Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Anthology from Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance!
The poems, essays, and short stories in this anthology focus on the northeast United States and Atlantic Canada, unique for their shared borders and boundaries, the many bridges that cross them, the blood and heritage people share and the things that divide them. The land is disputed in places, in others a shared responsibility, and Native lands reside as sovereign nations within these borders.
A timely and timeless collection
Borderlines, figurative and literal, hum in the national and international consciousness with more volume right now. What unites and divides; what’s shared and not; the power and complexity of lines drawn arbitrarily on a map. In essays, poems, and short stories, the writers navigate what it means to be from a place, to have it run in your blood. Fredda Paul, a Passamaquoddy elder and healer from Maine, writes of rescuing and healing an eagle; Leonore Hildebrandt writes of tubers, which “understand fertility/ as a sequence of moves,” in her poem “Thinking Potatoes.” Distinctly of a place, this anthology achieves that rare straddle between timelessness and of-this-moment. —The Boston Globe
Editor: Valerie Lawson
Authors: Michael R. Brown, Dennis A. Camire, Wendy Cannella, Barbara A. Chatterton, Daniel Crowfeather McIsaac, Frances Drabick, J. C. Elkin, Kathleen Ellis, Jéanpaul Ferro, Stephanie S. Gough, Jason Grundstrom-Whitney, Grey Held, Leonore Hildebrandt, Andrea Suarez Hill, Carol R. Hobbs, Paul Hostovsky, Robert P. Hunter, Cynthia Huntington, Sonja Johanson, Susan A. Johnson, J. Kates, Charles A. Kniffen, Michele Leavitt, Carl Little, Joyce M. Lorenson, Donna M. Loring, Frederick Lowe, Sharon Mack, Dr. Charles E. McGowan, Mark Melnicove, Rowan P. Miller, Caroline Misner, Sarah X Murphy, Susan Nisenbaum Becker, Ellie O’Leary, Fredda Paul, John Perrault, Patrick Pierce, Bruce Pratt, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, Susan Reilly, Bunny Richards, John Rule, Cheryl A. Savageau, Catherine Schmitt, Lee Sharkey, Grace Sheridan, Karen Skolfield, Karin Spitfire, Elizabeth Sprague, Emma Suárez-Báez, David R. Surette, Jeri Theriault, Cindy Veach, Robert J. Ward, Danielle Woerner, Leslie Wood
ISBN: 978-0-9988195-1-8
Perfect Bound 6X9 Paperback
176 pages
Press Kit for 3 Nations Anthology
Order online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from the publisher here.
Where to get copies of 3 Nations Anthology in Maine here.
Booksellers: 3 Nations Anthology is available through Ingram.
Advance Praise:
From the opening pages of the 3 Nations Anthology, Elizabeth Sprague’s ‘This That This’ emphatically announces a book pulsing with the heartbeat of the land. Quickly it becomes evident that these authors are as taken by the land of their home as is environmentalist Winona LaDuke, who recently wrote, ‘This land did not let me go.’ In these works of poetry, fiction and essay, disparate voices gain cohesion in their celebration and memory of specific land features: bodies of water, storms, animals, and in their ability to connect them to identity, ancestry and culture. Consider the profound wound in a statement of Donna M. Loring’s, who writes of how people ‘see the Tribes as foreigners,’ or, similarly yet in a decidedly different piece, J.C. Elkin defiantly asserts: ‘I will not have my relocation become just another big fish story.’ Or the depth of connection with not only land but beast, when Fredda Paul says ‘I felt the spirit of the eagle entering my spirit.’ The words herein embody this land and call readers home to it; we are compelled to follow.
—Chris Benjamin, Managing Editor, Atlantic Books Today; Silver Atlantic Journalism Award winner, 2014.These are not poems of my world, but they are utterly vital missives from a world we all desperately need to know the world where water aches an impossible blue, land lies nurtured and unscarred, and a precipitous beauty startles from all corners. Reading the poems in this long-overdue collection is like pulling a deep, revivifying breath into the body. And we’re reminded that the world conjured so faithfully in this work is still there, where it’s always been, still waiting for us.
—Patricia Smith, author, Incendiary Art, Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award, Finalist, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and
Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice.In many ways, the 3 Nations Anthology is a breath of fresh air. The idea of bringing together Canadian, Native, and New England writers is, in itself, a refreshing change from the literary and cultural barriers that we all too often allow to come between us. The fact that this collection is so well-edited, blending new and more established, prose and poetry, is another reason for celebration. Each page is like turning a corner on one of those Maine seacoast roads and suddenly seeing an entirely new vista opening up in front of you.
There are too many fine writers and memorable poems, essays, and stories for me to list in this brief comment. So let me just quote these lines from a piece by Dan Crowfeather McIsaac that catch the spirit of this collection: “My brothers and sisters, the walls are everywhere and they are very high indeed. But they are not too high if we work together. Come—give me your hand….’
—Joseph Bruchac, winner of the Writer and Storyteller of the Year Awards from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and founder of the Greenfield Review Literary Center