Flight Time is a collection of poems written over a period of extensive travel. Reflected in these poems is an intuitive understanding of the relationship between personal experiences and geographic context, i.e, the experience of the birth of a first grandchild in the midst of the abundant growth of the northern Florida marshlands, the winter images that are a stark backdrop for the painful years of constant travel across Pennsylvania highways prior to my sister’s passing; and the New Mexico poems with their sun-drenched optimism telling of new highways and fresh possibilities.

A number of these poems have appeared in the following publications: A Sharpville Anniversary Commemorative Poetry Anthology; Living Inland: a Collection of Women Artists; Catalyst Magazine; KARAMU: A Magazine Of Literature & Ideas; Blue Mesa Review; In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960; and the Rio Grande Writers Chap Book series. Several of these poems can also be found in the self published chap books The Sound Of Her Voice and Dancing Shadows.

This collection is dedicated to the memory of Rob Penny: poet, activists, idealist, and teacher.

Sample Poems

Critic’s Commentary

Maisha Baton's powerful autobiographical poems of place and history speak to the reader with many voices. Flight Time crosses the continent, grounding Baton's intimate personal world in the life of the land and geography of time. Nothing grows in this world without being rooted, challenged and nourished by context and situation, and there's no hope for any of us without, as she says, riding the "back roads of our future. Maisha Baton is a poet we need with us as we follow the maps of how we have become who we are.
-- V.B. Price, Albuquerque, April 2005

This collection of poems by Maisha Baton, with its wide range of emotions and experiences, and even wider range of place based on her travels, is to be welcomed. I hope that it will be widely read and that it will inspire others as it has inspired me.
-- Dennis Brutus, South African Poet and activist.

In this book, rhythm is as unstoppable as time. Maisha Baton’s poetic voice is like a taproot spanning the continent. From New Mexico to Pennsylvania, the front porch to the road, the countryside to third floor apartments “with two-story fire escapes on ten-story buildings.” This generous collection merges personal history and cultural history with geography and the seasons to give us poems of tremendous warmth and vitality. All the while the reader gains a sense, rightly, of the power of language not only to cross generations but to document life, “as if immortality were assured (even for my children).” Flight Time flies in the face of loss, culminating with a literal birth and a new life for memory.
-- Lisa Gill, Poet

Maisha Baton © Copyright 2007.