How to love a country: poems

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Beacon Press
Publication Date
[2019]
Language
English

Description

A timely and moving collection from the renowned inaugural poet on issues facing our country and people—immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more.Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, Richard Blanco addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all. Blanco digs deep into the very marrow of our nation through poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws, but also remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes. Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

More Details

ISBN
9780807025918

Table of Contents

From the Book

Election year
Dreaming a wall
Complaint of El Rio Grande
Como tu/Like you/Like me
Staring at Aspens: a history lesson
Letter from Yi Cheung
Leaving in the rain: Limerick, Ireland
Island body
What we didn't know about Cuba
Matters of the sea
Mother country
My father in English, indeed
El americano in the mirror
Using country in a sentence
American wandersong
Imaginary exile
November eyes
Let's remake America great
Easy lynching on Herndon Avenue
Poetry assignment #4: what do you miss most?
St. Louis: prayer before dawn
Until we could
Between [another door]
Pulse-one poem
Funerals
Remembering Boston strong
America the beautiful again
What I know of country
St. Louis: prayer at dawn
Now without me
And so we all fall down
Cloud anthem.

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Author Notes

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These Cuban-American authors have published compelling and accessible coming-of-age memoirs, and both also write in other genres. Richard Blanco is a well-known poet, and Carlos M. N. Eire also writes accessibly about religious history. -- Katherine Johnson
The diverse families of these authors influence their writing. Both have Cuban ancestry, while Richard Blanco is gay and Ruth Behar is Jewish. Their engaging, thought-provoking, and lyrical memoirs draw on their diversity and their experiences while coming of age. Both have also published books for children. -- Katherine Johnson
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Published Reviews

Booklist Review

The second Inaugural poet for President Obama (the first was Elizabeth Alexander) and only the fifth in U.S. history, Blanco presents a fresh and significant collection shaped by and reverberating with his experiences as a young, gay Cuban immigrant in America. With Walt Whitman's everyman as a guiding storyteller, Blanco charts his own impressive journey, illuminating America's social topography along the way. To find out who he is," he charts who we are." And with each poetic step and breath, he finds the promise, the necessity, and the beauty of hope and a vision of what America can be. This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet. The book's stand-out poems include his much quoted Until We Could, a lyric about marriage equality; One Pulse One Poem, about the Orlando nightclub shooting; and Remembering Boston Strong, about the Boston Marathon bombing. And years from now . . . / the tender roses you laid across / the finish line, the thankful praise you gave / for the lives that saved lives / . . . the brave / promises . . . filled with anthems sung by you like a thousand / songbirds at once. --Mark Eleveld Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Library Journal Review

Generous and deeply felt, the long prose poems in this moving new collection from presidential inaugural poet Blanco (after Looking for the Gulf Motel) help us understand what it means to cross a border. But, more universally, Blanco shows us how the struggle for identity and the need to lay claim to a place in the world can't be separated, especially today. Blanco's talent is such that his struggle to feel at home in America, the country his family chose for him, is manifested on each page-sometimes writ large, as in "LET'S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT": "Let's recast every woman as a housewife, while and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again....-no lines about a career or rape, again." Or, more quietly, as in "AMERICAN WANDERSONG": "For my parents' exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid's frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and winkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began." VERDICT Submit to the fierce pleasure of Blanco's art.-Iris S. Rosenberg, New York © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* The second Inaugural poet for President Obama (the first was Elizabeth Alexander) and only the fifth in U.S. history, Blanco presents a fresh and significant collection shaped by and reverberating with his experiences as a young, gay Cuban immigrant in America. With Walt Whitman's "everyman" as a guiding storyteller, Blanco charts his own impressive journey, illuminating America's social topography along the way. To find out who he "is, he charts who we "are. And with each poetic step and breath, he finds the promise, the necessity, and the beauty of hope and a vision of what America can be. This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet. The book's stand-out poems include his much quoted "Until We Could," a lyric about marriage equality; "One Pulse—One Poem," about the Orlando nightclub shooting; and "Remembering Boston Strong," about the Boston Marathon bombing. "And years from now . . . / the tender roses you laid across / the finish line, the thankful praise you gave / for the lives that saved lives / . . . the brave / promises . . . filled with anthems sung by you like a thousand / songbirds at once." Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
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Library Journal Reviews

Generous and deeply felt, the long prose poems in this moving new collection from presidential inaugural poet Blanco (after Looking for the Gulf Motel) help us understand what it means to cross a border. But, more universally, Blanco shows us how the struggle for identity and the need to lay claim to a place in the world can't be separated, especially today. Blanco's talent is such that his struggle to feel at home in America, the country his family chose for him, is manifested on each page—sometimes writ large, as in "LET'S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT": "Let's recast every woman as a housewife, while and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again….—no lines about a career or rape, again." Or, more quietly, as in "AMERICAN WANDERSONG": "For my parents' exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid's frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and winkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began." VERDICT Submit to the fierce pleasure of Blanco's art.—Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Copyright 2019 Library Journal.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal.
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