eing, is about what is stable in our world, then the second word, Becoming, is about all that shifts, and is changing. Poems of change, be it professionally, politically, economically, spiritually, physically or as embedded in any part of the world you consider yours or alien. We have experienced funerals, weddings, parenting, going back to school, starting new vocations, becoming home-owners, relocating across town or borders, travels abroad or back-home, becoming empty-nesters, taking a sabbatical, and many other life-changes and the experience of that is perfectly legitimate to document.

   The third element in the theme, Belonging, is to bring in the rasas that make poems precious to everyone. Poems of loss and discovery, grief and joy, shame and glory, paradoxes and humor, beauty and disgust, trust and betrayals, confidence and fear, hot and cold, song and prose and belonging or not.

   This anthology is the poetic tapestry of a wide flung collective of poets, individually and together, embracing the idea of the unity, to deliver poems to new readers and listeners that bring them a measure of what we each have found.