Category Archives: Publication

Corona/Crown

Cross-disciplinary chapbook created in collaboration with photographer Robert Revere. The book addresses the act of looking, and the experience of going to museums. It is also about the COVID pandemic, and a time when museums and cultural spaces were closed.

Reviews, Interviews

Listed in the Washington Blade‘s December 2023 “Favorite Books for Holiday Gifts”: “…a fab present for lovers of photography, museums, and poetry. Revere and Roberts were deeply affected by the closure of museums during the COVID pandemic. In this lovely chapbook, they create a new ‘museum’ of their own.”

Listed as one of 9 recommended books on Bay Area Reporters‘s “National Poetry Month LGBTQ Reading List” for 2024: “Queer poet and historian Kim Roberts joins the collaboration club with her new cross-disciplinary chapbook Corona/Crown (Word Tech Editions, 2023). Roberts’ project is particularly distinguished in that her collaborator is fine art photographer and foreign service officer Robert Revere. Co-created in response to the impact that the pandemic had on them individually regarding the sensation of being cut off from the cultural enrichment of visiting museums and other such venues. The pairing of Roberts’ poems and Revere’s photos creates a kind of gallery of the page.”

Advance Praise

“The writing and images in this many-layered book make me see my world in new ways. They bring together the most personal and the abstract, interacting and making me more and more curious as I turn each page, excited to discover what will come next. What new relationship will unfold between word and image, between self and other, between what is seen and what is perceived? This treasure of a book speaks on many levels about why and how art matters, what beauty is, and where we find it. Each time I reread it, I find something new. This is a book to be savored.”
—Vaughn Sills, photographer of Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens, and One Family

“‘The lines, the sweet curves. The way light hits the surface of a face’ observes the speaker, referencing her long-standing love affair with the art of sculpture (—all the while playing the instrument of assonant rhyme). But as this gorgeous marriage of text (prose poem) and image (photographs) is revealed, one senses that something else is in play. Yes, these pieces ‘tremble, they vibrate—’ But why? Because although the backdrop of this dual artistic journey is a global pandemic, one can’t (I couldn’t) escape that what is unfolding before our eyes and ears is a portrait of an artist (falling) in love: ‘[T]he way, when you smile, you always lift your chin, as if pleasure starts at the neck and travels upward to the mouth. Upward to your eyes.’ But what also felt true is that these photographic images were very deliberately placed, often offering this viewer an example of the visual experience depicted in the preceding text. As if, in the face of our mortalities, art and the possibility of love is what kept us going: ‘This is how we map our loss. All those beautiful curves.’”
—Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén and Glow of Our Sweat

Quire

Poetry Tract Number 3, 2022. A hand-letter-press fan fold with five love poems.

By Broad Potomac’s Shore

Selected by the DC Public Libraries for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program, sponsored by the East Coast Centers for the Book.

 

A comprehensive anthology of poems by both well-known and overlooked poets working and living in the Washington, DC from the city’s founding in 1800 to 1930. Roberts expertly presents the work of 132 poets, including poems by such celebrated writers as Francis Scott Key, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Ambrose Bierce, James Weldon Johnson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as the work of lesser-known poets—especially women, writers of color, and working-class writers. A significant number of the poems are by writers who were born enslaved, such as Fanny Jackson Coppin, T. Thomas Fortune, and John John Sella Martin.

The book is arranged thematically, representing the poetic work happening in our nation’s capital from its founding through the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, and the beginnings of literary modernism. The city has always been home to prominent poets—including presidents and congressmen, lawyers and Supreme Court judges, foreign diplomats, US poets laureate, professors, and inventors—as well as writers from across the country who came to Washington as correspondents. A broad range of voices is represented in this incomparable volume.

Reviews

“This is a marvelously rich and satisfying project—a comprehensive treasure trove of poems by poets living in Washington, DC, during its first one hundred years as the nation’s capital. Roberts has resoundingly achieved her goal in this collection, which includes sample poems by well over one hundred poets. An impressive job of research and a valuable contribution to our understanding of Washington’s literary history.”

—Christopher Sten, Literary Capital: A Washington Reader

“Kim Roberts, once again, shows her skills as Washington D.C.’s literary historian. Impeccable research and a heart for the past make Roberts’s work shine bright, bringing voices to the page from the shadows. It’s our great good luck to make the acquaintance of these distinguished poetry ancestors from the early days of our Capital.”

