Beskrivelse
Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird’s song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace –from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again–touching everything in between. The book’s focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.
«In long prose-poem sequences, Spahr approaches a now overly addressed topic [September 11] in a surprising manner. She succeeds in blending emotional reactions to the attack with political tracts on American imperialism, using form and language to revitalize the debate. With a poet’s touch, she takes the reader on a breathless litany of lists, images, and nightmare visions that somehow, in their rapid horror, lead to salvation and hope for the future.»–Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review
«Innovative, incantatory, politically charged and decidedly accessible.»–Publishers Weekly
«In a time of war, dirty air, missile worship when all oracles seem silenced, from every eco-lyric pore these fine auroras of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs have been streaming. Registering 9/11 as cellular rupture, this is a work of full globality which redeems our time, makes us remember all that poetry is capable of as form, frame, syntax linking air, earth, lung; what Emerson meant by lyric language as nothing less than externalization of planet’s soul.»–Rob Wilson, author of Waking in Seoul
«By listing, by naming, the atrocities–the harrowing stats, the scary particulars–in our world-at-endless-war–we might at least exert control over our sanity and extend our mind and compassion to others. It is a connected universe as Spahr so forcefully and powerfully reminds us. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a sustained and anaphoric meditation, a catharsis for our predicament.»–Anne Waldman
