The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed

The poems in this anthology embody what it's like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in THE PLACE THAT INHABITS US are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the 'hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, "the mental maps that for humans," writes Robert Hass in the foreword, "make a place a place." Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us. Poetry. California Studies. Foreword by Robert Hass. "One of the great pleasures of this anthology is that, at a certain moment, a group of early-twenty-first-century poets made a selection of poems about the place that mattered to them, so that this book is about the experience of place—and about being given the remembered expression of the experience of place by others who have lived here. And that begins to be a culture." --—Robert Hass 'What a splendid volume of poetry and what an incredible range of poets—iincluding some of the greats as well as the yet unknown—and what a rich and impressive array of topics, themes, settings, and emotions! If you love poetry and poetics, you will be smitten over and over again by this cornucopia, this amazing, diverse harvest." --—Michael Krasny, Forum,KQED-FM, San Francisco