Foreword by Robert Hass. The poems in this anthology embody what it's like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in The Place That Inhabits Us are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the 'hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, "the mental maps that for humans," writes Robert Hass in the foreword, "make a place a place." Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.
Poems by Kim Addonizio, Ellery Akers, Yehuda Amichai, Ellen Bass, Stella Beratlis, B.A. Bishop, Chana Bloch, Robert Bly, Barbara Swift Brauer, Tom Centolella, Nancy Cherry, Laura Chester, Marilyn Chin, Catherine Clark-Sayles, Dan Clurman, Gillian Conoley, Constance Crawford, Patrick Daly, William Dickey, W. S. Di Piero, Mark Doty, Sharon Doubiago, Ellen Dudley, Robert Duncan, Camille Dungy, Quinton Duval, Don Emblem, Donna Emerson, Martín Espada, Peter Everwine, Sharon Fain, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Molly Fisk, Jean V. Gier, Sandra Gilbert, Dana Gioia, Linda Gregg, Thom Gunn, Ken Haas, Forrest Hamer, Robert Hass, Zbigniew Herbert, Lee Herrick, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirschfield, Tung-hui Hu, John Isles, Robin Leslie Jacobsen, Joyce Jenkins, Alice Jones, William Keener, Carolyn Kizer, August Kleinzahler, Jeff Knorr, Phyllis Koestenbaum, Susan Kolodny, Joanne Kyger, Melody Lacina, Ursula Le Guin, Priscilla Lee, Julia Levine, Larry Levis, Karen Llagas, Jeanne Lohmann, Morton Marcus, Stefani Marlis, Jack Marshall, Tom McCarthy, Jane Mead, Stephanie Mendel. Josephine Miles, Czeslaw Miloz, Alejandro Murguía, Charlotte Muse, Jim Nawrocki, Diana O'Hehir, George Oppen, Daniel Polikoff, D. A. Powell, Jim Powell, Zara Raab, Kenneth Rexroth, Adrienne Rich, Kay Ryan, John Savant, Eliot Schain, Aaron Shurin, Richard Silberg, Gary Snyder, Gary Soto, David St. John, Amber Flora Thomas, Daniel Tobin, Mark Turpin, Lew Welch, Walt Whitman, Kathleen Winter, Al Young, C. Dale Young, and Gary Young.
Founded by seven writers in 1999 as a shared-work nonprofit, Sixteen Rivers Press is named for the sixteen rivers that flow into the San Francisco Bay. As a regional publishing collective, the primary mission of Sixteen Rivers Press is to publish the work of Northern California poets. In the course of its 25-year history, the press has established itself as a vibrant local, regional, and national presence through outreach and service to publishers, educators, and communities.
Sixteen Rivers Press has been honored with grants from the Yellow House, the Koret Foundation, the Ross Whitney Foundation, and two NEA grants. Poems by Sixteen Rivers authors have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry, and Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Sixteen Rivers books and authors have won NEA grants, an American Book Award and California Book Award, several IPPY honors, a National Indie Excellence Award, several nominations for the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, a LAMBDA Poetry Award honor, a Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation. and more.
"One of the great pleasures of this anthology is that, at a certain moment, a group of early-twenty-first-century poets made a selection of poems about the place that mattered to them, so that this book is about the experience of place—and about being given the remembered expression of the experience of place by others who have lived here. And that begins to be a culture." — Robert Hass, from the foreword
"What a splendid volume of poetry and what an incredible range of poets—including some of the greats as well as the yet unknown—and what a rich and impressive array of topics, themes, settings, and emotions! If you love poetry and poetics, you will be smitten over and over again by this cornucopia, this amazing, diverse harvest." — Michael Krasny, Forum, KQED-FM, San Francisco
