Product Description

Originally inspired by the Asian tsunami, this project now encompasses Katrina as well. This timely, sensitive collection of poetry sends a message to survivors that help is on the way and compels readers, who aren't experiencing such disasters, to contribute to those who are in need. In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief features 93 poems written by 94 poets of all ages, religions, ancestry, education, who hail from Italy, France, Norway, Spain, Canada, India, Africa, Serbia, and the US. Poets include Diane di Prima, Bob Holman, Ellen Bass, Nick Carbo, Marilyn Chin, Brett Axel and Lyn Lifshin. The proceeds will benefit charitable organizations for both disasters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2759210 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 116 pages

About the Author
Amy Ouzoonian received her BA in Journalism and Creative Writing for the Theater from SUNY New Paltz in 2004. She is the editor of the anthology Skyscrapers, Taxis and Tampons (Fly By Night Press, 1999) and author of Your Pill (Foothills Publishing, 2004). She has edited four issues of A Gathering of the Tribes magazine.

Customer Reviews

A "Benefit" Collection that Rises Above
(Amy Ouzoonian and a number of poets from the Into the Arms of Words read as part of the Writer''s Voice's Visiting Authors Series on July 14, 2006. This is from my spoken introduction to the event).

The breadth of poets collected together inside "In the Arms of Words" subtly communicates a great truth expressed more explicitly in the poems gathered here. From our safe remove, the story can too easily be reduced to "A bunch of foreigners suffer a tragedy..." and on we go with our lives.

The poets in "In the Arms of Words" particularize the victims of the tsunami. They connect the very real, very individual people affected by the tsunami to us, using their knowledge of the world that the victims lived in, and their estimable skills as poets, as communicators. They deal with the myriad cultural, religious, economic and military/industrial aspects of the disaster which contributed in making the situation even worse than it should've been, all the while zooming in with an unblinking eye on individuals, never turning away from the horror there, though in so many of these poems, you can feel, tangibly, the poets fighting the natural human desire to do just that.

But they stay. In the lovely, heart-breaking "After the Wave, Another: Nam Jai" Laurie Klein writes:

No, don't look
away from this.

And in poem after poem we are pulled out of comfort, asked to consider, to look, to reflect, to engage. It's surely more than most people can bear, and the great task of this book is to keep the reader going through it, wanting to go through it. After all, it pales in comparison to the events these moving poems cover.