Breathing Out is a poetry anthology featuring twenty-one poets from Loosely Identified, the St. Louis Women’s Poetry Workshop. Breathing Out gives new visibility to the work of St. Louis women poets. The project has utilized various talents of the workshop including all editing, production layout, artwork, and distribution.
The publishing project originated to present Loosely Identified’s creative work to the reading public, raise women’s visibility in the arts community, and acknowledge members’ support and work in the St. Louis region’s artistic and activist community. Over sixty organizations are included in the preface to the book, credited by the poets for their own development as artists.
Loosely Identified traces its history in St. Louis back over thirty years, with sixty-five writers participating over time. Many poets from the Workshop’s early phase remain active participants today. Two of these, Nanora Sweet and Rebecca Ellis, served as managing editors for Breathing Out.
What are critics saying about Breathing Out?
"Breathing Out is well-worth reading—fertile, glimmering, and exploding
with seeds, leaves, claws and fur."
- Donna Biffar
"The whole collection has a fine breadth of motion and energy, color and
imagery, expressing a variety of experience and retrospection. "
- Charles Guenther
"These poems are real voices, doing what real voices do: sing and shout,
whisper and moan."
- Pat Schneider
"The longest-lived writers workshop in town, identified by fidelity
to gender and justice. These poems are by turns poignant, darkly
comic, romantic, and knowing."
- Steven Schreiner
"Its 'Loosely Identified' title alone reflects its wry, mature good humor."
- Suzanne Rhodenbaugh,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(Click here to see entire review)
"I was so impressed with the poetry in this booklet, that I wish I
could become an honorary member of their group — even for just
one meeting! The booklet as a whole leaves one with a feeling of
the kindred spirits at work in their poetry workshop that has
survived thirty years."
- Stuart Eglin,
New Hope International
Review On-Line
(Click here to see entire review)
"Breathing Out, Poems by Loosely Identified is a book to inhale....The book is cohesive and persistent, consistently Middlewestern, with each of the 21 poets quietly reminding the reader there is something breathing, somewhere in the magnolia trees -- moment by fragrant moment."
- Donna Biffar,
Chiron Review,
Issue 77, Winter 2004
NewPages.com -- "New and Noteworthy Books" --
http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/noteworthy/2004_12_01/newbooks1.htm
