Air Fare: Stories, Poems, and Essays on Flight Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a commercial pilot and flight instructor. I read many aviation related books and magazines. I don't often read books that contain a lot of poetry, which AIR FARE does.(It also has short stories and excerpts from longer works.) So to say I was pleasantly surprised by this little wonder of a book is an understatement.
My advice? If you've never flown but wonder what it's like, you should read this book. If you have flown as a passenger, you'll recognize your own emotions, both good and bad, in every page. If you are a pilot, you'll see yourself reflected in myriad indelible images; you'll be drawn back by memory to a hundred different experiences; and you'll want to read-and reread-each and every privileged glimpse into the human heart of flight, and be left wanting more. It's a must-have for any aviator's library. Get it!

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From take-off to landing and everything in between, this anthology is about flying and the culture surrounding this precarious method of transportation.From the awe of being airborne to the shrink-wrapped airplane meals, from the phobia of flying to the very real reason for that fear, everything is explored.
"One hundred years after Orville and Wilbur Wright's first manned flight near Kitty Hawk, N.C., poets respond in a multitude of ways to the simple yet miraculous fact that humans take to the air and stay there.Maybe we're more blasé now than Apollinaire was when he celebrated 'the machine that flies early in the twentieth century.'But looking out of a small window, we may still gasp in wonder as we fly over Bryce Canyon, or as we take off and land at dusk, the heavens lit up with their psychedelics.We can experience, in William Matthews' words, 'the blue, sourceless, amniotic light / in which the world, hidden by clouds, seems / from 39,000 feet to float.'
We began to work on this anthology before 9/11 and in the days after, when selecting the poems, I still wanted to honor the original conception?to make an anthology of literary works inspired by the myriadaspects of flying.There are as many individual responses to these experiences as there are writers who have written about them: awe, boredom, fear, surprise, delight, transcendence.The poems in this anthology offer differing perspectives, in many voices and styles. . . . Flying, floating, in between: a very good place for poets, for whom rumination comes as second nature."
?From the Introduction by Coeditor Judith Taylor
Air Fare Contributors
Diane AckermanMargaret AtwoodNed BalboEllen BassJoshua BeckmanSharon BryanAndrea Hollender BudyKelly CherryAlain de BottonRuss FranklinRichard GarciaLise GoettAlbert GoldbarthRosemary GriggsJeffrey HarrisonBrenda HillmanChristine HumeBrigit Pegeen KellyMartha KinneyPeter LaSallePhilip LevineLee MartinWilliam MatthewsIan McEwanCampbell McGrathCarol Muske-DukesMarilyn NelsonNaomi Shahib NyeKim PondersKevin PruferBarbara RasSherrod SantosNatalie SerberEnid ShomerBruce SmithSusan StewartTerese SvobodaJames TateJean ValentineArthur VogelsangCharles Harper WebbJan WesleyColson WhiteheadGary Young

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