Product Description

A collaborative poem about America, from fifty-four of our best poets

: is a poetic relay race across the continent: fifty-four poets responding to ideas of Americaand to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressionsfrom the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music, and bombs in Baghdad, to a poet-soldier's rifle-sight in Afghanistan. The renga itself, in the ancient tradition of Japanese linked verse, provides the form of this historic conversation among the poets, as they meditate, within ten lines, on a moment in America. begins with Robert Pinsky's recounting of a line of poetry by Lincoln as fall deepens and "maples / kindle in the East," and ends some five hundred lines later, with Robert Hass's "greeny April" on the Pacific coast. All proceeds from sales go to America: Now and Here.