Consider Gifts Of Kathy Goodkin’s Crybaby Bridge

Another great gift idea from the editors at Moon City Press: Buy a copy of Kathy Goodkin’s wonderful Crybaby Bridge, winner of the 2018 Moon City Poetry Award, for everyone you care about!

It’s been a few weeks since my chapbook class for The Loft ended, and I miss my students. Probably most teachers think/feel this, but they really didn’t need me. They wrote beautiful poems and gave each other insightful feedback; I just held space for them and read their work and enjoyed the conversation, we got a drafting machine and made it a casual weekly reunion. And I’m so impressed that everyone who participated in the class finished a draft of a chapbook! When one designs a new class, one never knows how (if) it’ll work, so I’m pretty happy about how it all shook out.

Now I’m deep in detail-planning mode for a new class I’ll be teaching in a few days. It’s an intensive poetry class for high school students called “Poetry in the Real World” and it’s going to be amazing (well, or not… see above re: class design on paper vs. reality…) The point of the class is to give students the agency to engage poetry as something touchable, to see how it is of the lived world and lived experiences. Too often I encounter the idea/feeling that poetry is esoteric, and while I love the esoteric, poetry is so broad and vital a form, so full of living possibilities, I hate thinking that students don’t have access to it. We’ll read all kinds of cool stuff: poetry of the body, protest poetry, eco poetry, and write a lot, too.

Best of all, the class will culminate with a poetry reading in which the students will share their own work with the public! EEEEk I’m excited.

https://www.uapress.com/product/crybaby-bridge/