Publisher's Synopsis
Anne Stevenson's new collection crosses many borders. While her title-poem mocks borders dividing rich nations from poor, its subtext undermines the public language of political self-justification, suggesting that the true dimensions of morality can be approached best through literature. Many of these poems balance between youth and age, life and death, love and friendship, science and mythology, terrorists and victims. For most of her life, Stevenson has spanned the New World and the Old, and in her "rescued" long poem, Green Mountain, Black Mountain, she looks back again to her wartime childhood in America. A sequence of Welsh poems explores borders between reality and imagination and between the worlds of the present and the past. As always, Stevenson's poems are sharp-edged, disconcerting and musical, often bordering on laughter or tears. Never trying sell ideas or confirm prejudices, she reveals - through her scrupulous choice of language - profound, complex, hidden, maybe shaming but certainly important insights into human nature.
