition will take place at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, which must be an amazing place, because every time we google it, McAfee warns us it is a DANGEROUS SITE. Well, poetry explosions do happen there. Or one will happen, anyway, on Thursday, June 6, at 7:30 p.m. We leave you with a list of the combustible contributors that will be poetically present that fine eve:

Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light: Poems, the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of several books from Italian. His versions of twelve poems by Patrizia Cavalli appeared in CR 9.1 (Summer 2012), and two of his own poems appeared in CR 2.2 (Winter 2005). He teaches at Arkansas.

Randall Mann’s third poetry collection, Straight Razor, is forthcoming from Persea Books in October 2013.  His work has appeared in the Winter 2011 and Winter 2013 issues of CR. He lives in San Francisco.

D. A. Powell is the author of five books of poetry.  Prizes for his work include the Kingsley Tufts Award, the California Book Award, and, for his most recent book Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), the National Book Critics Circle Award.  He has poems in the Summer 2008 and Summer 2010 issues of CR.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of The Local World, which won the Wick Poetry Prize, and the translator of two volumes by Polish poet Tomasz Rozcyki, most recently his sonnet cycle Colonies. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the PEN Translation Fund, the Fulbright Commission, and the ACLS. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Slate, A Public Space, and The Cincinnati Review (Winter 2009, Winter 2011). She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford.

Kathleen Winter’s poems appeared in CR in 2007, 2008, and 2010 (Issues 4.1, 5.2, 7.2). Her book Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press, 2012) won the Antivenom Poetry Prize, as well as the 2013 Bob Bush Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for Best First Book of Poems. Winter’s poems also were published by Tin House, The New Republic, Agni, and Field. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Oh yes, we are on Facebook. If you like us . . . then LIKE us. You’ll find bonus goofy fun on our page. Right now, for example, there are new photo albums featuring staff, volunteers, and community supporters involved in Word Without End (our annual reading-series extravaganza) and our end-of-year cryfest (yesterday’s party, at which we mourned the loss of graduating staffers Becky and Lisa).

Returning guest blogger Don Peteroy learned something from his interview with upstart novelist Marjorie Celona. If you mess with her, she will first outthink you, then put you in the hospital, then head to the kitchen to scramble some eggs.

Marjorie Celona’s first novel ,Y, was published in 2012 by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Canada and in 2013 by Simon & Schuster (US), Faber & Faber (UK), and Suhrkamp (Germany). Y is forthcoming from Gallimard (France), De Bezige Bij (Netherlands), and Juritzen (Norway). Marjorie is the recipient of the John C. Schupes fellowship and Iowa Arts fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Olive B. O’Connor fellowship from Colgate University, and was recently writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she lives in Cincinnati with her fiancé, Brian, and their dog, Betsy Lou.

Question: Let’s make believe I have extraordinary powers. I decide to travel back in time to April 9, 2003. My mission: complicate your life. Before you wake up that morning, I move everything on Earth, except for you, over one inch to the left. How would this alter your life as a writer? Consider causality, and the butterfly effect.

MC: Why not just move me—but nothing else—one inch to the right? If you move everything but me one inch to the left, you’ll have to travel all the way back to the 90s in order to complete the task by the time I wake up on April 9 (a Wednesday, i.e., a work day, so we can assume I’ll be getting up ’round 7).  That’s early!  And who wants to relive the 90s? You?  No, you do not. You might also remember that April 9, 2003, was the day that the Iraqis, with the help of some US Marines, slung a noose around Saddam Hussein’s giant bronze neck and pulled the big man down. I suggest, then, not moving everything over by an inch (who wants to “complicate,” as you say, the fall of one of history’s most notorious war criminals? You?  No, you do not), but, rather, slipping into my bedroom circa 6:59 and giving me a gentle, one-inch nudge. I’ll tell you what happens next: I tell you to get the fuck out of my bedroom. I spray your face with mace. I beat you with the baseball bat I keep under the bed. Nothing changes for me, but a lot changes for you. Paralyzed and toothless, you beam yourself back to 2013, Don, while I wash the blood from my hands and go downstairs to make breakfast.