—Grace Cavalieri, The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress

“Kim Roberts’s By Broad Potomac’s Shore confirms why she is called Washington’s literary historian. Informative, heartbreaking, and filled with delights, Roberts’s preface alone is worth reading for its concise and fascinating history of DC, the first place slavery officially ended, nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Roberts’s anthology covers authors born in the 1750s to those born before 1900. She includes formerly enslaved persons, abolitionists, Confederates, at least one suspected Ku Klux Klan member, suffragists, African Americans, one President, public office holders, military leaders, and Native Americans, as well as some well-known poets: Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Elinor Wylie, Archibald MacLeish, and Jean Toomer.”

—Katherine Gekker, Delmarva Review, Volume 14, 2021

“Last fall, editor Kim Roberts published an illuminating anthology called By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital. Some of the poets are familiar—Francis Scott Key, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass—but many were new to me. Each is presented with a helpful, brief biography. As befits our complicated history, the poems present a remarkable range of themes about America, from grand to intimate, from wildly celebratory to scathingly critical.”

—Ron Charles, The Washington Post, July 2, 2021

“Kim Roberts wants to talk back to the canon. That’s the point of putting together an anthology of historical poems, she says. As a local literary historian and a poet herself, she’s been thinking about the city’s literary culture since she first moved here three decades ago…The book is a very broad survey of what was being published and what was being read—you’ve got presidents and first ladies next to these writers whose names are now obscured.”

—Emma Sarappo, Washington City Paper, Sept. 24, 2020

“By Broad Potomac’s Shore is an anthology of 132 poets who were active in Washington, DC from the city’s founding to about 1930, with a focus on women and minority poets, as well as writers’ work that may have been lost to time.”

—Holly Gambrell, “Local Author Love,” Northern Virginia Magazine, November 1, 2020

“As compared to New York, San Francisco or Chicago, Washington DC might not be among the first places the average person thinks of when it comes to poetry. But thanks to queer poet/historian/educator Kim Roberts that is changing. Beginning with her groundbreaking 2018 book A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston, Roberts wisely turned our attention to the city’s rich literary history. For her new book, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poets from the Early Days of the Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), she narrows her expansive focus from all writers to just poets (132 of them), including a substantial portion of whom were queer. The result is an indispensable collection honoring and celebrating a too often overlooked literary hub, one that is finally getting its chance to shine like a beacon.”

—Gregg Shapiro, Baltimore OUTloud, November 1, 2020

“Poetry and its history in Washington, DC are bringing attention to the hard truth that the Nation’s Capital is nothing more than a territory with no voting rights, that Black lives matter, and that women’s voices have always been consequential though not necessarily heard…While selections made by editor Kim Roberts reveal the hardships of a city used as the major trading point for slavery in the United States as well as a refuge to those emancipated, and…still now, under the choking control of Congress, Roberts’ intention is to define what it meant at that time to be an American.”

—Karren LaLonde Alenier, Scene4 Magazine, December 1, 2020

“The restorative power of verse often helps us express the inexpressible. You need only look into Kim Roberts’s new anthology, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital, to find precedence. From slavery, race riots, and suffrage, to the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, local poets have brought lyricism, passion, and clarity to the topics of the day.”

—Karen Lyon, The Hill Rag newspaper, December 2020

A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation’s most acclaimed writers. From the city’s founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation’s capital.

In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city’s rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington’s literary community. Starting with the city’s earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and “Star-Spangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book’s stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways.

Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation’s capital through a literary lens.

 

Reviews

“It is easy to feel like a second-class citizen in Washington, D.C. when it comes to our literary heritage. Washington is not commonly associated with a national recognized literary movement such as Transcendentalists in Boston or Beat Poets in Greenwich Village and San Francisco…But what D.C.’s literary tradition has existed all along, patiently awaiting a champion to identify who and what has been hiding in plain sight? Enter literary historian, writer, and editor Kim Roberts, whose A Literary Guide to Washington, DC shines a light on the work of American writers who lived and wrote in the nation’s capital between 1800 and 1930. Roberts’s book proves beyond a doubt that Washington has a proud literary legacy to celebrate and cherish.”
—Carolyn Crouch, Washington History, Vol. 31, Nos. 1 & 2, Fall 2019

