Crossing State Lines

Book excerpt: "A poetic relay race across the continent: fifty-four poets responding to ideas of America--and to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressions--from the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music; and bombs in Baghdad, to a poet-soldier's rifle-sight in Afghanistan. The renga itself, in the ancient tradition of Japanese linked verse, provides the form of this historic conversation among the poets, as they meditate, within ten lines, on a moment in America. Crossing State Lines begins with Robert Pinsky's recounting of a line of poetry by Lincoln as fall deepens and 'maples / kindle in the East, ' and ends some five hundred lines later, with Robert Hass's 'greeny April' on the Pacific coast"--Publisher description.