Synopsis
Featuring over one hundred contemporary poems, the book captures DC's unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes. All poems were written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city. Edited by Kim Roberts, the publisher of the acclaimed online journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, this anthology captures the city's many moods: celebratory, angry, and fiercely political. Contributors include: two-time US Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore; DC's first Poet Laureate, Sterling A. Brown; senator and five-time presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy; Cervantes prize winner for lifetime achievement in Spanish-language literature, Jose Emilio Pacheco; renowned gay rights activist Essex Hemphill; and President Obama's official inauguration poet, Elizabeth Alexander.
Review
Chicago has Carl Sandburg's fog, coming on little cat feet. Los Angeles has Bukowski's drunks, sleeves soaking up spilt booze. New York has as many poets as rats. Washington has . . . what, exactly? Its reputation in popular poetry is that of a way station for gestating genius, a quarry of one-liners chipped into monuments, the coronation spot of a poet laureate who lives elsewhere. Quote a line from a poem that captures the capital as a place to live. Can't. Couldn't, until now. Full Moon on K Street -- the first anthology of modern poetry to be wholly for, about and by current and former Washington residents -- teems with poets who've distilled the region's lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years... The poets in Full Moon on K Street; sniff the dread in the jungle of medical offices at 18th and K. They listen for murmurs of the past along storied Fourth Street SW. They notice the crouch of the old Universal Artificial Limb Co. in Silver Spring. They feel the itinerant ache at the Greyhound bus station in Northeast. --Washington Post writer Dan Zak
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