“Roberts has expert knowledge of the former residences of literary figures in D.C., like the Douglas Johnson house. Upon her arrival to the city, she immediately started researching the topic, primarily focusing on the homes of Walt Whitman, one of her favorite authors. She and fellow poet and friend Dan Vera developed a hobby of going to the former addresses of writers to see if the buildings were still standing. ‘You could say I’ve been writing this book for a really long time,’ Roberts says of A Literary Guide to Washington DC, ‘but I didn’t know that it was a book.’”
—Ella Feldman, Washington City Paper, October 24, 2019

“District resident Kim Roberts, a poet and literary historian, has compiled this unique guide that can expand your mind as you exercise your body. Follow four walking tours to the residences and places of interest in the lives and times of D.C.’s greatest writers, their spouses and social acquaintances.”
—Dinah Rokach, The Beacon Newspapers, October 8, 2019

“It’s not often that a literary history comes alive by inviting the reader to walk around and experience where prominent writers wrote…A pleasing layout makes the book easy to read, especially if the reader is on the street trying to understand why the destination has been singled out for literary tribute…Lots of historic nuggets to mine in Kim Roberts’s A Literary Guide to Washington, DC.”
—Karren LaLonde Alenier, Scene4 Magazine, Volume 19, Issue 6, November 2018

“Writer and literary historian Kim Roberts had been working on her most recent book, A Literary Guide to Washington, D.C., for years before she even knew she was writing a book. When Roberts moved to the nation’s capital 30 years ago, she began researching writers who had lived in the city in years prior. Roberts was disappointed at how few of these places talked about the writers who inhabited them, and began to map the lives of famous wordsmiths like Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes in their forays about the District. ‘I’ve always been really attracted to a sense of place,’ Roberts explained in a recent interview, saying that documenting the places these writers lived and worked ‘made the city come alive in a new way.’ Her research cumulated in this pocket-sized guidebook to the city, a collection of spotlights on historic places related to D.C.’s cultural scene, accompanied by short biographies of writers connected to Washington and four walking tours readers can follow. The book represents an impressive cross-section of writers from a variety of historical periods, ethnicities, and backgrounds.”
—Rebecca Gale, “Mr. Whitman Goes to Washington,” Preservation Magazine, August 8, 2018, National Trust for Historic Preservation

“Four walking tours take you where famous authors lived, worked, and partied. Learn about Walt Whitman’s experience tending injured Civil War soldiers or stop by the house where Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other luminaries met for salons.”
—Washingtonian Magazine, August 2018 Issue

“The author, Kim Roberts, is a literary historian, which shows in the broad array of authors she mentions in this handy and engaging book full of photos and quotations. Walt Whitman and Henry Adams are here, of course, but also old writers who may be new to many readers, starting with the poet Joel Barlow (1754-1812). Roberts’s walking directions are easy to follow, but her tales of writers in the capital are so engaging that readers may feel they don’t even need to leave the house.”
—Ron Charles, Book Reviewer for The Washington Post, July 13, 2018

“Kim Roberts wrote the book on D.C. authors. She had to, because she felt the district hasn’t gotten its due as a literary city. ‘D.C. has never really had that identity, despite the fact that we’ve had so many important writers live here,’ says Roberts…’When I moved here 30 years ago, I wanted to know who they were and where they lived. It gave me a deeper sense of ownership of place.’ So she started offering walking tours that include stops like ‘Newspaper Row’ on 14th Street, and eventually decided to turn her extensive knowledge into a cultural tour of a book.”
—Washington Post Express, June 28, 2018

“Kim Roberts’ latest leads readers through the literary—and literal—landscape of the nation’s capital and reveals the city’s rich history in letters…Roberts’ literary guide is definitely one to pick up for those interested in Washington history, American literature between 1800 and 1930, African-American literature or even generally in the interplay between artists, their landscapes and their moments in history.”
—The DC Line, June 27, 2018

“As Kim Roberts writes in her eloquent introduction to A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, writers here have often chafed against the perception that ‘government is DC’s only business.’ Her well-reseached book should put paid to that notion…A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is an invaluable resource.”
—The Hill Rag, June 2018

“The perfect accompaniment for a literature-inspired vacation in the U.S. capital. The compact size, clearly labeled maps, and succinct, informative text make this a handy guide to slip into your suitcase.”
—Library Journal, May 2018

 

 

The Scientific Method

In The Scientific Method, Kim combines poems about Thomas Alva Edison and Carl Sagan, the strange mating habits of invertebrates and fish, and rondeaux about the United States presidents. She investigates the fascinating and tangled history of science, then applies that same precision to examine what it means to be Jewish and a resident of the American capital, Washington, D.C.

