Reality Detonates - Paperback

by Mona Mehas (Editor), Alana Smithee (Editor)

Reality Detonates started as a poetic game. We sent a challenge out to the world, write a poem that uses the phrase "reality detonates." The results are in this book, and boy are they wide-ranging. They move from deep inner conflict to exploding galaxies. There are love stories, prayers for the world, and reflections on aging. These poems come from all over the world. The writers range from known poets with long resumes to first-time submitters. If you read one poem, turn the page and the next will be completely different. I hope you enjoy reading these poems as much as I do.

Within these pages, you will encounter that same phrase-reality detonates-again and again. But you will never encounter it the same way twice.

Here, it arrives in love poems and in memory and in imagination. It appears in grief, in longing, in revelation. It fractures. It transforms. Each poet met the phrase at a different flashpoint and followed the outburst.

No two poems are similar. Not in subject. Not in tone. Not in emotional landscape. Some are quiet, others are sharp. Some turn inward, some outward. The same two-word phrase has carried each of us in an entirely different direction. And yet, every poem holds.