Thoughtfully investigates the important yet little-heralded topic of the effect of class on the poet's life and work

"Kill class is based on two years of fieldwork the author conducted within combat trainings in simulated Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America"--

"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.

Collection of poems about school. Suggested level: primary.

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.

This is for anyone who needs a reminder that you deserve to take up space in the world and that you are enough. Daniell Koepke is the author behind the Internal Acceptance Movement (I. A.M.). In her first poetry collection, Daniell gives voice to the fear and anxiety, as well as the perseverance and strength, that has been fundamental to her own personal growth journey and the path to deeper and more meaningful self-love and acceptance. In her own words, this book is for "the 17-year-old Daniell who was convinced she was worthless; who was convinced she would never survive or amount to anything. This is for the friends and family who never stopped believing in and supporting her. This is for all the people who feel that they have to shrink and hide who they are in order to be loved and accepted and worth something.

Brazen Creature spans a young woman's awakening. The poems' concerns are twofold: violence against women and girls that has become rooted in the land, and verdant female desire and self-assertion in the face of entrenched oppression. In the poems' Midwestern towns and farmlands, patriarchy is a ghost that haunts the cottonwoods, soybean fields, and creek beds. The speaker is in limbo between fear and yearning, vulnerability and transgression, drought and flood, saving a life and needing to be saved.