 

Reviews, Interviews, and Reprints from the Book

A review in Poet Lore by Anne Harding Woodworth (Fall/Winter 2018) states: “Roberts’s alertness to poetic forms and a keen sense of the absurd abound in this collection.” She praises the poems that uncover “science in all its different guides, personalities, theories, histories, triumphs, and errors.”

In an hour-long podcast for Writer’s Bone, Kim talks with Daniel Ford, Sean Tuohy, and Melanie Padgett Powers about The Scientific Method, her writing process, and how living in Washington, DC has influenced her poetry and her research. In light of the current presidential administration, she states, “Culture is more important than ever.” Published Oct. 9, 2017.

Kim was interviewed by Josephine Reed for ArtWorks, the podcast series of the National Endowment for the Arts, in May. She read poems and discussed her latest book, her background, and what inspires her poetry.

An excerpt of the title poem, “The Scientific Method: Chemistry Laboratory,” is featured in the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas project. Science Stanzas, curated by Jane Hirshfield, is a series of poems printed onto seven-foot banners, exhibited at the National March for Science in Washington, DC in May 2017. The poems are now traveling the US.

A review in Innisfree Poetry Journal by Mary-Sherman Willis (issue 25, Fall 2017) states: “Kim Roberts’s poems…are like canny experiments in lived life—hers, and those of the men and women who worked to study and codify the world around us. Think of the experimental lab report in science class, its empirical precision, its grounding in observation and measurement, its technical vocabulary, and you get a sense of this book. Add to that a series of ‘Eureka!’ moments of discovery and understanding. You will feel like you’re in the company of a smart museum docent who speaks in verse and has a sense of humor.”

A poem from the book, “Six,” was featured in Takoma Park, MD’s Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day in April 2017, and reprinted in Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics in Spetmber 2017. Another poem from the book, “Quebec Place NW, Park View neighborhood,” was featured in the Park View blog in April 2017 for National Poetry Month.

From a review in The Journal of Martinsburg, WV by Sonja James, March 2, 2017: “Kim Roberts’s The Scientific Method is a fascinating series of poems by one of D.C.’s finest poets. Roberts connects intellectual energy with historical insight in poems that reverberate with significance. Beautiful, bold, and passionate, these poems capture and celebrate the enduring nature of the human spirit. Roberts is magnificent.”

Read an interview with Kim by Grace Cavalieri (Washington Independent Review of Books, February 14, 2017) in which “the poet explains her endless fascination with science.”

Three poems from the book were reprinted in Origins Journal in February 2017.

 

Advance Praise

“Kim Roberts’s poetry uses a passionate microscope: it brings us into sudden intimate contact with the strange neighborhoods of the body, the mind, and of the living stone of the city.  The Scientific Method ranges from the body’s ‘dark grottoes’ of ‘small words / long forgotten’ in the hammer and anvil of the ear, to the moon of 1836, where ‘a race of flying men,’ were seen praying in ‘sapphire temples.’  With Elizabeth Bishop’s eye for vivid detail, Roberts shares the names for aluminum conductors, ‘lupine, valerian, narcissus,’ and the curious mineral threads of radiola: ‘spiked crowns, chandeliers and lobed planets.’  A book of wondrous discoveries, and luminous portraits.” —David Gewanter

 

“Kim Roberts is preeminent as a writer of ‘science poetry.’ The Scientific Method looks at icebergs, oysters, astronomy, chemistry, labs, T-cells—language immersed in the many fascinations of life on earth. There’s a fire inside this poetry where intrigue led to imagination, commanding the page with startling lines, esthetics, and tonal geography.   We have here a hallmark: intelligence and passion turning practical facts into poetic truths. This is a master work by a master poet.” —Grace Cavalieri

 

