Poet-physician Rafael Campo’s “The Chart” captures what we lose, in diagnostic accuracy and in ourselves, when we overlook the complex humanity of the people around us.

Campo knows firsthand the way modern medicine’s focus on efficiency and testing can categorize and dehumanize patients, and has witnessed the consequences of relying on lab results and generalities without the context of personal story. Like many of his poems, “The Chart” embodies the empathy he wants patients to find not only in their physicians, but also in their neighbors, teachers, co-workers, and classmates.

The patient in “The Chart” is a “fifty-four-year-old obese Hispanic / female”: categories the speaker individualizes as he predicts who is waiting on the other side of the exam door. He expands Hispanic to Peruvian, Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, and Columbian; he hears their voices – the tamale vendor telling him he’s “too thin” and the drug addict’s perfect Spanish.

In quick sketches, the fifty-four-year-old female becomes someone who is a lady and grandmother, who braids her hair, applies rouge, has a vocation, has lost her youthful beauty, 

"hoards the littered papers she collects / and says they are her ‘documents’"
or is 
"drunk / on grief. "

The layered meaning of “documents” in this context and the enjambment of “drunk / on grief” illustrate how Campo’s careful choices about craft amplify the poem’s emotional and psychological power.

The sixth woman the speaker imagines doesn't volunteer information about herself, so he studies her gestures for clues about her story, noticing the 

"lace handkerchief balled up in her plump hand,"

a habit that reminds the speaker of his grandmother 

"who died too young from a condition that 
some doctor, nose in her chart, overlooked."

As the poem reaches its turn in these final lines, the speaker has left the predictive value of the chart’s categories in shambles, revealing in each sketch a detail—nutrition, work conditions, depression, homelessness—that could inform a diagnosis. He has also replaced the clinical term “obese” with “plump.”

In terms of literary craft, there is much to study beyond enjambment and diction, including the poem’s musicality and its masterful structure as a single sentence.

For young people frustrated by assumptions made about them based on their age or race or neighborhood, this poem offers a side door into those experiences, and since obesity remains an aspect of outward appearance that passersby seem free to disdain, its inclusion further widens the poem's embrace. 

"The Chart" has many potential audiences: literature and writing students, medical students, healthcare professionals, policymakers, advocates for health services, and everyone who’s felt overlooked by institutions, including schools, that view them as a collection of data points.

To read Rafael Campo's biography and several of his poems, including "The Chart" which was published in the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazine, go to his page on the Poetry Foundation's web site.

When I finished reading William Notter’s Holding Everything Down (Southern Illinois UP, 2009), I longed to connect with the working people and landscapes of my growing-up years: uncles in bib overalls leaning against trucks, Aunt Eileen’s strawberry-rhubarb pie cooling on the counter, the chainsaw scent of morning in the woods with Dad. And despite the unlikely inclusion of meat on my plate these days, my stomach growled for sausage, biscuits, and gravy.

In this hardscrabble, heartfelt collection, Notter captures a deep connection to the land, as well as the connection between Midwestern people who live with nature’s unpredictability.   

“Morning News in the Big Horn Mountains” starts with the news that makes the papers - celebrity impropriety, global warming, and war - then shifts to local news of a different sort, revealing the speaker’s keen observance of nature’s wildness even as he tries to influence it.

In Wyoming, just below timberline,
meteors and lightning storms
keep us entertained at night. Last week,
a squirrel wrecked the mountain bluebirds' nest.
I swatted handfuls of moths in the cabin
and set them on a stump each day,
but the birds would not come back to feed.

As the poem moves toward the closing lines, this intertwining of human and natural world continues, sparking reflection about the cyclic, ephemeral quality of both.

Flakes of obsidian and red flint
knapped from arrowheads hundreds of years ago
appear in the trails each day,
and the big fish fossil in the limestone cliff
dissolves a little more with every rain.

In “The Ranch Woman's Secret,” it is the rancher’s actions the woman undoes. As he obsesses over coyotes that she knows haven't killed their cattle in years, she muses... "He'll start to wonder / where he put his seven-millimeter shells / and how his traps get sprung while he's in town / or hauling a load of hay to from Nebraska." 

While coyotes limit the geography where readers could imagine the ranch woman listening for the coyotes' wailing, the kids the speaker addresses in “Directions in the Nebraska Sandhills”  could represent kids in any rural place with dwindling options for making ends meet.

Ahead of them are shotguns, pheasant,
deer from groves along the Platte.
Then clumsiness with girls, the monotony
of tractors, raking hay.  They will hate Lakeside.
They will buy a pickup or souped-up car,
rumble off to Rapid City, Denver, anywhere

After this passage, Notter hones the poem's sense of place as the speaker praises the wide, stubborn beauty of the plains, a landscape he predicts will follow the kids to that anywhere.

In mountains they will wish for sunset
the way it looks past Alliance, nothing
but orange sky over all their families work for,
ponds like sheets of Depression glass,
trill of a fencepost meadowlark,
Angus in silhouette, more space
than anyone can stand until he leaves.

Other poems available online include “High Plains Farming,” “Jubilate,” and “Demolition Derby.” Some poems startled me, like the short series whose speaker is "the dead guy" who picks up dead animals from farms. Others unsettled me, like "The Trailer House on Bethel Road" in which a couple encounters tracings of the last family who lived there, evidence that makes them wonder "if rage could live on in a house."

