Once I Was a Block of Stone: Six Recent Chapbooks (on Epic Journeys, Unbelievable Escapes by Steve Kowit; A Different Kind of Hunger by Beth Ann Fennelly; Take Hold by Merrill Leffler; The Memory Palace by Colin Hamilton; Hand-Me-down Calicos by L. Teresa Church; and At The Dead Center of Day by Walter Bargen)

Paul Zimmer lives on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. In the fifteen years since his retirement from a long career in university publishing, he has published two books each of poetry and essay-memoir. His first novel, The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove, is forthcoming from Permanent Press in early 2015, when he will be eighty years old—which surely makes him, he believes, one of the oldest first novelists ever.