See How We Almost Fly, selected winner of the 2008 Pearl Poetry Prize by Gerald Locklin, is Alison Luterman's second book of poetry. Here she presents a dazzling array of characters and subjects that reflect her rich and various life as daughter, friend, lover, teacher, and world traveler. Although Luterman clearly and unflinchingly addresses the pain and suffering of death, illness, failure, and betrayal, her intense engagement with the people and things of this earth is ultimately life-affirming. In poems at once personal and emblematic, she never gives in to despair or cynicism, but instead offers up her experience as a metaphor for what it means to be human. As she writes most eloquently in 'Young Girl at the Olympics': Little salmon, like the last / Of your kind / In our dying times, do you leap / Ever higher as if to say No matter what / We ve done to the earth, / Look how our souls / Made flesh can flame for a moment, / See how we almost fly.
Alison Luterman was raised in Massachusetts, the oldest of four children, and moved to Oakland, California in 1990. Her poems have been published in The Sun, The Brooklyn Review, Slipstream, Tattoo Highway, and on the Library of Congress web site Poetry 180. Several of her poems have been featured as Poetry in Motion posters on buses and subway trains in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. She has also published many personal essays and feature articles and has written several plays.
She writes frequently about her neighborhood, social justice, personal relationships, urban wilderness, and the uses of art, especially poetry and theater.
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