Rushed to a December 2001 print as a collection of progressive and reflective voices in reaction to the September 11th attacks on American soil and the subsequent blood thirst for vengeance and war, another world is possible: conversations in a time of terror, (or as the back cover, reads: new world disorder) consists of essays and journal writing that plunge into a myriad of mixed feelings regarding 9/11--- while maintaining that an all-out war on terror‚ only terrorizes further.

The design for the cover, which has a solid black outline of the New York skyline with the WTC present on one side and an upside down version on the back side, perfectly exemplifies the flip-coin philosophy of bringing us the voices of a firefighter, a paramedic who worked at ground zero, a war veteran, and the son of a 9/11 victim, who, among others, say, Not in our names should you bomb Afghanistan.

Despite reading this text of political and personal writing almost a year after the 9/11, a catastrophic event abbreviated to three digits that were eerily and incisively buffooned by a Public Enemy song that wondered when the cops would come if a black man needed emergency assistance, I find another world is possible an increasingly pertinent text. Especially so next to the barrage of literature that likes to show the Other side‚ and the history of Islamic militancy as a voyeuristic search for some explanation for an unprecedented‚ (and yet, as an afterthought, predictable) terrorist attack on the United Stated.

The typos and overlap of similar information in awip (abbreviated), while bothersome, did not distract too much from the underlying message for peace, and added to the sense that the editors of the collection, Jee Kim, Jeremy M. Glick, Shaffy Moeel, Luis Sanchez, Beka Economopoulus, and Warida Imarisha, all with fascinating activist backgrounds themselves, were under a lot of pressure to send out this alternative dialogue to the world.

The various strengths of the collection lay in interjecting quotes, email exchanges, and poetic political proclamations that reinforce their words with statistics and specific information. Below is a sampling:

The silence is amazing. The quiet of people who have just had the wind blown out of them. Speechlessness. A silent New York. --Kiini Ibura Salaam.

The local news indulges in grief pornography, repeatedly showing sobbing relatives holding photographs of the missing. --from Brooklyn Diary, Kenny Bruno, CorpWatch.

Five Proposed New Laws For This Crisis: 1. To display an American flag, you must present proof of voter registration … 3. To be permitted to scream Arabs go home, you must list and correctly locate ten Arab homelands.

Into this neutral air/Where blind skyscrapers use/Their full height to proclaim/The strength of Collective Man/Out of the mirror they stare,/Imperialism`s face/And the international wrong. --W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Like all Americans, on Tuesday 9-11, I was shocked and horrified to watch the WTC Twin Towers attacked by hijacked plans and collapse, resulting in the deaths of perhaps up to 10,000 innocent people. Over the course of my life I have been shocked and horrified by a variety of US governmental actions, such as the US sponsored coup against democracy in Guatemala in 1954 which resulted in the death of over 120,000 Guatemalan (author`s emphasis) peasants --Shocked And Horrified, Larry Mosqueda, Ph.D.

I will not elaborate on these quotes that were only a minute selection from the readings, that also include writings by Angela Davis, Representative Barbara Lee, and Deepak Chopra, because awip must be read in its entirety to understand the viewpoints I chose to highlight.

One absence that did trouble me was the lack of a thorough, urgent, and detailed description of the attacks on South Asian and Arab Americans and the alarming INS detentions of immigrants of this background that are occurring since 9/11 at rates that scream human rights violations, raises questions about what the land of the free really means and recalls the Japanese internment camps. While the issue of hate crimes after 9/11 and concerns with the Patriot Act were interspersed throughout the collection, a section devoted to the multiple issues facing Arabs and South Asians, written by members of that community and activists of an organization, such as DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), would have brought the book to a whole other level of urgency. As a South Asian woman myself, I was doubly traumatized as a New Yorker and American by the 9/11 attacks. Not only did I fear another terrorist attack, but I also feared being attacked by fellow Americans. I still deal with such fears.

However, awip in its very first tale, contains a poignant recollection by a Pakistani-American of his experience evacuating the WTC on September 11 and being helped by a Hasidic Jewish man, and the journal poetry of Suheir Hammad who states ironically: more than ever, i believe there is no difference./the most privileged nation, most americans do not know the difference/between indians, afghanis, syrians, muslims, sikhs, hindus./more than ever, there is no difference.

Alpa Patel is a multi-media artist who writes erotic poetry, started `brown girl` comics strip, and made a short movie, Love Stinks, shown at the Women of Color Film Festival held at the University of Santa Cruz. She is a graduate student in Media Studies at the New School in Manhattan.