Favorite books of 2002 - includes poems

Progressive, The, Jan, 2003 by Kate Clinton, Ruth Conniff, Anne-Marie Cusac, Elizabeth DiNovella, Andrea Lewis, Fred McKissack, Jr., John Nichols, Matthew Rothschild

  I saved your writing even the scraps
   I saved the letters praising you as a
   teacher
   today you have wet yourself you
   have soiled your underpants
   I embrace you when I arrive and
   when I leave.

Intense and profound, these poems also dazzle with surprising imagery: "Their words fall like spilled face powder," or, in describing people sitting in a cinema, "we are coiled here in utero / like pears in syrup."

Now that's poetry!

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.