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"One hundred years after Orville and Wilbur Wright's first manned flight near Kitty Hawk, N.C., poets respond in a multitude of ways to the simple yet miraculous fact that humans take to the air and stay there. Maybe we're more blasé now than Apollinaire was when he celebrated 'the machine that flies early in the twentieth century.' But looking out of a small window, we may still gasp in wonder as we fly over Bryce Canyon, or as we take off and land at dusk, the heavens lit up with their psychedelics. We can experience, in William Matthews' words, 'the blue, sourceless, amniotic light / in which the world, hidden by clouds, seems / from 39,000 feet to float.'
We began to work on this anthology before 9/11 and in the days after, when selecting the poems, I still wanted to honor the original conception—to make an anthology of literary works inspired by the myriad aspects of flying. There are as many individual responses to these experiences as there are writers who have written about them: awe, boredom, fear, surprise, delight, transcendence. The poems in this anthology offer differing perspectives, in many voices and styles. . . . Flying, floating, in between: a very good place for poets, for whom rumination comes as second nature."
—From the Introduction by Coeditor Judith Taylor
From take-off to landing and everything in between, this anthology is about flying and the culture surrounding this precarious method of transportation. From the awe of being airborne to the shrink-wrapped airplane meals, from the phobia of flying to the very real reason for that fear, everything is explored. Air Fare Contributors Diane Ackerman
Margaret Atwood
Ned Balbo
Ellen Bass
Joshua Beckman
Sharon Bryan
Andrea Hollender Budy
Kelly Cherry
Alain de Botton
Russ Franklin
Richard Garcia
Lise Goett
Albert Goldbarth
Rosemary Griggs
Jeffrey Harrison
Brenda Hillman
Christine Hume
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Martha Kinney
Peter LaSalle
Philip Levine
Lee Martin
William Matthews
Ian McEwan
Campbell McGrath
Carol Muske-Dukes
Marilyn Nelson
Naomi Shahib Nye
Kim Ponders
Kevin Prufer
Barbara Ras
Sherrod Santos
Natalie Serber
Enid Shomer
Bruce Smith
Susan Stewart
Terese Svoboda
James Tate
Jean Valentine
Arthur Vogelsang
Charles Harper Webb
Jan Wesley
Colson Whitehead
Gary Young
Nickole Brown is a poet and fiction writer. She recently graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College and is working on a collection of short stories with grant help from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She graduated summa cum laude from University of Louisville in 1996, studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for Hunter S. Thompson in 1997. Her critical work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle and Mammoth Books' 2003 Sudden Stories anthology, and she was a finalist for both the Lorian Hemingway and the Kestrel Review short story competitions. She currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Judith 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. Her poetry has been published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Fence, Boston Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and many anthologies. 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.
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