Vortex Street

Heather H. Thomas’s Vortex Street is a road through loss, conflict, and change where the shocks of being are personal and global. The street spirals inward and outward in space and shuttles back and forth through time. It leads from the poet’s Pennsylvania riverside home to places and events in Bosnia, Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Newtown, Connecticut, disregarding boundaries we think we have in place to protect us. Thomas addresses lost others in a process that transforms pain into something larger, a healing, sustainable love. That the scientific phenomenon of the vortex street in water and air appears to look like our own genetic code, the double helix, suggests that this is the place where we live. Here, in the space of the poem, language bears, confronts, and reimagines our possibilities.