Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work collective of Northern California poets, conducted a nationally advertised call for submissions, seeking unpublished poems that would "respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country: poems of resistance and resilience, witness and vision, that embody what it means to be a citizen in a time when our democracy is threatened." In a matter of weeks, the press received over two thousand poems. The work came from across the country, from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns. At the same time, the poet-members of the press were asked to nominate poems. These poems could be old or new, published or not, the poets living or dead—anything from anywhere that spoke to this moment in the voice of poetry. In this way, we gathered another three hundred poems, ranging from Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Bai Juyi to last Thursday's just-posted Poem-a-Day.
This anthology is a blend of poems from these two sources, each of its nine sections a kind of town-hall meeting where citizen-poets gather to raise their voices, now raucous, now muted, now lyric, now plain: voices responding with dissent and consoling with praise, perspective, vision, and hope.
Around 1950, Pablo Neruda wrote the poem, "América, I do not call your name without hope" to a Latin America in crisis. In this anthology, Dean Rader's poem, in the spirit of Neruda but in the time of Trump, speaks, under the same title, to our America: "this is for you and your fear, your tar; / for the white heat in your skin and / for your blue bones that one day may sing." The title of our book echoes this cry: America, listen to what your poets are saying. Are we the corrosive, racist, authoritarian regime that the 2016 election brought to power, or are we a democracy, that fragile, imperfect form of government that must be constantly guarded in the struggle for equality, justice and freedom? In resistance and resilience, and not without hope, America, we call your name.
Authors include William Blake, Lucille Clifton, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, Camille T. Dungy, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Emma Lazarus, Ada Limón, W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Kay Ryan, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Tomas Transtromer, Ocean Vuong, Walt Whitman, and Matthew Zapruder.
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.
"These poets have an urgent message to share with you. This message is brand new, and it is also eternal. Read carefully. What you learn here might just save your life." — Camille T. Dungy, from the foreword
"Poetry is one of the oldest forms of resistance. Entering not only our minds but our hearts, poems can swim under the highest walls erected by the powerful, subverting the most staggering onslaughts of distortion and outright lies, undermining threats, answering despair, rescuing the simplest and yet most profound ways that we know, reviving our courage, inviting action. Tyrants, despots, fascists of all kinds, beware this book. It may bring even you to your senses!" — Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones
"From Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare to Pablo Neruda, Po Chu-I, and Thursday's just posted 'Poem-a-Day,' the vast array of voices is inspiring. Many of these poems touch on themes of land, belonging, and truth, yet the spirit of resistance imbues every selection, no matter the era—although it is disheartening that we are still asking the same questions without finding any lasting answers. America, We Call Your Name reminds us that the conviction of resistance is timeless and inevitable." — Peyton Harvey, Zyzzyva
