Everywhere is Someplace Else: A Literary AnthologyThis is the product of a publishing colony in which a group of eleven national writers created a book at a week-long retreat held on the Texas Gulf Coast. It is a gathering of poetry about issues: justice, environment, spirit, creativity, and community. Contributors include Susan Bright, Bonnie Buhler-Smith, Valerie Bridgeman Davis, Bradley Earle Hoge, Frances Downing Hunter, Margo LaGattuta, Polly Opsahl, Christine Valentine Reising, Karen Chorkey Renaud, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Gail Teachworth. Everywhere we go in the world, we bring ourselves and our histories. We are both exhilarated and cautioned by differences we see in climates, customs, ideologies and people, and we build walls of protection to keep us safe in our hermetic hometowns. Yet, as writers and readers, we can see beyond those walls. Through the lenses of metaphor and image, focus and association, we can see the inner connections between people infrastructures of common experience that go beyond first appearances. The world becomes smaller and less intimidating when we name our truths and discover that our neighbors share them. Through collaboration, we create new pathways of understanding. Everywhere is Someplace Else is a powerful collection that examines Spirit, Earth, Justice, The Other, Community, Work, Creatures, Time, Death, Love and Creativity through the eyes of eleven poets and storytellers who gathered to collaborate and create a stunning celebration of life and the creative process. The book was assembled in a week of intensive collaboration which influenced everyone's vision. In this process of creating, we found that community sustains us. Our best art comes from healing its pain. Our readers are an extended community of people all over the world who work every day to change ideas and institutions that are destroying the planet. This anthology is the product of all we know about the soul of the writer, how it grows from community and gives back to it, how a circle of voices is often the truth of the poem, how meaning is created because we need it. |
Contents
Love | 7 |
Do Not Forget in Peace Times | 8 |
The Other | 81 |
Generations Passing | 91 |
Double Blind | 98 |
Mother Sang to Clouds | 105 |
At Least | 111 |
The Old Chair | 117 |
Creatures | 143 |
Susan Bright | 171 |
Mourn | 188 |
Edited by Christine Valentine Reising | 201 |
Shadow Scene | 223 |
The Appeal of the Mother to Her Infant Poem Bonnie BuhlerSmith | 241 |
Up an Unfamiliar Trail | 247 |
At Fathers Grave | 255 |
Nona Mena Christine Valentine Reising | 123 |
Copyright | |