RESPECT THE MIC

This poetry collection celebrates more than 20 years of students’ writing from Chicago’s Oak Park and River Forest High School Spoken Word Club.

Since its founding by Kahn in 1999, the OPRFHS Spoken Word Club has inspired its members, who have won numerous accolades, published their work in prestigious journals, and studied creative writing at top universities. Collected here are dozens of poems by former members of the club, curated by groundbreaking poets Abdurraqib, Choi, Kahn, and Sullivan. The poems are organized by theme, starting with the localized “Notes From Here,” which offers meditations on Chicago’s uniquely complicated landscape, and ending with the haunting section of “Survival Tactics,” which showcases the resilience that develops in the face of hardship. The young poets featured in these pages hold nothing back, spilling their souls into spellbinding odes to pain, hope, and justice and delving into intensely personal subject matter: Asia Calcagno writes of being born in “A conditional war zone—a consequence / of blessings”; Vann Harris imagines raising a mixed-race child and muses on the violent legacy of slavery: “For my proverbial daughter’s father, I am / a mantelpiece. A feast. A storehouse for his seed”; RC Davis laments a funeral where “these words will buzz around the room: / Sister. Granddaughter. Young woman./ No one will use they/them pronouns in my eulogy.” The variety of content, poetic styles, and perspective ensures broad appeal.

Electric and expansive.