Teaching Metaphors, Nathan Graziano s sixth collection of poetry, goes beyond the lesson plans and standardized tests to probe the humanity of the modern high school. An English teacher for the past decade, Graziano uses experience and wry wit to draw composites of faculty and students as both metaphor and microcosm. From a homecoming princess sacrificed on the stake of popularity to a nostalgic literature teacher who won t let go of The Canon, Graziano juxtaposes the characters of his imaginative high school to examine the core of our common experiences. Both lighthearted and elegiac, Teaching Metaphors challenges readers to identify themselves among the stereotypes and ghosts that roam these allegoric halls.
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If Keats is right about that whole truth and beauty thing, this is the most beautiful book about high school you'll ever read. Nathan Graziano's poems capture the experience of high school, especially the uneasy coexistence of the pain of being young and the pain of growing old, with clarity, grace, and heart. Teaching Metaphors is a powerful collection that should be read by anyone who has ever worked in or attended an American High School. --Brendan Halpin, author of Losing My Faculties and Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Teaching Metaphors is the consistently right-on execution of an ingenious concept I can t think of another book that so thoroughly inventories the contemporary high school s cast of characters by a writer long and widely admired for his clarity, conciseness, wit, and humanity. It is a classic of working class literature (and anyone still laboring under the illusion that dedicated teaching is not hard work needs most of all the refresher course in American education that these word-portraits offer). --Gerald Locklin, Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach
Teaching Metaphors is the consistently right-on execution of an ingenious concept I can t think of another book that so thoroughly inventories the contemporary high school s cast of characters by a writer long and widely admired for his clarity, conciseness, wit, and humanity. It is a classic of working class literature (and anyone still laboring under the illusion that dedicated teaching is not hard work needs most of all the refresher course in American education that these word-portraits offer). --Gerald Locklin, Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach
About the Author
Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire, with his wife and two children. He is the author of Frostbite, a collection of short stories, and nine other collections of poetry and fiction. For more information, visit www.nathangraziano.com.
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A Mature Poet's Celebration of Variety,
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This review is from: Teaching Metaphors (Paperback)
The beauty of the new, democratic poetry movement is that a chorus of new voices has appeared at a time when copy stores and computers make it easy and inexpensive to publish their work. There is also a thriving community of micro-presses out there, which might be seen as intermediaries between self-publishing and the higher-status academic presses and publishing houses. To a voracious reader, such as myself, this is a source of great and ongoing pleasure--mostly because I get to pick which poets are working for me, and I get to watch the growth of poets' writing style and tasted through a progression of works that would have been trivialized previously as juvenalia or vanity publications unworthy of notice. All that by way of explaining my great pleasure with Nathan Graziano's 6th collection of poetry. Here are all the qualities characteristic of the new poetry movement, including honesty, clear direct communication, unashamed and unembarrassed confession and self-contradiction, and fearless observation of the new embraced in the expression, "nothing is ordinary." All this is expressed by Graziano in bright, concise lyrics celebrating the everyday in arresting language, and with a sharp appreciation for the concluding twist that makes his lyrics memorable. These are not the portraits that the bureaucratic handlers would prefer to imagine best represent public education now days; they are real portraits drawn from the great variety of individuals that inhabit public education, teachers and students alike, and therefore, champion education as a sort of salad whose ingredients are constantly being added to and taken away from, and whose participants are trained to appreciate the variety drawn to the process and acquire a real hunger for the process that will outlive institutional learning and carry a sort of drunkenness on the variety of existence into their adult lives. In short, these are the people I want to know, these are the people I want to be a part of my life; and I thank Graziano for providing this album of snapshots as reminders of what I know life can be.
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