Full Moon on K Street : Poems About Washington, DC [Paperback]

assorted contributors (Author), Kim Roberts (Editor), editor (Editor), Katy Jean May (Illustrator), illustrator (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 2009

Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes. All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political. Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Chicago has Carl Sandburg's fog, coming on little cat feet. Los Angeles has Bukowski's drunks, sleeves soaking up spilt booze. New York has as many poets as rats. Washington has . . . what, exactly? Its reputation in popular poetry is that of a way station for gestating genius, a quarry of one-liners chipped into monuments, the coronation spot of a poet laureate who lives elsewhere. Quote a line from a poem that captures the capital as a place to live. Can't. Couldn't, until now. Full Moon on K Street -- the first anthology of modern poetry to be wholly for, about and by current and former Washington residents -- teems with poets who've distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years... The poets in Full Moon on K Street; sniff the dread in the jungle of medical offices at 18th and K. They listen for murmurs of the past along storied Fourth Street SW. They notice the crouch of the old Universal Artificial Limb Co. in Silver Spring. They feel the itinerant ache at the Greyhound bus station in Northeast. --Washington Post writer Dan Zak

Product Details

• Paperback: 147 pages
• Publisher: Plan B Press; First edition edition (December 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977824365
• ISBN-13: 978-0977824366
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,404,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kim Roberts is the author of three books of poems, and editor of the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC. She edits the online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and wrote a history of spoken word poetry in DC called Lip Smack. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humanities Council of Washington, and the DC Commission on the Arts, she has been a writer-in-residence at twelve artist colonies, and her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin.