The Swing at the Edge of the World - Paperback

by Lea Graham (Author)

Is travel within or outside of us?

-"Why Don't We All Stay Home"In this chapbook of travel poems, the heft and range of perspective is explored. What do we see and experience when in unfamiliar places? How are those sights and experiences determined by the familiar or the angle of the self? How does our knowledge or lack thereof determine how we piece together a place? How does travel then change our familiar places? If we spend time in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, France, does that change our vision of Paris, Arkansas? Paris, Texas? Like the photo of Lantau Peak by the photographer, Yoav Horesh, in which his subject is shooting photos from the second highest place in Hong Kong, perspective shapes the view.In some of these poems like "When You're in Romania and Wish You Were Alone," a single person (the "rock and roll loser") undermines the speaker-traveler's hopes for a peaceful, thoughtful experience. In others, like "It's As If the Whole World Has Forgotten Us, " the Guatemalan woman who speaks the title's line, opens up a whole world for our narrator-a world of both near-total isolation on the border of Mexico/Guatemala and one of gratitude. In this book, the ethics and limitations of travel are implicitly questioned-and how places leave us craving, leave us dreaming.