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.
Juliana Spahr is a poet, critic, and editor. Among her books of poems are Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You and Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award. She coedits the international arts journal Chain with Jena Osman.
"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
86 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520242951$26.95|£23.00Paper
Apr 2005