In this time when so much attention is focused on the border between Mexico and the US, the northern border, unique for its shared borders and boundaries, the bridges between, the blood and heritage people share and the things that divide them is a vastly different place.

One of the world's largest vortexes whirls offshore where some of the world's highest tides surge in and out every day. Waves of people have come and gone; Native and First Nations people have been here for ten thousand years. The land is disputed in places in others the US and Canada share responsibility: Campobello Island, where Franklin Roosevelt spent summers, and St. Croix Island International Parks, near where Samuel Champlain spent a disastrous winter in 1604.

The people who live here are fishermen, farmers, back-to-the-landers, artists, writers, telecommuters, and more.

The stories and poems gathered in the 3 Nations Anthology are about the borders and bridges, blood ties and feuds, and the great love shared for this rugged corner of the world where three sovereign nations live side by side, and in some places, overlap.With works by: Lee Sharkey, Cheryl Savageau, Paul Hostovsky, Kathleen Ellis, Carl Little, Michele Leavitt, Michael R. Brown, Mark Melnicove, Donna M. Loring, Sarah Xerar Murphy, and more.

«These are not poems of my world, but they are utterly vital missives from a world we all desperately need to know'the world where water aches an impossible blue, land lies nurtured and unscarred, and a precipitous beauty startles from all corners. Reading the poems in this long-overdue collection is like pulling a deep, revivifying breath into the body. And we're reminded that the world conjured so faithfully in this work is still there, where it's always been, still waiting for us.» --Patricia Smith, author of, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the 2014 Rebekah Bobbitt Prize (Library of Congress), the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (Academy American Poets), and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Poetry.

From the opening pages of the 3 Nations Anthology, Elizabeth Sprague’s “This That This” emphatically announces a book pulsing with the heartbeat of the land. Quickly it becomes evident that these authors are as taken by the land of their home as is environmentalist Winona LaDuke, who recently wrote, “This land did not let me go.” In these works of poetry, fiction and essay, disparate voices gain cohesion in their celebration and memory of specific land features: bodies of water, storms, animals, and in their ability to connect them to identity, ancestry and culture. Consider the profound wound in a statement of Donna M. Loring’s, who writes of how people “see the Tribes as foreigners,” or, similarly yet in a decidedly different piece, J.C. Elkin defiantly asserts himself: “I will not have my relocation become just another big fish story.” Or the depth of connection with not only land but beast, when Fredda Paul says “I felt the spirit of the eagle entering my spirit.” The words herein embody this land and call readers home to it; we are compelled to follow.

--Chris Benjamin, Managing Editor, Atlantic Books Today, winner of the silver Atlantic Journalism Award in 2014

Loring M. Donna

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