Read Holding Everything Down for the memories it may stir and for the barren, gritty, and ruggedly beautiful places it takes you. Read it for the vivid, textured quality of Notter's precise diction and imagery. Share his poems with students, friends, or cousins who may find themselves in its dusty, grease-stained lines.

The poetic currents featured at Poetry River include poems of work and economic struggle. Although told through the voice of fictional speaker, Bead, the story that poet Anne-Marie Oomen tells in un-coded woman (Milkweed, 2006) was inspired by women with whom she stood shoulder-to-shoulder at a canning factory working third shift.

Bead’s story is one of survival, struggle, and ultimately, strength. In “I Have Taken the Line,” readers meet her bruised in her battered truck, sharing a smoke with the hitchhiker with whom she’ll seek shelter near the shores of Lake Michigan: Barn. 

Already, we sense the grit that fueled her escape from an abusive home and will pull her through:
I drive like a flood busting open sluice
gates, like my whole past wants me
drowned but I’m not going down.

Oomen describes Bead as “a little rebellious and smart-ass,…with a tender side.” Throughout the collection’s absorbing narrative, we see her meet life’s rough edges unflinchingly whether she has a plan or is still weighing her options.

Imagery, dialect, and metaphor surprise too with battered pickup, gutting table, buckshot-pocked door, charred burgers, “waves big as horses’ asses,” and hunger that “burns / like old tires can’t get put out.” The deft music of Oomen’s sonic craft sings across the pages like a well-cast line arcing across wide water.

Bead’s life is one lived as close to glimpses of nature’s quiet wisdom as to the pain people inflict on one another. Consider this section of “Light Has Been Extinguished” quoted in a 2007 interview with Oomen published in Madison, Wisconsin’s The Daily Page:

I come back to the dark place,
to the scrub acres where the cabin sits,
where these cloudy nights work on me.

You know, old-timers say it’s best
to look at a sky without stars--
it will show you what you are

without any light at all.

The poem titles are based on codes from the International Code of Signals, a stylistic trait that provides another way into the collection for readers drawn to water - and another way to link poems to the curriculum. This innovative organizational structure is also another reason that un-coded woman serves as a multifaceted resource for young poets, whether studying persona poems, narrative arc, voice, or structure.

Until I saw her name on the list of featured poets for Split this Rock 2014, I hadn't read Shailja Patel's poetry. One of my gifts for the holidays was Migritude (Kaya Press, 2010) a genre-blurring collection which includes the poems and monologues she performed in a one-woman show by the same title, a performance inspired by the trousseau her mother carefully collected and sent to her in a battered red suitcase: eighteen saris.

As an educator in a high school whose curriculum is organized by global regions, the fact that this powerful woman of Indian descent grew up in Kenya and later emigrated to England and America beckoned me to learn more about her story, to settle into a chair and listen. I recommend the collection for Patel's clear poetic voice, the collection's tone laced with love and defiance, gratitude and pride, and for the way her writing challenges genre lines, invites discussion, and provokes discomfort. 

In this beautiful printing, each of the four sections begins with a proverb in Gujarati, a language of Patel's home, and an illustration:  (1) the poems that comprise the performance, (2) the "shadow book" of stage/writing notes for the performance poems, (3) earlier and additional poems, and (4) a section that sheds further light on the creative journey through a timeline and interviews.  

As Vijay Prashad's foreword explains, "it's about the condition of migration - of migritude. It is not a cultural anthropology of migrant lives, but rather a philosophical meditation on what it means to live within the concept of Migrant." In the context of its open exploration of identity, there is an occasional swear word and reference to Patel's lesbian identity (from "Dreaming in Gujarati" - "Words that don't exist in Gujarati: // Self-expression // Individual // Lesbian"), both authentic layers in the collection's passion and candor. To get a sense of what that passion is like in-person, watch this video of Patel from Peace on Fire (2011).

The virgule ( / ) is the most common form of punctuation in Patel's poems, so I'll use // to indicate stanza breaks. "Shilling Love: Part One" opens "They never said / they loved us // Those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents". The poem contrasts love in the speaker's home with experiences in cultures she encounters in England and America, juxtaposing references to the exchange rate of Kenyan shillings to the British pound which emphasizes the sacrifice her parents made for her and her sister. Her parents' advice is italicized: "learn and study / succeed / learn and study / succeed / remember remember remember / the cost of your life".

In "The Making (Migrant Song)", the speaker addresses the reader about such contrasts directly. "We calibrate hunger precisely. Define enough differently from you. Enough is what's available, shared between everyone present. We are incapable of saying, as you can so easily: Sorry, there's not enough for you."

As a result of the topics they explore, the strong tone in which they're delivered, as well as their anti-Imperialist, feminist themes, and the deep, complicated love for parents, home culture, and ancestry they express, these poems would elicit vibrant class discussions. 

An excellent addition to high school collections - for emerging poets to look to for inspiration and craft, for performance artists to reflect on the insights in part two, and for readers to explore the ideas it presents and consider if/where they find themselves in this meditation on Migrant.