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Preface: The filthy presidentiad / Martín Espada -- Smile / Elizabeth Alexander -- Refugee women / Julia Alvarez -- Binge - How Nazis - Subterranean inner redneck blues / Doug Anderson -- Vending - They roll the tarp / Naomi Ayala -- Ghazal for Jim Foley #5: what comes home / Ben Balthaser -- The face I wore / Sean Bates -- Trumpcare - I knew I wasn't poor / Jan Beatty -- Failed spells / Richard Blanco -- Dreaming a wall - Complaint of el Río Grande / Tara Betts -- From ten patients and another - The chart - The good doctor / Rafael Campo -- The world that the shooter left us / Cyrus Cassells -- The problem with me is the problem with you / Hayan Charara -- The school of logic - The school of morning & letters / Chen Chen -- Grievance / Brian Clements -- Crack the whip - My two aunts / Jim Daniels -- On hearing news of another shot black man - Capitalism / Kwame Dawes -- Check list / Chard deNiord -- American dream, 2018 - Cradle song / Dante DiStefano -- Now I pray / Kathy Engel -- Letter to my father / Martín Espada -- Borderline - The altar / George Evans -- Self-portrait as mango / Tarfia Faizullah -- The boatman - Mourning / Carolyn Forché -- Puertopia / Denice Frohman -- Poem for the poorest country in the Western hemisphere - Shithole / Danielle Legros-Georges -- Daddy, we called you - I want to write a poem to celebrate / Maria Mazziotti Gillan -- You are who I love / Aracelis Girmay -- The hands that wanted / Ruth Goring -- The plan / Adam Grabowski -- On confinement / Torrin Greathouse -- Ars política: how to make art - Three hundred years before these, three hundred years after / Laurie Ann Guerrero -- A prophecy of Amos / Donald Hall -- Another year / Sam Hamill -- To a commencement of scoundrels / Samuel Hazo -- Field guide ending in a deportation / Marcelo Hernández Castillo -- We are remarkably loud not masked / Juan Felipe Herrera -- On the fifth day - Let them not say / Jane Hirschfield -- Georgia on his mind - At the access / Everett Hoagland -- Here in a state of tectonic tension - Visions of labor / Lawrence Joseph -- A prayer for workers - The mushroom gatherers / Yusef Komunyakaa -- If it weren't for bad ideas, i'd have no ideas at all / Dorianne Laux -- Skinology - Invisible places of refuge - The Motherland / Adrian C. Louis -- I give you my heart = Os doy mi corazón / Ricardo Maldonado -- The girl who learned to sing in crow - Ghost - Mexico / Paul Mariani -- Inauguration day, 2017 / Demetria Martínez -- Mykilladoreher - Framework / Paul Martínez Pompa -- Don't let me die in Disneyland / Julio Marzán -- White girl interrogates her own heart again - The sacrament of penance - The sacrament of hope after despair / Marty McConnell -- Rage bracelet - When dividing the unbelievable by the undeniable / Leslie McGrath -- Gossip is forbidden - Fake news / Richard Michelson -- Still life in black - What do they do? - Bunting and the art of non-violence / E. Ethelbert Miller -- Fannie Lou Hamer - Shared plight / Kamilah Aisha Moon -- Why Bruce Lee is sad - Minneapolis Public / David Mura -- Upon reading that Eric Dolphy transcribed even the calls of certain species of birds - On confessionalism - Dolores, maybe / John Murillo -- Waitress in a small-town seaside tavern - Overheard proselytizing dreadlocked man's Ghazal / Maria Nazos -- Honor guard / Marilyn Nelson -- Seeing his face - Gate A-4 / Naomi Shihab Nye -- Driving to York Prison in a Thunderbird / Cynthia Dewi Oka -- As yet untitled: a seasonal suite / Brenda Marie Osbey -- The light (we all came from somewhere else) - Ghazal: America the beautiful / Alicia Ostriker -- Brother Lo on the prison industrial complex / Willie Perdomo -- Not one more refugee death / Emmy Pérez -- Illegal with only hope - Way late December 2016 / Marge Piercy -- For want of water / Sasha Pimentel -- From an explanation of America / Robert Pinsky -- If pit bulls had a justice system it'd be belly rubs - Cotto the pit bull of Borinquín / Gabriel Ramírez -- Breakfast conversation with my oldest son - A poem for the man who asked me: where are your motherhood poems? / Luivette Resto -- At every family party where the grown-ups drank too much / Peggy Robles-Alvarado -- Heavy blue veins: Watts, 1959 / Luis J. Rodríguez -- The mill of grief - The only El Dorado that is real: retranslating Neruda / William Pitt Root -- At the tribunals / Patrick Rosal -- For Zella Ziona / Joseph Ross -- All extinction is gradual at first / Nicholas Samaras -- Ars poetica - A tree in Perth Amboy / Ruth Irupé Sanabria -- The social worker's advice / Lauren Schmidt -- Lucky / Tim Seibles -- Letter to my Suegra, from Artesia, New Mexico / Katherine DiBella Seluja -- From crown decline / Don Share -- Sometimes I wish I felt the side effects / Danez Smith -- MAGA - Speak now, or forever. hold your peace - Saheed's silver gun / Patricia Smith -- Campesino - Christmas in East Los Angeles / Gary Soto -- It burns - Ezra learns to ride / Mark Turcotte -- At Lowe's home improvement center - Ajal / Brian Turner -- The ends of the world - The new dark ages / Chase Twichell -- A history of morning clouds and contrails - Cracking 100 / Pamela Uschuk -- Self-portrait of America as a revival / Elisabet Velasquez -- Manifesto after the storm / Richard Villar -- The gift / Ocean Vuong -- I am sorry Diane Di Prima / George Wallace -- Blackberry wine - Prayer for the city / Afaa Weaver -- What saves us - War story - Wade Park VA / Bruce Weigl -- In a time of war - Establishment - This straw and manure world / Eleanor Wilner -- Death abroad - Salvadoran woman on Fillmore Street / Daisy Zamora. "We now live in the "Age of Trump," whether we wish to admit it or not. The backlash represented by 45 is not only political, but cultural and linguistic as well. Because Trump and his ilk divorce language from meaning, we now live in an age of hyper-euphemism, where "alt-right" refers to what everyone, even apologists, once called "white supremacy." However, as What Saves Us editor Martin Espada observes, poets have a particular gift for reconciling language and meaning, for calling things and people by their right names, for restoring the blood to words. Furthermore, poets are well qualified to document this historical moment--and the more astonishing the moment, the more surreal or ominous, the more we need poets to capture that moment in a few brushstrokes of language. The poems collected in this volume, nevertheless, are not limited to works aimed at Trump, or poems written in the wake of his election. They're not narrowly "political," nor are they all well-written rants. Instead, these poems embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage in the Age of Trump, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes as a result. In the tradition of an earlier Curbstone Press volume edited by Espada, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (2000), these poems speak from the heart of the communities most gravely endangered in our times, or on behalf of these communities. These poems assert our common humanity in the face of dehumanization"--Provided by publisher
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