128 Pages
©2011
Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Purchase includes: PDF

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Poems, like mushrooms, demand our close attention before they can be found or seen at all. As mushrooms are a hybrid kingdom first thought to be plants, now believed closer to animals, but truly neither, a life form in fact uniquely their own so it is with poems, which reside hybrid between music and speech, between logic and feeling, between waking thought and the leapings of dream, doing work they alone can. As mushrooms hold dangerous powers, so do poems Plato famously banned poets from his ideal Republic because their words can sway in ways beyond reason s reach. Both mushrooms and poems hold shamanic potential; when taken inside us fully, they have the power to alter consciousness in profoundly unpredictable ways. 

CONTRIBUTING POETS
Sherman Alexie • A.R. Ammons • Margaret Atwood • David Axelrod • John Bargowski • Marvin Bell • Simeon Berry • Elizabeth Bishop • Robert Bly • Todd Boss • John Cage • Jim Daniels • Alison Hawthorne Deming • Xue Di • Adam Dickinson • Emily Dickinson • David Dodd Lee • Alan Dugan • Donna J. Gelagotis Lee • Harry Gilonis • Mark Halperin • Robert Hass • William Heyen • Christopher Howell • Andrew Hudgins • Charlotte Innes • Louis Jenkins • Laura Kasischke • Basma Kavanagh • Christine Boyka Kluge • Yusef Komunyakaa • Ted Kooser • Maxine Kumin • Ann Lauinger • Dorianne Laux • D.H. Lawrence • Jeff Mann • David Mason • W.S. Merwin • Mary Oliver • Allan Peterson • Sylvia Plath • Robert Michael Pyle • Alberto Rios • Pattiann Rogers • Michael J. Rosen • Kay Ryan • Tomaz Salamun • Lynne Shapiro • R.T. Smith • Gary Snyder • William Stafford • Gerald Stern • Arthur Sze • Lee Upton • Sidney Wade • Robert Penn Warren • Michael Water • Richard Wilbur • Nance Van Winckel • Jane Whitledge • Robert Wrigley • W. B. Yeats • David Young • Gary Young