English: Poetry

Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice

Rhythm and Resistance offers practical lessons about how to teach poetry to build community, understand literature and history, talk back to injustice, and construct stronger literacy skills across content areas and grade levels-- from elementary school to graduate school. Rhythm and Resistance reclaims poetry as a necessary part of a larger vision of what it means to teach for justice.

We Begin in Gladness : how poets progress : essays

"The staggering thing about a life's work is it takes a lifetime to complete," Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work.

Not Here

"Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved"--Amazon.com

Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity. The collection opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved on earth. "Dear White America," which Smith performed at the 2014 Rustbelt Midwest Region Poetry Slam, has as strong an impact on the page as it did on the spoken word stage. Smith's courage and hope amidst the struggle for unity in America will humble and uplift you.

Whereas

This volume confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through an array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created an innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation -- and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live."

Poetry of Resistance: voices for social justice

The stories aired in Poetry of Resistance are almost all of the narrative sort. The book is anchored in a commemorative poem by Francisco X. Alarcón, dedicated to the nine Latino students who chained themselves to the doors of the Arizona State Capitol in 2010 to protest the state’s anti-immigration bill SB 1070 (“you are nine/young warrior/like nine sky stars”). Soon after it was written, Alarcón started a Facebook page, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” and asked for submissions. Thousands of contributions, directed at various political developments, have come since the group’s founding in 2010.

The book, edited by Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez, gathers dozens of these submitted poems. The personal stories, told in images both expected and not, give voice to an extended family that shares a history of migration. Daniel García Ordaz’s “Immigrant Crossing” tells of his father’s feet and suggests something of the humor required to maintain resolve. Aurora Levins Morales’ “Grave Song For Immigrant Soldier” is about four “green card soldiers” who died in Iraq. The variety of experiences held in the book, no matter how different, seem to be threads pulled from the same tapestry.

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/books/book_reviews/poems-for-political-disaster-and-poetry-of-resistance-voices-for/article_e1e28504-2483-52c5-9672-309ffbfeedd1.html

Life on Mars: Poems

“Hypnotic and brimming with irony, the poems in Smith's latest volume aren't so much about outer space as the interior life and the search for the divine. . . . The spiritual motif running through these poems adds a stunning dimension that will please many readers.” ―Library Journal

The House on Mango Street

This book tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, she is able to rise above hopelessness and create a quiet space for herself in the midst of her oppressive surroundings. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

The Poet Upstairs

When a poet moves into the apartment above hers, young Juliana asks to meet her and together they write poems of tropical birds and a river that flows to the sea, typing out words that change the world, if only for a while.

Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric

For years, some scholars have privately suspected Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry, and the link between the two was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. In Origins of the Dream, W. Jason Miller lifts that veil to demonstrate how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice, and that the influence can be found in more than just the one famous speech. Miller contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. He argues that by using allusion rather than quotation, King avoided intensifying the threats and accusations against him, while allowing the nation to unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind Hughes's poetry