In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month), we took part in the annual "Poem-a-Day" Challenge, writing during breaks at work, during lunch hours, on long subway rides, in parks in the rain or sun, in front of the 11pm news (or the 4am news), while avoiding conversations in the Laundromat, instead of doing our taxes (or because we'd just done our taxes), and so on. April soon became May became another summer and then fall and winter and finally on into another April. In 2011, we agreed to select roughly 25 poems each and put them into this book-length collection. Out of literally hundreds of poems, we have distilled this collection down to these few (many?) pages. The only rules: the poem must have been written between the two Aprils (2010 and 2011) and no editing allowed (except obvious typos). The idea is not so much to show that we are great poets (there are already enough people out there claiming that) but instead to simply show friends, family and fellow writers something we did over this past year. Themes in these poems are broad in range and yet, often repeat over the course of a month or months: Mexico, the ocean, rivers, loss, grief, love, sex, food, traffic, bridges, food, rain, injustice, food, sleep, nightmares, sex, food, Mexico, the ocean - you get the idea. Like lovers or meals or rivers, some poems are better than others. Some are only a few lines, some cover pages. What is important here is not that this is "great art" but instead that we set out to write a poem every day. And we did. We have. We still do. As we move into our second year of poem-a-day, certain themes repeat, new ones are introduced, but again, what is important is that we do this, every day (or nearly so) and we will keep doing this until we run out of things to say about Mexico, food, sex, the ocean, the world, loss, injustice, sex, chocolate, and so on. We hope you will enjoy our words as much as we have enjoyed writing them and sharing them with each other.
About the Author: Yvonne Garrett has been published in several music magazines, had stories in the Brooklyn Writers' Space "Reader" anthology, the Raleigh Quarterly, Thema, Bardsong, Compass Rose, and poetry in Roux, Spire, and the Baltimore Review among others. She's taught writing at Manhattanville College and currently leads a writing workshop at the Brooklyn Vet Center. She has an MFA in Fiction from the New School, an MA in Humanities & Social Thought from NYU, a B.A. in English from Smith College and is currently working toward a Dual Masters in Irish Studies/Library Science at NYU. Associate Fiction Editor for Black Lawrence Press, she is also a reader for Barrow Street Poetry Journal. Although originally from the Pacific Northwest, she's lived in the East Village for many years. Mary Ellen Sanger lived for 17 years in Mexico, and has published short stories and poems in Spanish and English in several Mexican journals and in online venues. Her essay "A Grammar of Place" was anthologized in Mexico, a Love Story. She is currently writing a collection of short stories inspired by the women of Ixcotel State Penitentiary in Oaxaca, Mexico where she spent thirty-three days and nights falsely imprisoned in the fall of 2003. She leads workshops for New York Writers Coalition (a Spanish-language workshop for Hispanic immigrants and their families at Mano a Mano, and one for people in the early stages of memory loss at Riverstone Senior Life Services in Washington Heights). She is involved in several prison-related projects, as a member of the fiction committee for the PEN Prison Writing Project, and as a long-time supporter and volunteer for the award-winning documentary "Presumed Guilty (Presunto Culpable)."