Second, my sincere thank you to every editor who participated in the WIP: Saltian project. I am humbled by the good-natured and honest responses you offered. I was looking for technical, grammatical, and typographical errors and misuse of words, wrong tense, syntax, etc, as well as pointers to any abstractions, cliches, and just plain bad choices. I was counting on you to be passionate and you were.

Every poem should stand on its own plus be understood in the context of a whole if it is part of a thematic organization. I realize you were somewhat at a disadvantage by not seeing the entire manuscript in chronological order to make any positional comments. We strived to achieve the best tactical understanding of the project to fulfill several goals and along the way had to make choices that were not all inclusive. Also, I wanted to stay out of the process as much as possible so that the editorial bard could set the bar for tone and response and have that elusive unknown creative spark that no one can foresee emerge from you. The poems are mine and mine alone, but the intent of this pre-release book project was to focus on the concept of editing in its own right. Some of the confusion that arose around a particular poem or passage was quite nicely resolved without my interference. In addition, I believe that explaining poems often takes the magic out of them and I did not want to fall prey to that.

Thank you for dancing with my words and helping to bring them closer to perfection than I could have dared to on my own. 

Sincerely,

Alice Shapiro