Boris (psychoanalysis, Harvard Medical School) says that while we are going about our personal concerns, pursuing pleasure and ego gratification, we are also being influenced by a force that causes us to identify with the aims of the Group, even if it means we individually fail to thrive, or even die. He synthesizes three approaches: classical psychology; recent interpersonal and object-relations psychology; and current selectivistic evolutionary biology. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. This book too marks alignments and creates pathways, but its sacred sites are not monuments, they’re artworks and poems. Its various forms of exchange between writers and artists offer unique access to contemporary art, poetry, and the creative process. In this unique anthology, working poets respond to questions about their recent books, painters and other artists offer statements about their work, and writers respond to artworks. These offerings and exchanges are juxtaposed so as to speak to one another in a capacious, resonant dialogue. The result is a broad-minded and inclusive poetics, a vision of creative work as a constituent of personal and civic life. Anyone who nurtures the creative impulse will enjoy Ley Lines and return to it again and again. Writing students, art students, and any reader engaged in artistic practice will find in Ley Lines not a how-to manual or step-by-step instruction but an inexhaustible vein of instructive reflection on imaginative work and the creative life.