In the aftermath of this election, it’s undeniable this country is a contested space, and that its citizens are hungry for new language to describe its landscape and reshape its boundaries. Within contemporary poetry, many writers of color are responding to this desire by renegotiating the rhetoric of the page.
Jacqueline Woodson, author of the National Book Award-winning Brown Girl Dreaming, said, “I think it’s so important for readers to see mirrors of themselves in books and to see that the people who wrote the books look like them, so that they can understand their own power and ability.”
Alice in Wonderland inspired Lewis Padgett’s sci-fi story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” in which an alien sends boxes of special toys to Earth. Scott Paradine finds one and intuits that the toys are special, as does his baby sister Emma.
Today’s nonfiction writers have at hand a number of forms other than the essay and the memoir. There’s the flash essay, of course, and literary journalism. Then there’s the catch-all form of nonfiction known as the lyric essay. So, what do they all mean?
Sinking down the basement steps of the Palais Porte Dorée in Paris is to find it much as it was in its inaugural year. The hulking Art Deco palace was a centerpiece of the 1931 Colonial Exposition—a World’s Fair-type undertaking meant to reinvest French citizens of the interwar period in the “civilizing mission” of their brutal land-people-and-resources grab across Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, and Pacifica.
A year ago, I first read Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, a compelling memoir about his work as an attorney and a convincing indictment of the injustices of our current legal system. Now, I have the opportunity to accompany death row exoneree Anthony Ray Hinton, who was defended by Stevenson, to a nearby federal prison where he speaks to inmates.
I conducted short interviews with a group of hotshot poets, scholars, and critics to help out. I invited them to nominate an American poem they think is underrated—a poem they wish more people loved and taught, a poem that might be for many an unknown unknown.
For a nonfiction food writer, the mango provides an endless mine of stories. For those living in Asia and immigrants in other countries, eating mangoes is so visceral, so memorable an experience that the significance of eating them often transcends mere flavor. Mango then becomes a metaphor.
I see the aphorism as a flag the poem is waving, a point of contact, or discovery, that exists only in relation to the space around it: poem, aphorism, more poem, then reaching into blank space. When an aphorism stands alone, there’s no more poem around it, just the reaching into blank space.
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