Last year, my sister bought me the young adult memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming. And then it went on to win the National Book Award for young readers! Hooray! I have been meaning to read it again and again, and something else got in the way. So when I was at my conference, chilling in my hotel room, I decided to pull out the audio copy I had borrowed from the library and listen to it. It was a good choice. Jacqueline Woodson covers her birth […]
Poetry…purposely complicated
Readings 4 & 5 for the masters program are two collections of poetry, “Holding Company” by Major Jackson, and “Poems” by Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve come out of it with the understanding that poetry isn’t for me. I mean, I sort of went in with that notion, but slogging through over 200 pages of it has really hit the nail into the coffin. This isn’t to say that I hated them; there were many of the 150 or so poems I read that I liked for […]
Make mine a double (cannonball) with this beautiful and wrenching book.
For the past four years, I’ve been teaching poetry as part of my social justice as creativity unit in Composition II. I’ve taught several different poets–including favorites Katie Ford, Marvin Bell, and Yusef Komunyakaa–but have also been turning to novels in verse as a means of making the poetry more approachable to young adult students. I taught an excerpt from Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (and I will read the whole thing this CBR, for sure), Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover, and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out […]
Let yourself be triggered.
Well, it’s a first for me to give anything Neil Gaiman has written less than four stars, but I’m reminding myself that according to Goodreads’ rating system, that means “I liked it.” And I did! Some of the stories were delightful and magical, and terrifying. But some of them didn’t really work for me, for one reason or another, and overall, it was actually harder to pay attention to the stories, or work up enough energy to dive back into the book, knowing I’d have […]