What's on your bedside table? Installment One

Jeff Hoover (One of my dearest friends and my son's godfather, Jeff is a freelance writer living in Cape Town, South Africa)

"Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve", by Sandra Gilbert (non-fiction)
"The Black Book" by Orhan Pamuk (fiction)
"The Apple" by Michael Faber (fiction)
"Burger's Daughter" by Nadine Gordimer (fiction)
"Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene (fiction)
The Economist magazine


Emily XYZ

"The Botanical Garden," vols.1 and 2; Blackburne/Maze,
"Fruit, An Illustrated History"; Sherwood
"A New Flowering"; Everard
"Wild Flowers of the World"; Beales
"Classic Roses";
also
"The Individual Investor's Guide to Winning on Wall Street," by Peter DeAngelis;
Jim Cramer's "Confessions of a Street Addict";
the last 2 issues of Weird New Jersey.

Donna Masini

In a small studio, the whole apartment, really, counts as the bedside table -- and all personal items --in fact just about everything I own, can be seen in a glimpse, so what I can say it this: what is now directly beside my bed in one of the "active" piles: Daniel Mendelsohn The Lost; Dickens, Bleak House; Sebold, The Emigrants; Bresson's Notes on Cinematography; Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air from The Epic; Annie Rogers, The Unsayable; Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity, Virginia Woolf, The Waves; Thomas Ogden Reverie and Interpretation; and a beat of copy of Elizabteh Bishop's Complete Poems -- a couple more -- but you said ten.

Each morning, when I change the futon into a couch, the pile falls over, up aganist a tall bookcase on which sit, among other things and forming a little tableaux in front of the books (I'm picking out one shelf here): a tiny statue of Buddha from my Godchild, Inan; bottle of massage oil; small terra cotta creche figures from Assisi: Mary kneeling, a woman carrying basket of eggs and a goose, etc. ; a small bottle of "Lourdes Water" my mother sent me; Rothko postcard, pens, stones, small white "bust " of Dante, and an old rubber Gumby. Anything more personal is stored in a pink wooden box on the shelf beneath.

Stephanie Strickland
(Stephanie Strickland is a print and new media poet whose most recent book
publication, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una, has an online component,
http://vniverse.com)

Chicago Review 51:4 and 52:1 (Lisa Robertson special focus)
Black Dog Songs Lisa Jarnot Flood Editions
Code The Language of Our Time Ars Electronica 2003 Hatje Cantz
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul Rudy Rucker Thunder's Mouth Press
Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought Vladimir Tasic Oxford UP

Cate Peebles

1. packet of McCaans instant Irish oatmeal
2. photo of self w/ best friend drinking a 40 freshman year of college in blue frame
3. empty bottle of smart water (1.5 L)
4. clock
5. The Eye Like A Strange Balloon, by Mary Jo Bang
6. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
7. Shake, by Joshua Beckman
8. What Do Pictures Want, W.J.T. Mitchell
9. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
10. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings, E.A. Poe

Ellen Baxt

My "bedside table" is a stool. It contains Ida by
Gertrude Stein, When You Are Awake by Diane Ward,
Practice: New Writing and Art (Issue No. 1) and
Gourmet, November 2006

Robert Masterson (Masterson writes: i don't spend nearly enough time in bed.)

a lamp
three alarm clocks

books--
one hundred years of solitude
dogs of babel

magazines--cemetary dance; cthulhu sex

Maggie Wells
(Maggie Wells lives in the East Village, attends the New School graduate writing program, grew up in California and owns two Winterkitties.)

The Paris Review Interviews, Volume One
John Ashbery, Your name here
T.S. Elliot, Old Possum's book of Practical cats
The Tempest
Henry James, The Turning of the Screw and the Aspern Papers
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman
John Asbery, Three Poems
Ben Doyle, Radio Radio
Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

Personal Items:
Ibuprophen, Birth Control, Herbal Energy Pills (Take Off), Sunglasses, a bobby pin, a ceramic Sea Horse still in the box, Marigold plant, a business card of a photographer, three glasses.

Amy Michelle Wright(Amy M. Wright is currently teaching poetry and composition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.)

Thomas Merton's Spiritual Direction & Meditation
2 journals
ink pen
a clay tumbler of water
aged childhood Winnie the pooh
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo
Harry Mathews' The Case of the Persevering Maltese
The Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire
The Encyclopedia of Stupidity
George Oppen's Selected Poems
one antique clip lamp
A Bernadette Mayer Reader
Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
2 down ear plugs

Carmen Gimenez Smith (Carmen Gimenez Smith is publisher of Noemi Press. She lives in New Mexico.)

wipies
notebook
Vanity Fair magazine
YOU'RE WEARING THAT by Deborah Tannen
LIKE WIND LOVES A WINDOW by Andrea Baker
POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO by Barbara Jane Reyes
THE AESTHETICS OF VISUAL POETRY, 1914-1928 by Willard Bohn
MODERN VISUAL POETRY by Willard Bohn
THE FLEXIBLE LYRIC by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Lee Schwartz

BOOKS:

THe Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan, my poetry journal, THE Wellspring by SHaron Olds

ITEMS:

wind up alarm clock, anti itch foot cream, printed out pages, ripped out articles,k recipes,business cards, to do list, vase from Mexico with over dried faded flowers.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont (Author of Curious Conduct, Placebo Effect, and Editor (with
Claudia Carlson) of The Poet's Grimm)

Bedside Table:
As of 10/29/06, I have a small photo of my husband and parents taken in Central Park in the 80's, a clock radio set to 10 am and Air America, a big basket containing, my journal, a tiny 3 X 5 spiral notebook for recording poems, ideas, dream ideas, etc., Mary Ruefle's "Life Without Speaking," Wislawa Szymborska's "Monologue of a Dog," Elizabeth Bishop's letters, "One Art," and two old, finished journals, plus my 35mm camera and lenses. Oh, and a pen and a tissue, both slightly used.

Terri Muuss

A book of Baha'i Prayers
Two candles
A stone sculpture
A baby monitor
Zen mediation chimes
and a bunch of baby board books that rotate
(right now it is "Corduroy's Day", There's a Woket in my Pocket!" and "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?"

Wish I could say that I had adult books on it, but who has time for that with a ten month old. :-)