Poetry Book Revisits, Reflects on National Trauma

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 companion YouTube videos. Collected and presented now in print and e-book, the work can be read sequentially, or browsed 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 features a scannable QR code to direct readers to the entire set of 130 videos. 

Starting Dec. 7, 2021:

SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH (150 pages, Middle West Press LLC) is available in a $11.99 trade paperback edition through Amazon and other booksellers, as well as a $5.99 Kindle e-book edition exclusively via Amazon.

Middle West Press LLC (www.middlewestpress.com) is a Johnston, Iowa-based editor and publisher of non-fiction, journalism, and poetry. As an independent micro-press, we publish one to four titles annually.