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jessica Care moore’s newest book centers around a demand: “We Want Our Bodies Back,” in which she names the ways in which Black women’s bodies have historically and are currently coopted, abused and degraded. She names slavery, the disappearance of Black girls, the wanton murder of Black women’s families as specific injustices enacted on her as a Black woman and the poem is a demand that these be acknowledged and remedied. Write a poem in which you call out a specific injustice — name its roots, its faces, its manifestations, its harms — and then demand the change that you believe would effect justice and repair.


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Matthew Shenoda’s latest collection of poems  Tahrir Suite, takes the contemporary event of the Egyptian Revolution and recasts it in an epic, mythological light by casting two figures, Isis and Tekla, as epic subjects. Write a poem that brings a myth into a contemporary moment or that elevates a contemporary moment  to the mythic sphere.


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Whether it is the secrets buried below silences, the archetypes animating her muses or the histories of Black women entombed in willful or innocuous amnesia, a key poetic concern in Dominique Christina’s work is using language as a tool to unearth what needs to be brought back to light and memory. What has been buried in you? Whose bones would you unearth and re-flesh given the means, and why? Imagine the poem a shovel in your hands; find the landscape, the moment; dig.


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Nate Marshall writes from what he knows intimately, whether it be his neighborhood in Chicago– its sounds, smells, characters, seen and unseen markers– using his deep knowledge to interrogate the wider world. In this issue Marshall uses his name as a catalyst to question race, belonging, and America. What questions or possibilities does your name evoke?


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Master of the marriage of form to content, Tyehimba Jess began his journey into dynamic formal structures (see his book Olio)  by trying to write a contrapuntal poem. His work is also deeply invested in the events and unspoken corners of history. Write a contrapuntal poem — two columns of text, printed next to each other, that can be read either down or across — that takes on a piece of history.


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Music haunts the work of our featured poet, Kwame Dawes. His poems include dedications to musicians, invoke music, and indeed create music through his skillful handling of the instrument that is language. 

Make music your muse, too. Write a poem that is immersed in music from subject to structure to style. Turn up the volume, and sing your necessary song.


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Komunyakaa ends his book Warhorses with the striking poem Autobiography of My Alter Ego, which provides an account of the speaker’s experience in war and its aftermath. One gets the sense that through the intimate persona of the “alter ego” Komunyakaa is able to access truths unavailable to his own speaking voice. What is the nature of your alter ego? What would it write as its autobiography? Give it the pen and find out!


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Patricia Smith is known for her work in traditional form, and even more for stretching form to its limit. For example, the poem “Elegy” in Incendiary Art is a triple sestina, and the poems featured in this issue are parts of a triple crown. (That’s 45 sonnets!) How might you innovatively and generatively expand a traditional fixed form? 


Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Poems