Part memoir, part multimedia experiment, part catharsis
, Amalie ("ah-MAHL-ee-ah") Flynn explores
how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 both shatter and echo in us
-both as individuals and as a culture.
Flynn is author of the 2013's
Wife and War: A Memoir
, and is also the poetry editor of the monthly literary journal
The Wrath-Bearing Tree
.
Her poetry collection
September Eleventh
grew first from a 2011 series of blog posts at septembereleventh.wordpress.com. In 2021, she recrafted the work as a random-access constellation of 130 social-media posts and on-line videos. Collected and presented now in print,
the poems can either be read sequentially, or accessed by flipping among pages.
"Leave it to a poet to unlock something fresh and new in the space of 'remember that day' stories," writes the publisher. "
Here is a narrative that both invites participants to recall their own experiences
of a trauma in our nation's shared history,
while also recreating the immediacies and uncertainties
of what it was like to live through it."
In the print edition, each micro-poem is presented along with a shortened URL link to a corresponding YouTube video. In the Kindle e-book edition, each URL is a "live" hyperlink to that poem's video. Both editions also feature a scannable QR code to direct readers to the entire set of 130 videos.