American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time

This anthology brings together voices both familiar and new—all living American poets. In five thematic sections, ranging widely in style and topic, they speak passionately about family life, politics, history, hope, and our nation's multicultural identity. The fourth section, "Here the Sentence Will Be Respected," consists of a single poem, Layli Long Soldier's "38," which weaves comments on the writing process as it describes the hanging of 38 Dakota Natives ordered by President Abraham Lincoln about the time of the Emancipation Proclamation—"the largest 'legal' mass assassination in US history." "I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem," says Long Soldier. "There's irony in their poem./ There was no text." In another intriguing poem, "Reverse Suicide," Matt Rasmussen tells of a suicide backward: "and we pour bag after bag/ of leaves on the lawn,// waiting for them to leap/ onto the bare branches." The small format makes for a portable volume, to be perused throughout the day.