Customer Reviews

Teaching Metaphors

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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.