Common Threads 2015

Common Threads is an annual publication and outreach program produced by Mass Poetry, with a goal to facilitate approximately 350 poetry discussion groups throughout the state of Massachusetts. Edited in 2015 by the poet Alice Kociemba, the anthology includes my poem The Salt Stronger, from The Looking House (Graywolf Press). A free, printable, and shareable PDF of Common Threads 2015 is available at www.masspoetry.org, along with an accompanying media package concerning the poems and poets in the anthology. The cover of the collection is graced with “Summer Light,” a painting by Denise Manseau.

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The overarching theme of this fifth edition of Common Threads is love--a reverence for life and a zest for living that is intensified at moments of birth and death, the cherishing of one’s birthplace and the longing for what has been left behind, a passion for  peace and respect for poetry itself as its witness, and finally the precious and precarious beauty of nature. Each of these eight poems reveals love’s common threads.

— Alice Kociemba, in her introduction “What Calls You to the “Things of this World”?

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The 2015 Threads:

1) “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Richard Wilbur
2) “The Birthing” by Deborah Digges
3) “For the Man Who Spun Plates” by John Hodgen
4) “Prospective Immigrants Please Note” by Adrienne Rich
5) “On Hearing My Name Pronounced Correctly, Unexpectedly, for Once” by Rhina P. Espaillat
6) “The Salt Stronger” by Fred Marchant
7) “Sea Grapes” by Derek Walcott
8) “The Osprey” by Mary Oliver