Description: How do poets engage issues of race? This timely collection of essays brings together the voices of living poets and scholars, including Garrett Hongo and Major Jackson, to discuss the constraints and possibilities of racial discourse in poetic language, offering new insights on this perennially vexed issue.
Brief description: LAURA McCULLOUGH is an associate professor of English at Brookdale Community College. Her essays, criticism, poems, creative nonfiction, and short fiction have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and journals, and her books include the poetry collections Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic, Speech Acts, and What Men Want. Her hybrid works include Ripple & Snap and Shuttle*Voices*Wind. She is the editor of the anthology The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn. McCullough is also the founding editor of Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations, for which she currently acts as an editor-at-large.
Review Quotes: An important book. I am hard-pressed to think of many anthologies that take on a cultural scope this wide and varied. Such a book needs to exist in the world, especially since our literary landscape largely lacks this kind of critical engagement with poetry, specifically written by poets rather than 'traditional scholars.'--Matthew Shenoda "author of Tahrir Suite"