99 Poems for the 99 Percent. Edited by Dean Rader. San Francisco: 99: The Press, 2013.

Review By Judy Halebsky

Its late-December in Oakland. They are marching now for Eric Garner and Mike Brown.

I hear helicopters and see the police cars crossing Telegraph. I walk with them at dusk.

People come out of their homes

and cheer for us as we pass. In

2011, when the poems in the

anthology 99 Poems for the 99

Percent were being assembled, we

were in a severe economic

recession and the Occupy

movement was emerging. Edited

by Dean Rader, this collection

developed out of his blog with the

same name. The 99 poems are all

by different poets. The book

includes not just their bios but also the poets commentary on their poem. These insights

help to put the poems in context, both in relation to the Occupy movement and how poets

find and write poems in their daily lives. The publisher, 99: The Press, generally releases

books where the main text is 99 pages long. Here the 99 represents the number of poems

and poets in the anthology and at the same time names the 99 percent catch phrase of the

Occupy movement.

When I was in college, my father, a leftist visionary, would give me poems by political

radicals and social activists. I ignored the books he passed onto me and continued the

learn The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by heart. Ive long tried to figure out the

conflict been a good poem and a well-intentioned poem. Percy Shelley describes poetry

as the work of the imagination. He argues that verse too closely tied to moral reason lacks

the imaginative energy required for that transformation. With Shelley in mind, I

approached this new anthology 99 Poems for the 99 Percent cautiously. While I share the

concerns of this collection, including economic inequality, military aggression, police

brutality, and consumerism, I was nervous about the poems as poems. I need not have

worried. The anthology is full of vibrant poems that address our challenges individually

and as a group. It includes work by many celebrated poets such as Bob Hicok, Dana

Levin, Matthew Zapruder, Maxine Chernoff, and Camille Dungy, as well as new voices.

These poems attend to the emotional experience of our human condition and offer routes

to finding poetry within the many struggles voiced here.

W. Todd Kanekos Quarry is a dynamic poem that appears in two versions on opposing

pages. The first page looks like a found poem made from a newspaper article with most

of the text blacked out. So much is blacked out that the lines across the page become hard

to follow. Deciding which words to read in what order creates an active wandering

through the poem. The line In....the...parking...lot.../...looking...up...at... the... rain in the

longer version of the poem on the opposite page becomes tiny voices from the Jurassic

sparking a plot against/ apes looking for supper. That dithery brain recalls. (Ive added

the bold type to show the connection.) In the online version posted on Raders blog

clicking on the blacked out text revealed what was hidden. Here the two versions live in

mirror image creating a step between what is spoken, what is hidden and what is revealed

in the work of making and reading a poem. Quarry continues with a haunting absence

in both form and narrative that touches on the economic struggle of working families

dreading that...talk/with... her/... kids....about last paychecks, /...her....gas .../ ... bill...., or

about extinction. The reverse last lines present a more playful and narrative ending:

eating giant ferns, dreading thatchy predators who stalk

with expensive thumbs. That leathery body remembers

living on the skids without worries about last paychecks,

but here is a family portrait, a smorgasbord of gorilla

billionaires mother worried about her mortgage,

father about rising prices for milk, junior about extinction

This contrast emphasizes the under layer or back story in a family situation and a sons

world of the animals and make believe.

Christina Olson offers Dear Buffalo, a poignant poem about leaving an economically

depressed hometown. The poems emotional tenderness contrasts with rough-edged

language from the start:

Sorry about the brain drain thing.

My father said if I came back home,

he would shoot me. He was kidding

mostly. Dear Buffalo, its November

in Georgia and today I sunburned.

Every time I spray the roaches,

I think, Still beats shoveling.

Despite the brash humor and unadorned tone, this poem creates a tender lament for ways

that economic necessity shapes our closest relationships. Enjambed lines running across

stanza breaks adds to the disjuncture and distance evoked in the poem. The couplets

support a pairing of person and place while Dear Buffalo becomes a love letter that is

trying to justify a break up. Lines toward the end of the poem read:

Youd like the fall down here, when someone

pulls the lid off the sky and its blue for days.

People are fat and poor, but the stores

are hiring. And you get used to the accent.

We connect poems with beauty but his poem has so many ugly parts, it shows us what

we dont want to see. This revealing raw quality has its own kind of beauty.

In an introductory essay, Rader argues that the core of this collection is illumination. He

writes that this anthology shows how the aims of poetry are in concert with the aims and

ambitions of the vast majority of Americans... You dont need to know or love poetry in

order to get these poems. You just need to love people, and you need to be at least

somewhat interested in language. Trust me, thats you. Theres a poem in here for each

of us. Theres even one that my father would love: Justin Evans Ode to Neruda

(Esperanza). In short lines that make a long, vertical poem, the poem pays homage to

Neruda and reflects on Nerudas life and writing, his green ink, the loss of his daughter,

and asks how his vision and values could live in the U.S. today.

The poem begins with Because of you/tonight I write/ in green ink. / I write in green/as

you always did-/ green being / the color of hope. The green ink becomes a marker of

poetic lineage and connects the voice in the poem to Neruda. Green connotes new growth

and possibility while naming hope which shifts in the poem between optimism and

navet. The poem continues:

I want to think

America has hope

but I dont know

if there is enough

green ink in my pen

for all of America.

We are vast like

the blue-green sea

but we despair, languish,

lay weighted down

by our sins. We are

carnivorous dogs

running the streets

devouring everything

that smells like hope.

How did you continue

to write in green

after your little girls death.

Was it habit

or did you switch

to another green virtue,

perhaps epiphany

or safe passage? I know

you rarely

thought of leisure

on the run

all those years

chasing the Nobel

being chased

by Republicans.

America never sleeps.

We are constantly

on the prowl.

I am weary

of America lying

to itself. Maybe

we need socialism.

Maybe no one candidate

can offer enough

hope for America

our appetite too immense

to ever glut or satiate

our thirst.

These straightforward, carefully measured lines start with quaint affection for green ink

and develop to address complex struggles of the present day. As the tight short lines

move down the page, the intensity and span of the poem increases. Lines such as, I am

weary / of America lying/ to itself pivot the poem between hope and despair creating an

intense urgency. My father, more a reader of theory that poems, would be pulled in by the

celebration of Nerudas communal values and the understated critique of present day U.S.

policies. I stay with the poem for the way it subtly moves us to the edges of what we can

articulate in words and what we only know through our bodies.

Evans Ode to Neruda (Esperanza) resonates with me because it is hard to be hopeful. I

dont always know that I am making a positive change. When there are a thousand people

marching does it matter that I am with them? We can march and we can write. Both are

important ways to draw attention to how government policies and social structures affect

the lives of people living in this country and around the world. Will these poems carry the

weight? Can they reach into the corners and forgotten spaces? Can they nourish

compassion and help us to care for each other across so many divides? I hope so. I think

so. Im sure. Actually, for me right now, they already have.

Judy Halebsky is the author of two collections of poetry, Tree Line and Sky=Empty, both published by New Issues Poetry & Prose. Her honors include fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the Japanese Ministry of Culture. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, she now lives in Oakland and teaches at Dominican University of California.