This anthology features poems by over 100 poets from all over America, including the former Poet Laureate of the United States. This important book creates an alternative poetic response to the din of collective madness that has characterized our national dialogue since 9/11/2001. Many of the poets have projected themselves into the minds and bodies of the victims of 9/11, the firemen and policemen who were searching the wreckage of the buildings and even the hijackers. They express deep emotions and profound thoughts with the severe attention to detail that makes poems revelatory. Upon reading these poems written by so many diverse poets one sees a deepening of perception, of renewed seriousness about the human predicament and about the necessity to evolve into our full humanity. We hope the poems will help readers feel more deeply, and think about our future, and ultimately act to achieve a more peaceful and just world.

Poets included in the anthology:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima, Robert Creeley, Opal Palmer Adisa, Robert Pinsky, Michael McClure, devorah major, Nellie Wong, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer Neeli Cherkovski, Lyn Lifshin, Antler, John Sinclair, Allen Cohen, Clive Matson, Al Young, Steve Kowit, Gerald Nicosia, Q.R. Hand, Ira Cohen, Julia Vinograd, Jack Foley, Janine Pommy Vega, A.D. Winans, Shepherd Bliss, S.A. Griifin, Coleman Barks, Claire Burch, Gail Ford... and many more.

Allen’s poetic line is “so natural and real” (to use one of his phrases) that you feel he’s talking to you with a lilt in Golden Gate Park. And when you read his title poem, “The Radiant White Dove,” you feel you could at most be persuaded that God exists.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Look, one of the most meaningful voices of the Counter Culture also leaves behind him poems of beauty and soaring consciousness.
— Michael McClure

The poems in the Book of Hats were written while the author was working at the Shlock Shop on Grant Avenue in the North Beach district of San Francisco....Old Indian baskets, whales’ teeth, antique dentist tools, sock monkey dolls, political and labor buttons from the thirties, old beer cans, Eskimo knitting tools and hundreds of other old relics are clogged into the many glass cabinets and cases that line the walls and floor space. Hats are everywhere — stacked on shelves, swinging on dummies’ heads from the rafters and hanging on nails from the walls....These poems are transcriptions of his interactions with people who came into the dark shadows of the Shlock Shop and left some part of their being there. The poems reveal the humor and poignancy of the human person that we so often forget to notice in the techno-electro speed of contemporary life.

Allen Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. Moving to San Francisco in the early 60’s, he founded and edited the legendary San Francisco Oracle, the psychedelic, rainbow hued underground newspaper published in the Haight-Ashbury. He also helped originate rites of passage like the Human-Be-In. He is also the editor, with Clive Matson of the PEN award winning An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11.

Ann Cohen is an artist from L.A. who has lived in Walnut Creek the past 23 years. Her work is widely collected and has appeared in Beatitude magazine, Relix, and Split Shift.