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Issue #4, April 2025

Darkside 4.jpg

photo by David Ward

Consider haute couture. The fine suit, the grand dress, bespoke, rich with public commentary and private messages. Certainly not made for the public school-goer. Yet anyone can understand hundreds of hours of design, hand-sewing, fittings and more fittings, details in and out that are easy to respect. Even if you would never wear it.

 

It is easy to admire virtuosity in a handcrafted object. Even if it is too avant-garde for your wardrobe and you don’t “get” all the decisions and references that went into this insane and gorgeous garment (it is, after all, still a garment, distant cousin to a tube top or a pair of cutoffs), honoring its maker is instinctual. 

 

Yet what is a poem, but a handcrafted object? Editing Issue #4 deepened our understanding of why we do what we do here at Public School Poetry. We make criticism a practice of solidarity with other poets when we examine the way a poem is made, instead of just enjoying it, or not. This practice of solidarity underlies our mission: when we poets give our careful attention to a poem we would never write, we make a claim that that poem, as evidence of human creation, is worthy of discussion. Through that discussion, we connect across aesthetics, traditions, histories. We sit at a different table in the lunchroom and see what the conversation is like there. Try it.

                                                     -- Megan Levad, Vice-Principal

Alison Swan

Memorial

Carrying

For Everything There Is a Season           

Five-Paragraph Essay by Shou Jie Eng

            

Cela Xie

深影 The Reflection

蕾丝边 Lesbos

           Five-Paragraph Essay by Gahl Liberzon

Dale Going

This is My Secret Society My Private Tribe

Seer

The Distance

           Five-Paragraph Essay by Alison Swan

Gahl Liberzon

Ode to the Mango

Attempts to Answer

Ode to the Suddenly Wet Sock

           Five-Paragraph Essay by Kimberly Gibson Tran

Jasmine An

ACT(ION)

CODE OF CONDUCT

The Ancestors Laugh at the Lesser of Two Evils

ALIEN AMERICA

           Five-Paragraph Essay by John Popielaski

John Popielaski

Extraordinary Measures

A Part of Me Still Thinks Koans Are Conundrums To Be Solved

The Hero's Journey

          Five-Paragraph Essay by Patricia Clark

Kimberly Gibson Tran

Iphigenia

A Memory of Violence

Little Houses for Little Gods 

         Five-Paragraph Essay by Dale Going

Patricia Clark

Terroir

Bull in a Field

Old Bees

           Five-Paragraph Essay by Cela Xie

Shou Jie Eng

On Subjectivity

Shoreline Sketch

Shoreline Sketch

Shoreline Sketch

           Five-Paragraph Essay by Thomas Lynch

          Essay by Scott Beal

Thomas Lynch

ANTIGONE CANADENSIS

BELOVED APOSTLE

         Five-Paragraph Essay by Jasmine An

       

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