In Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine’s latest collection of poems, hybrid essays, and photographs, she sets out to ask a random white man how he understands his privilege. I admit, as I read, I’m a mix of …
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Genre: Special Feature 2
I finished writing this review of Claudia Rankine’s new book, Just Us: An American Conversation, during the week in which a White mob devoted to “vigilante antidemocratic paramilitary violence” (in Reconstruction historian Gregory P. Downs’s phrase) broke into the …
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Special Feature 2
Surrounded by Peach Trees, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
Back to School Day and my sister has been dead one year, ten months. This is how you get to the other side. We’ve been moving into a new world. When pressed against
your palm, the flesh of a good …
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Is man no more than this?
—King Lear
From twelve floors up, looking across the roofs,
we get a glimpse of Jersey, glimpse of Hudson,
evening sky. Window wide open. Breeze.
My folks—my mother’s ninety-three and blind,
my father’s …
Special Feature 2
far past the beginning and quite close to the end [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
before revealing the rabbit, after she reaches into you
like the magician into the hat, the will
of touch descending into night, past the stain
-ed mural against the brick, past any tulip or fallen
rose, the lesser pleasures—no, further, …
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Special Feature 2
Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner]
Was not a one-trick pony.
Was the trick of many ponies.
Was the trick of swimming
The ponies from the island
To the mainland. So as not
To burden the island, said
The saltwater cowboys whose
Trick it was …
