More on: function of poetry

In issue 87, poet Lisa Ampleman reviews three new books by Jericho Brown, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Rickey Laurentiis—three African American poets who each write about faith, identity, and injustice in different ways. We asked her to reflect a little on the connection between poetry, empathy, and justice. She was interviewed by Mary Kenagy Mitchell.…

In twelfth grade our English class read Milton, Wordsworth, Samuel Pepys, Keats, and Shakespeare. We reluctantly took turns reading aloud, but besides that I don’t think anyone ever said a word, not even when Pepys described the plague and London’s doors marked with a red cross and “Lord have mercy upon us” written there. No,…

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections—Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)—all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve’s Striptease was named one of the top twenty poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She has…