Last issue I had intended to publish an essay about the power of protest poetry, particularly highlighting the work in the 2016 anthology Of Poetry and Protest: from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr, against the backdrop of more unjust verdicts, more tragic shootings,…
Posts published by “Sandra Yannone”
For the better part of a year, I’ve been sharing essays and poems about poetry’s prismatic capacities to cast light on how humans live in a dominant culture depleted of deep meaning. I’ve shared how poetry connects us in time and space to historic events like the Pulse nightclub shootings,…
for Kabby Mitchell III, (1956-2017) In Seattle at the Quality Inn off Aurora and John, I greet an elder brother with a particular train cap perched on his head, a Pullman porter whose stepped out of time while we wait to ride the elevator with my grief and gratitude…
On the tenth of February I found myself in a more improbable place than I had imagined even just a few days before I travelled to the other Washington. I stood in front of the wrought iron gates of the White House with a dear friend, the mother of an…
At the frosty noon hour on January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as the 35th President of the United States. He made a choice that day not to wear a coat; he wanted to demonstrate his resiliency at the height of the Cold War.…
When the new year arrives wrapped in snow, she thinks nothing of the phone call or my voice or how it will change when I’m pressed up against her back, my tongue knocking at her ear. She is not thinking of the alphabet’s wonders, the shy way I stack letters…
As I continue to move through the aftermath of this election cycle and as I anticipate a trip to Washington, D.C. in January the day after the inauguration to march with women and allies to protect women’s lives, I remain ever mindful of the power of poetry to ground and…
I heard Lucia Perillo read on a December evening at Orca Books in 2010. The following week Perillo was the featured poet at the Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute in Washington, D.C. To the handful of us seated in our metal folding chairs, she recounted her excitement when the Folger Shakespeare…
On October 18th, I listened to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! report from outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota, where she was preparing to turn herself in on criminal trespass charges that the local prosecutor had switched to riot charges in the twenty-four hours before her surrender.…
That vintage illusion called Vari-Vue where you tilt the printed object slightly one way to reveal an image and tilt again to reveal another, that’s how this election season feels to me. The dominant media’s portrayal of a black-and-white binary is far more nuanced; from my vantage point Republican Donald…
In the August issue of Works in Progress, the editorial collective was gracious. Instead of haranguing me about missing a deadline, they published my poem “Occupy Sonnet” that they had tucked away in their reserves, perhaps in anticipation of my precise indiscretion. With all of the violence in the world…
Because everything is broken in this country of squandered and pillaged dreams, even the sonnet’s usual bliss can’t right it all in fourteen jagged lines. When all remains said and undone, this sonnet will list like the Andrea Doria, mortally wounded off the stone coast of New England,…
(for those departed and surviving in Orlando and everywhere) I am struggling now to comprehend how I still have one after all the opportunities I’ve had to die with my hands at the wheel after too many drinks in bars while I waited to become my uncloseted self.…
For twenty-four years in a side yard in bucolic Ashfield, MA, my friend Jan Freeman has held a sacred ritual on the 4th of July outside her home, which also serves as the headquarters for Paris Press, a homegrown publishing mecca she founded for the sole purpose of putting and…