This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

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