Cry Out: Poets Protest the War

Those who practice "the miraculous art of stitching words into a web" have "not merely the right but the duty to protest and dissent."—Edward MorrowOn February 16, 2003, eleven contemporary poets held a reading in Manchester, Vermont, called "A Poetry Reading in Honor of the Right to Protest as a Patriotic and Historical Tradition." The reading was sponsored by the Northshire Bookstore and drew a crowd of more than six hundred people. Cry Out: Poets Protest the War gathers together the poems read by the participants, many original poems and others poems by such renowned poets as Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, and Walt Whitman. Among the poets present at the reading were Julia Alvarez, Donald Hall, Jamaica Kincaid, Galway Kinnell, William O'Daly, Grace Paley, Jay Parini, and Ruth Stone. Celebrating poetry's vital and historic role as a means of peaceful protest, these poems remind us, as Jay Parini observed, that although it might take time, "the language of poetry seeps through." And that this language has the potential to redirect the fate of nations.

Library Journal

On February 16, 2003, the day Laura Bush had invited poets to attend the (subsequently canceled) White House event honoring Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, poets gathered across the country for impromptu readings to protest the coming war. In Manchester, VT, 750 people came to hear 11 poets (including Grace Paley, Donald Hall, Ruth Stone, Galway Kinnell, and Julia Alvarez). The poets' own poems are interspersed with those of others, past and present, including poems written by the very poets Mrs. Bush thought to celebrate safely. This volume is the transcript of that reading, including not only the poems but the opening remarks and the commentary between poems. "We must never allow people like [Mrs. Bush] to take [dead poets] again. The next time you are asked by people in power to come and discuss great literature, you must tell them no," Jamaica Kincaid tells the audience. Several other volumes of protest poetry have been hastily drawn together over the past few months, but few have the sense of immediacy captured here.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

With her vivid tales of growing up between the two disparate cultures of the Dominican Republic and the United States, Julia Alvarez has drawn comparisons to writers ranging from Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez. However, its is Alvarez's fresh, vivid voice that sets her apart, and speaks to fans from both cultures.