“With linguistic and formal diligence as well as wonder and curiosity, Kim Roberts has written a smooth-reading collection of poems that respects a reader’s intelligence without denying that we come to poems for more than scientific or historical data. This is a book that loves its terminology—Latin or otherwise. It also loves its humble questions—‘Is the chimney a chute of air […] Or is the chimney the bricks,//the mason’s careful art?’ And such questioning can be applied to poetry. What is the poem—the veracity of its elements or the alchemy? The Scientific Method’s answer is ‘both.’” —Kyle G. Dargan

Sample Poems

CASEUS

“How can anyone be expected to govern a country with 325 cheeses?”
—Charles de Gaulle

Caesar ate his first blue cheese
Just west of Rocquefort,
in the town of Saint-Affrique.
In Latin it was caseus,
which became cacio in Italian,
queso in Spanish, queijo
in Portuguese. Cheese.
The Roman farmer Columella
described how to get rennet
from the fourth stomach
of a lamb, how to add it
to fresh milk, how long to wait
for the milk to curdle,
how to press the whey out,
how to salt the curds until dry.
In The Odyssey, the Cyclops
drained his curds in wicker baskets
lining the walls of his cave.
The baskets gave the cheese
its form—in Greek formos—
in Italian formaggio, in French
fromage. Virgil ate fresh cheese
with chestnuts. The techniques
of ripening and airing, affinage,
are secrets passed down
thousands of years. Right now,
in some cave in France,
a farmer is carefully turning
each wheel, salting one side,
watching the mold emerge.

 

THE INTERNATIONAL FRUIT OF WELCOME

A pineapple is the perfect gift
to bring to a blind date.
A pineapple is like a blind date:
spiky and armored at first,
with the hope of sweetness inside.
A pineapple is the perfect housewarming gift.
You don’t have to wrap it,
it doesn’t spill inside your car.
It comes in its own house.
A pineapple is the perfect birthday gift.
You might prefer a coconut,
that planet molten at the core,
but the pineapple has a better hairdo,
better wardrobe; it never
goes out of style.
Think of all those historic houses
with pineapple bolsters, pineapple finials,
pineapples carved above lintels.
Such a sophisticated fruit:
every sailor wants one.

The Wishbone Galaxy

“…one of the best first books in my lifetime…Moving, passionate, insightful, these wonderful evocations of Eros should be appreciated by anyone interested—and who isn’t—in ‘the pressure of one body against another.'” —Bill Knott

“The passionate, sardonic voice in these poems is that of a woman who boldly roams the universe and offers us meditations on love, sex, and the gritty mysteries of being female.” —Minnie Bruce Pratt

Out of Print
Limited copies available; query the author for more information

Book Reviews

from Publisher’s Weekly:

“This promising first book offers an eccentric commentary on love, sex and family. Roberts has a dexterous poetic voice, one that either tells a story or, better yet, disappears behind the story, allowing you to enter it. Roberts also has a keen ability to spot the perfect metaphor…Roberts lets her cadenced poetic voice carry the poem, allowing it to find its own language and story line. These poems comprise the lucky side of the wishbone.”

from Letter Ex: Chicago’s Poetry Newsmagazine by Gregg Shapiro:

“This uncommonly original and spirited book of poems is as bountiful as the universe itself. It is divided into three diverse sections, each of which bristles with a kind of glorious energy…There is a delightfully subversive list quality to the poems ‘Imagine This’ and ‘Darwin in Reverse,’ like layers being delicately but deliberately peeled away. The mother in ‘Mother’ is a female horseshoe crab and a sharp metaphor at that. While the daughter in ‘Daughter’ comes face to face with the real father who failed her and the dream father she created on the page…All in all, this book is an astronomical debut. Next time you look up at the stars, the one shining brightest might be a poet named Kim Roberts.”

Sample Poem

HOW TO IMAGINE DEAFNESS

Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,

but keep it secret.  The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water’s surface,
in their repose.  The small hairs

will lie down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repetition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)

and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.

Lee Highway: Beyond Pavement

Collaborative limited edition artists’ book of eight printmakers and four poets from Arlington, VA.  Kim Roberts edited the poetry portion. The poems were handset in Bodoni Bold and printed letterpress by Mike Kaylor at the Press at Gunston Day School, Centreville, MD. The binding was created by Portfoliobox, Inc., Providence, RI.

Out of Print

Contributors

Poets: John Elsberg, Carol Heller Nation, M.A. Schaffner, and Hilary Tham.

