City Lights celebrates the release of a wonderful new collection of poems accompanied by photographs in honor of the building of the new east wing of the Bay Bridge.

Everything Indicates: Bay Bridge Poems & Portraits

published by Words Pictures Ideas

Poetry Readings with images. Appearing shall be editors Tamsin Smith, Elissa G. Perry, and Ben Davis. Readers to be announced.

A statement from the editors:

A poem – like a bridge – connects us. These strange and beautiful testaments to human imagination, will, and shared purpose, exist as soaring reminders that we are not alone. Too often, however, we forget to look and listen. In the course of our busy hours, we travel through frustration and drudgery, stopping to look neither within nor beyond ourselves. This collection is an invitation to connect.

On a bright April day in 2011, local poets took an all-access tour of the new Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge. As we marveled at the collective feat of engineering prowess, creativity, and sheer human strength, verses sprung forth. These inspired poems are as diverse as the individuals and communities that this bridge links together.

We hope that they move you.
We hope that you share and return to them. We hope that you look at the innumerable bridges all around you – literal, metaphorical, and mortal – with a keener, more tender eye. And listen.

There could be no more perfect accompaniment to the music of the verses than the imagery of Thomas Michael Alleman. His photographs distill and communicate a mysterious beauty that's sometimes too much for the eyes to take in all on their own. With his lens, he makes visible the echo of our deepest senses. To this poet of pictures, we are most grateful.

Tamsin Smith
is a social entrepreneur and poetry evangelist. She is the president of a global consultancy SlipStreamStrategy.com and founder of OBene.com. As founding president, she helped Bono and Bobby Shriver create and build (RED), which has generated over $175 million to fight AIDS in Africa. She hosts a weekly poetry circle at an assisted living community in Santa Rosa, and blogs frequently on poetry, literature, philanthropy, and life at www.huffingtonpost.com/tamsin-smith. Tamsin helped organize the Poets’ Bridge Tour and co-edited this collection.

Elissa G. Perry
writer, artist, educator, agitator and geek— is of African and Choctaw descent. She has published several short stories, interviews, and other writings in numerous anthologys, journals, and magazines including Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds, I Do/I Don’t, Black Silk and others. She has been a finalist in Poets & Writers’ "California Voices" competition, a Voices Fellow at the Voices of Our Nations Foundation at the University of San Francisco, and is currently the recipient of an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for her project Mission Drift. Elissa helped organize the Poets’ Bridge Tour and co-edited this collection.

Ben Davis
is a champion of activating the arts and creative community for the advancement of the civic good. In addition to helping bring this poetry book to life, he is spearheading The Bay Lights-a monumental fine-arts installation of 25,000 LEDs along the West Span of the Bay Bridge.