Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America - Softcover

Virgil Suarez is professor of creative writing at Florida State University and author of, most recently, the poetry collection Banyan, published by Louisiana State University Press. The editor of Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes, Ryan Van Cleave is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Together they are the editors of American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (Iowa, 2001).

Conceived and edited before September 11, these poems serve as reminders that terrorists are not our only threat. There are responses to high-profile murderers (Simpson, Koresh, et al.), but the collection's strength rests in a subtle joining of internal and external, depicting violence at a level too often ignored. Thus, Peter Johnson's prose poem begins "There's a tattoo of a tiny gun on my hand symbolic of the tiny wars I wage inside myself," and Denise Duhamel describes a child raped near where her sister and nieces live. Wisely, the editors elected not to group the pieces thematically, instead presenting them in alphabetical order. Similarly, they keep their introduction short and simple, letting the ethnically diverse poets speak for themselves. A few writers trivialize the experience, and many employ rhetoric rather than image, but there are also poems whose sharp, concise portraits will not soon be forgotten. These are not Sixties pacifists protesting war but for the most part a generation of writers who have grown up with graphic violence posing as entertainment. Many have yet to publish collections, so their names will be unfamiliar, but that shouldn't dissuade libraries from purchasing this excellent anthology. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
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