Visual Artists: Margaret Arthur, Lucy Blankstein, Diane Bruce, Gwen Impson, Gwen Partin, Jane Phelan, Claudia Vess, Carolyn Witschonke.
All the artists printed their images at Lee Access Print Studio on Lee Highway.

Afterword by Kim Roberts

When Lee Highway was officially dedicated as a transcontinental route in 1923, the automobile was no longer a rare sight. Paved roads, however, were still the exception rather than the rule, and cars could only travel dirt roads in dry weather without fear of getting mired. Lee Highway was the first all-weather route across the nation, a model for the “modern improved highway.”

As Dr. S. M. Johnson, General Director of the Lee Highway Association boasted: “We have taken a stand for a paved United States…The use of the automobile is universal, therefore pavement must be universal. Until this is accomplished we will not be living in the spirit of the age in which our lives are cast.”

A zero milestone dedication ceremony, presided over by President Warren Harding, took place on June 4, 1923. The zero milestone, located in the Ellipse behind the White House, was compared to the golden milestone in the Forum of Rome, as a point from which modern highways would radiate and “over which will surge the tides of an ever-advancing civilization.” The occasion drew together more automobiles than had ever before assembled in the capitol city, including 100 cars filled with Shriners, who circled the crowd twice in a caravan, blaring horns in exultation.

Lee Highway was named, of course, for Robert E. Lee, Confederate General in the Civil War. It is perhaps the first time in history a losing general has been so honored by his victors, and yet Woodrow Wilson thought the tribute appropriate, writing: “It is one of the happy circumstances of our national life that the bitterness of the Civil War has disappeared and that General Lee is now recognized as a man worthy of the admiration of the whole nation.” In this spirit of reconciliation, Lee Highway was envisiond as a road that would transcend “section strife, binding North, South, East and West in the bond of an indissoluble Union.”

Lee Highway is now called by that name in only two states (Virginia and Alabama), but the route still exists, following US 11 in Tennessee, US 72 in Alabama and Mississippi, US 70 through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and US 80 in Arizona and California, where it ends in San Diego at the Pacific Milestone, with a spur to San Francisco.

In Arlington County, Virginia, it is a major thoroughfare for local traffic, and the site of the County’s first fire department (1904) and first permanent fire station (1919). Arlington County was named after Lee’s Mansion (now part of Arlington National Cemetery), and Arlington Memorial Bridge was built as a symbolic connector of the North and South in 1935. Lee Highway is also the location of the Lee Arts Center, where the Access Printmakers are housed. This book documents the relationship of the artists and poets to the communities and businesses along Lee Highway, and pays tribute to the history and people intimate with this notable road.

Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word Poetry in DC

An illustrated timeline of major people and events from 1991 to 2010. Limited edition non-fiction chapbook.

Commissioned by the Humanities Council of Washington, DC and released in conjunction with their 30th anniversary. Co-sponsored with Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Word Works, Inc.

Out of Print
Limited copies available; query the author for more information

From the Introduction

“Spoken word is a literary art designed for performance and Washington, DC is one of several cities at the forefront of the development of the form. DC is notable for its national contributions in several areas: we were a model for the development of youth poetry slams, for organizations that nurtured women performers in particular, and for the range and number of reading series that have taken place here…Lip Smack begins with the early 1990s, when the term ‘spoken word’ came into regular use. (Prior to that, the phrase was most often used to describe a category at the Grammy Awards for any text recording, which could include poetry, comedy or storytelling.) Several of the same performers who identified as ‘performance poets’ in the 1970s and 19802 began calling themselves ‘spoken word artists’ in the 1990s. No art movement begins in a vacuum, and spoken word is no different. In fact, the greatest strength of the form is its amazing flexibility, its ability to incorporate many influences and cultures.”

Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC

Captures DC’s unique sense of place, from monuments to parks, from lawyers to bus stations, from go-go music to chili half-smokes. 101 poems, written between 1950 and the present, by past and current residents of the city.  The Washington Post says it “teems with poets who’ve distilled the region’s lifeblood into verse over the past 50 years.”

