From Publishers Weekly
The poems, essays, short stories and novel excerpts Brown and Taylor have collected capture the glory of air travel while acknowledging the perils of flying. The selections range from works by well-known authors, such Ian McEwan's account of a ballooning accident from his novel
Enduring Love, to the musings of more obscure writers, like flight attendant Rosemary Griggs's inventive story "Isoka, a Northern Province of Zambia, 1999." Whether observing life lessons garnered from flight classes, as in Diane Ackerman's "On Extended Wings," or arriving passengers embracing in Ellen Bass's poem "Gate C22," the contributors take an eclectic approach to flight. The most haunting entries deal with the fears and realities of death associated with flying. Terrifying images may linger in readers' minds after perusing the chilling excerpt from Margaret Atwood's
Cat's Eye, which details a death at the hands of hijackers. Of all the pieces, Jeffrey Harrison's poem "Pale Blue City" is most poignant. He describes New York City viewed from the air in 2000: "I want it all to stay/ just like this.... But the plane/ is moving on, the city slips away...." As if in response, Ackerman writes, "[T]he only and ultimate fright is of trusting, releasing yourself to the present." This well-chosen anthology will delight, surprise and haunt anyone who takes to the air.
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About the Author
Taylor is the author of two collections of poetry, Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom (Zoo Press, 2003), and Curios (Sarabande Books, 2000) as well as a chapbook, Burning, for which she received the Portlandia Prize. Taylor is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She currently teaches literature and writing classes in Los Angeles, and is the editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry. Brown recently graduated from the M.F.A. at VT College and is working on a collection of short stories with grant help from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar and was the editorial assistant for Hunter S. Thompson in 1997. Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle and Mammoth Books' 2003 Sudden Stories anthology. She currently lives in Louisville where she is the Director of Development and Marketing at Sarabande.
