Book Description

No matter how you were touched by the events of September 11, 2001, that moment continues to resonate. Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath illuminates not only what happened that day, but what continues to challenge us twenty years later: Islamophobia, the vilification of refugees and asylum-seekers, nationalism, supercharged military budgets, and rises in virulent racism and domestic terrorism. Edited by former North Carolina poet laureate Joseph Bathanti and 9/11 family member and former literature and theater director for the North Carolina Arts Council David Potorti, Crossing the Rift takes head-on what Carolyn Forche calls “the poetry of witness” and its advocacy “for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance.”

Review excerpt by Maureen Doallas, Writing Without Paper
Twenty years after the most deadly terrorist attack on United States soil, what comes to mind?

For many of the 116 poets whose work was selected for the forthcoming commemorative anthology Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath (Press 53, September 11, 2021), what comes to mind is "the morning / rainfreshed" (Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, "Tony Writes to Say He's Alive"), "[t]hat September morning's iris of sky" (Debra Allbery, "The Wakeful Bird Sings Darkling"), cloudless and blued into brilliance before exploding into unforgettable images of fire and toxic smoke, of bodies falling and returned to dust. For others in this anniversary collection, memory remains "one of those days when you remember / exactly where you were," when "we lost the last of our innocence" (Kaye Nelson Ratliff, "Infamous Days") and were forever after to carry "the long litany of the lost" (Glenis Redmond, "Witness the Whole World") into a "new age of wars, two wars abroad that never end, and one at home to rip the fabric of our nation apart" (Robert Morgan, "A Sickness in the Air"). Read the entire review