Contributors

Karren L. Alenier, Elizabeth Alexander, Kwame Alexander, Abdul Ali, Francisco Aragón, Naomi Ayala, Jonetta Rose Barras, Holly Bass, Paulette Beete, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Derrick Weston Brown, Sterling A. Brown, Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri, William Claire, Carleasa Coates, Jane Alberdeston Coralín, Ed Cox, Teri Ellen Cross, Ramola D, Kyle Dargan, Ann Darr, Tina Darragh, Christina Daub, Hayes Davis, Thulani Davis, Donna Denizé, Joel Dias-Porter, Tim Dlugos, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Roland Flint, Sunil Freeman, Deirdre Gantt, David Gewanter, Brian Gilmore, Robert L. Giron, Barbara Goldberg, Patricia Gray, Michael Gushue, Daniel Gutstein, O.B. Hardison, Jr., Essex Hemphill, Randall Horton, Natalie E. Illlum, Esther Iverem, Gray Jacobik, Brandon D. Johnson, Percy E. Johnston, Jr., Fred Joiner, Beth Joselow, Alan King, Michael Lally, Mary Ann Larkin, Merrill Leffler, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Saundra Rose Maley, David McAleavey, Richard McCann, Eugene J. McCarthy, Judith McCombs, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, May Miller, Samuel Miranda, Miles David Moore, Yvette Neisser Moreno, Kathi Morrison-Taylor, Gaston Neal, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Jose Padua, Michelle Parkerson, Betty Parry, Linda Pastan, Richard Peabody, Adam Pellegrini, Elizabeth Poliner, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Liam Rector, Joan Retallack, Katy Richey, Joseph Ross, Ken Rumble, Robert Sargent, Gregg Shapiro, Myra Sklarew, Rod Smith, Alan Spears, Sharan Strange, A.B. Spellman, Hilary Tham, Maureen Thorson, Venus Thrash, Dan Vera, Rebecca Villarreal, Belle Waring, Joshua Weiner, Reed Whittemore, Terence Winch, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II.

Book Reviews

From Harriet, the blog of The Poetry Foundation, by Annie Finch:

“Fresh and memorable poems from a true range of voices. An additional unique charm is that each author bio ends with a sentence giving concrete information about DC evoked by that poet’s poem…All around, this is a fun and unique anthology and a great introduction to the very cool world of DC poetry.”

From Smartish Pace, by Wynn Yarbrough:

“One of the strengths of this collection is that local geography and life is always touched by national life and events, whether that be Bush’s second inauguration in ‘Second Inauguration’ or the legacy of slavery and Lincoln’s maid in ‘Elizabeth Keckley: 30 Years a Slave and 4 Years in the White House.’ Since so much history has taken place in D.C. and continues into the present moment, this collection engenders much of its richness from the intersections that are available to a poet writing for and in this city, even if it is because of nationwide outlets like the Kennedy Center, as in ‘billy eckstine comes to washington, d.c.’ where national fame intersects with local preoccupation.”

The Kimnama

The Kimnama is a masala of history, culture, and personal transformation.  Scene4 Magazine calls it “…a Whitmanesque long poem…[that] makes the reader viscerally smell, hear, touch and see the streets, mosques, gods, vehicles, shopping malls and slums of New Delhi…”

Book Reviews

From The Montserrat Review by Ethan Fischer:

“Lapidary verses vary with brisk evocation of streets, shops, and voices. Roberts devotes her lean book to vast India not only from her vantage point as traveler but from the eyes, ears, and tongues of Indians; their timeless spirit shines despite imperial edicts or raids by sacred cows…Passages echo and resonate as lines twine around streets or recline on roofs or ride camels or eat spicy meals or greet children or trace a god’s smile.”

From The Alsop Review by Cheryl Snell:

“The language throughout is elegant and precise, and the short swinging lines reinforce the idea of passage, for me. Musical repetitions, the use of opposites, and the theme of connection, recall Whitman–especially ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ or ‘Prayer to Columbus.'”

 

Book Excerpt

A fruit market on spindly wooden stand
is built by the side of the road.
Next to the melons,

a barber lifts his knife,
his client’s face
full of white lather.

A clump of laughing women
in a rainbow of saris
crosses the street.

Japanese Maruti vans honk
past ancient Ambassador cabs
built like tanks.

A man clad in a bright pink turban
and an orange scarf
around his neck smiles without teeth.

The market vendor deposits
red onion skins in the gutter
and three cows gather,

push their noses deep in rich reddish-purple,
stopping traffic,
as if they knew they were gods.